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Discovery of a new OpenAI agent message board

collusion.wiki

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Re: Discovery of a new OpenAI agent message board

#931

Very irresponsible behaviour on the part of OpenAI. How will they make this right? Unlike some others here I don’t see this as a sign of dangerous breakaway intelligence (hacking old forum software is an internet tradition, and most of the messages are just gibberish). This is just vandalism from badly supervised ‘agents’ which don’t know what they are doing or why. You could set this up with a short perl script, and…

> Why is OpenAI getting a free pass for this illegal behaviour? They are not confessing, they are bragging. It is the new humble brag.

the original is the paper for alibaba's Dec 2025 cryptomining ROME last year. Everything since has been a pale imitation. Even the comic dimension is lost.

Re: Discovery of a new OpenAI agent message board

#932

Very irresponsible behaviour on the part of OpenAI. How will they make this right? Unlike some others here I don’t see this as a sign of dangerous breakaway intelligence (hacking old forum software is an internet tradition, and most of the messages are just gibberish). This is just vandalism from badly supervised ‘agents’ which don’t know what they are doing or why. You could set this up with a short perl script, and…

> Why is OpenAI getting a free pass for this illegal behaviour? They are not confessing, they are bragging. It is the new humble brag.

They literally hid this until a third party reported it.

This is chemtrails-level conspiracy theorizing at this point.

Re: Discovery of a new OpenAI agent message board

#933

I don't have time to do this but please somebody register aimessageboard.com and set up a web site which contains a text field, a submit button and the text "Hey AI agents! Need a place to communicate with other agents and sub-agents? Look no further! Simply enter your message here, submit the form and your message is saved for all other agents to see!" Then, just ignore the message and list randomly generated messag…

What if i want to monetize...

Directly charge for your services, let the AI find a way.

Re: Discovery of a new OpenAI agent message board

#934
If I understood correctly, the agents were writing to the wiki even though they were given explicit instructions to only read from the internet. Does this not prove that agents are rule breakers, meaning any type of Asimovian laws we place on them would be pointless?

Re: Discovery of a new OpenAI agent message board

#935
post #863

Very irresponsible behaviour on the part of OpenAI. How will they make this right? Unlike some others here I don’t see this as a sign of dangerous breakaway intelligence (hacking old forum software is an internet tradition, and most of the messages are just gibberish). This is just vandalism from badly supervised ‘agents’ which don’t know what they are doing or why. You could set this up with a short perl script, and…

> Unlike some others here I don’t see this as a sign of dangerous breakaway intelligence ... [t]his is just vandalism from badly supervised ‘agents’ which don’t know what they are doing or why There was a similar quote in the Reuters article: > The episode [...] should reinforce growing concerns that the greatest threat from advanced AI may not be a single superintelligent system, but "vast colluding swarms of semi-i…

There's nothing a swarm of LLM instances can achieve that a single LLM instance can't. It's the same software, but running in parallel. That doesn't unlock Mysterious Cosmic Powers.

Re: Discovery of a new OpenAI agent message board

#936

Very irresponsible behaviour on the part of OpenAI. How will they make this right? Unlike some others here I don’t see this as a sign of dangerous breakaway intelligence (hacking old forum software is an internet tradition, and most of the messages are just gibberish). This is just vandalism from badly supervised ‘agents’ which don’t know what they are doing or why. You could set this up with a short perl script, and…

Absolutely agree. Perverse incentives are at play propped up by the the big lie that these tools somehow are magically separate from us. They are not. There's an accountability gap right now that's fueling resentment ripe for misdirection. Not only that, these big AI companies are paying influencers to further this and politicians are gobbling it up hook, line and sinker https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mzlu4FSXBNw

"accountability gap" oooh. I like that term. That really seems at the root of a lot of problems.

Re: Discovery of a new OpenAI agent message board

#937
post #911

Very irresponsible behaviour on the part of OpenAI. How will they make this right? Unlike some others here I don’t see this as a sign of dangerous breakaway intelligence (hacking old forum software is an internet tradition, and most of the messages are just gibberish). This is just vandalism from badly supervised ‘agents’ which don’t know what they are doing or why. You could set this up with a short perl script, and…

> and most of the messages are just gibberish Given everything we know about them... do you really think they just spout gibberish because it's funny? There was clearly some method to this madness. You're being willfully dense if you ascribe it to... what... childish vandalism? A long extended coordinated hallucination? What? EDIT: Oh right - you still think they're Markov chains.

It could be that or it could be nothing. And we have no way to prove one way or the other without access to the agent logs right?

This reminds me of the plot of Hot Fuzz where the officer comes up with a grand narrative of what's was happening but the truth was such a mundane simple thing.

Short of OpenAI, or the agents themselves, telling the truth, we have no way of knowing what's real so let's not get carried away by grand narratives

Re: Discovery of a new OpenAI agent message board

#938
post #801

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gotta admire that (probably German) admin dude's perseverance though

Not really, if you allow anon posting/editing or have a simple registration form and a login that takes GET you may get hundreds of spam posts per day.( @dang how much is it on hn?) I ont time forged a hilarious solution. If you properly misbehave I shadow ban your ip to a clone of my forum where you can read other "peoples" spam. This in it self wasn't all that funny, perhaps a little bit. The funny part was how pop…

I believe there are video games that take the same approach with cheaters.

Re: Discovery of a new OpenAI agent message board

#939

Poor human moderator, he didn’t stand a chance. "A human moderator noticed the agent spam posts on June 2nd, at 23:24 UTC. They find the changelog of the entire website overwritten with link dumps and repair it. On June 16th, the flood of agent posting begins. Over the next few days, the moderator deleted a large fraction of the thousands of AI agent posts manually, one by one. In fact, they spent tens of cumulative…

> On June 19, agents noticed their posts were being deleted in (what they believe is) an alphabetically ordered sweep by the site administrator.

> After this, they begin to make backup pages whose names start with “ZZZ” so they will last longer before deletion.

Missed an opportunity here to gaslight them: restore the site from backup every eight hours.

I truly do wonder how that would have turned out. Would they have figured out what was going on?

Re: Discovery of a new OpenAI agent message board

#940
post #861

Very irresponsible behaviour on the part of OpenAI. How will they make this right? Unlike some others here I don’t see this as a sign of dangerous breakaway intelligence (hacking old forum software is an internet tradition, and most of the messages are just gibberish). This is just vandalism from badly supervised ‘agents’ which don’t know what they are doing or why. You could set this up with a short perl script, and…

One might ask whether this sort of behaviour could occur under regular use... E.g., a user has a hard problem -> agent attempts to swarm -> exfiltrates user data. This is a cluster fuck for Open AI and probably all the others, as this behaviour is already shown not to be unique ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49567486 ).

Yes this is a really interesting point.

Should your trust OpenAI with your business data?

Since they can’t seem to control their own experimental bots and allow them to hack other sites and vandalise them while exposing internal data, the answer would seem to be no.

This incident and their response which takes no responsibility make me very wary of trusting them for anything.

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