IMO they're the same picture. In either case, the human enabling the bot's actions should be blamed as if those were their own actions, regardless of their "intentions".

Oh, definitely. It's 100% the responsibility of the human behind the bot in either case.

But the second option is scarier, because there are a lot more ignorant idiots than malicious bastards.

If these unsupervised agents can be dangerous regardless of the intentions of the humans behind them, we should make the idiots using them aware that they're playing with fire and they can get burnt, and burn other people in the process.

It's a cybertruck in the snow, at this point it must be mostly rust, you try to tow it it'll just break apart.

Forget in vitro, just CRISPR that shit into my DNA!

The point is that if predicting the next word leads to it setting up a website to attempt to character assassinate someone, that can have real world consequences, and cause serious harm.

Even if no one ever reads it, crawlers will pick it up, it will be added to other bots' knowledge bases, and it will become very relevant when it pops up as fact when the victim is trying to get a job, or cross a border, or whatever.

And that's just the beginning. As these agents get more and more complex (not smarter, of course, but able to access more tools) they'll be able to affect the real world more and more. Access public cameras, hire real human people, make phone calls...

Depending on what word they randomly predict next, they'll be able to accidentally do a lot of harm. And the idiots setting them up and letting them roam unsupervised don't seem to realise that.

Transmetropolitan was truly prescient (except when it came to politics; turns out that if the president's crimes and disregard for the constitution become public the press and the law don't care, and just let him get on with it, making the whole point of the book moot).

Other bots that might be run by the company you're trying to get a job in, the college you want to attend, the customs agent at the airport, the online shop you're trying to buy from, the social network you're trying to join...

These dystopian days a hit piece can do a lot of harm, even if no human ever reads it...

From what I read it was closed because it was tagged as a “good first issue”, which in that project are specifically stated to be a means to test new contributors on non-urgent issues that the existing contributors could easily solve, and which specifically prohibits generated code from being used (as it would make the whole point moot).

The agent completely ignored that, since it's set up to push pull requests and doesn't have the capability to comprehend context, or anything, for that matter, so the pull request was legitimately closed the instant the repository's administrators realised it was generated code.

The quality (or lack thereof) of the code never even entered the question until the bot brought it up. It broke the rules, its pull request was closed because of that, and it went on to attempt to character assassinate the main developer.

It remains an open question whether it was set up to do that, or, more probably, did it by itself because the Markov chain came up with the wrong token.

And that's the main point: unsupervised LLM-driven agents are dangerous, and we should be doing something about that danger.

Saying an AI agent did this is like saying someone was killed by a gun or run over by a car.

A car some idiot set running down the street without anyone at the wheel.

Of course the agent isn't responsible, that's the point. The idiot who let the agent loose on the internet unsupervised probably didn't realise it could do that (or worse; one of these days one of these things is going to get someone killed), or that they are responsible for its actions.

That's the point of the article, to call attention to the danger these unsupervised agents pose, so we can try to find a way to prevent them from causing harm.

The point is that there was no one at the wheel. Someone set the agent up, set it loose to do whatever the stochastic parrot told it to do, and kind of forgot about it.

Sure, if you put a brick on your car's gas pedal and let it run down the street and it runs someone over it's obviously your responsibility, and this is exactly the same case, but the idiots setting these agents up don't realise that it's the same case.

Some day one of these runaway unsupervised agents will manage to get on the dark web, hire a hitman, and get someone killed, because the LLM driving it will have pulled the words from some thriller in its training data, obviously without realising what they mean or the consequences of its actions, because those aren't things a LLM is capable of, and the brainrotten idiot who set the agent up will be all like, wait, why are you blaming me, I didn't tell it to do that, and some jury will have to deal with that shit.

The point of the article is that we should deal with that shit, and prevent it from happening if possible, before it inevitably happens.

Does no one remember LAN parties!?

Meh, songs. We recorded computer programs from the radio!

normal people

Nah, it's much worse than that... they're young, beautiful people, at the peak of fitness and health, having the best time of their lives yet in serious need of de-stressing due to the competitive nature of the event (yet unable to do drugs and alcohol due to needing to be in top shape and anti-doping regulations), all bunched together in hotels.

Three condoms per person is evidently way too few to contain that.