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AI tool OpenClaw wipes the inbox of Meta's AI Alignment director despite repeated commands to stop — executive had to manually terminate the AI to stop the bot from continuing to erase data (www.tomshardware.com)
submitted 7 months ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] 96 points 7 months ago (22 children)

How could any person with some programing literacy event thinking about installing openclaw. A malware ridden by critical bugs

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  • [–] 12 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (2 children)

    I don't think there's anything wrong with running Openclaw. What is way too brave for my taste is giving it access to accounts with your personal data, or the filesystem in your computer. That's a disaster waiting to happen.

    I run it in an isolated server, and it doesn't have access to my data - if it goes tits up, it deletes unimportant stuff only. If anyone gets access to the credentials in it, it's a bunch of budget-limited API keys, so they can spend all of $4 on openrouter. Maybe the riskiest bit is its Google account. I went with the approach of giving it its own Google account, so that it can create docs and calendar events and then add me, rather than getting access to my Google account. But then again... That account has no payment info, nothing that I would be mega worried if it got leaked...

    Sure, it might limit the usefulness a bit, but I think installing something like this is only acceptable if you sandbox it and don't let it access valuable information. Going full mad scientist on something as "alpha" as this, letting it run wild with your info is nuts.

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  • [–] 5 points 7 months ago

    I went with the approach of giving it its own Google account, so that it can create docs and calendar events and then add me, rather than getting access to my Google account.

    I wonder though: if Google can link this account to you as its actual owner, I wonder if there's a risk if the bot does something against the ToS?

    I hope you have backups of your Google account..

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  • [+] -17 points 7 months ago (15 children)

    I program medical devices for a living and I have openclaw and nanobot running at home. AMA.

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  • [–] 16 points 7 months ago (5 children)

    Why?

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  • [–] 0 points 7 months ago (4 children)

    Because i want to work on meaningful things that benefit people directly.

    Because i want to unterstand the capabilities and limitations of openclaw-like agents. LLMs aren't going away, better be proactive and learn what the hype is about.

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  • [–] 8 points 7 months ago (3 children)

    here's hoping you are just trolling, because people with that kind of approach to medical devices should be in prison.

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  • [–] 0 points 7 months ago

    Believe it or not, this is the first time for me being suspected a troll, but I start to see the appeal when people are getting so worked up while being so far off the mark.

    Sorry to disappoint that I am still on the loose. Then again prison is probably better than doing one more D-FMEA.

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  • [–] 12 points 7 months ago (3 children)

    Ah, doing your best to break the Therac-25's record, I see.

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  • [–] -3 points 7 months ago (2 children)

    That's why unit and integration tests shouldn't be written by Copilot.

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    • [–] 77 points 7 months ago (2 children)

    Seems like a good excuse for destroying evidence.

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    • [–] 74 points 7 months ago

    AI alignment fully achieved.

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    [–] 21 points 7 months ago

    Fucking LOL!

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    [–] 19 points 7 months ago (1 child)

    Don't worry ask the pentagon's grok to taskthe nsa's chat got to recreate your inbox from their profile of you and meta data of your correspondence 🤣

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    • [–] 17 points 7 months ago* (1 child)

    Wasn't this many days ago already, or did it happen again? I remember reading this like 3 or 4 days ago as well.

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  • [–] 4 points 7 months ago

    This was 3 or 4 days ago.

    I thought of it after Anthropic virtuously announced they would not create autonomous murder devices for the US government (but basically everything else was on the table). Because I'm pretty sure the US military could have just used an Anthropic OpenClaw to bomb civilians as easily as this Facebook AI Safety expert used OpenClaw to destroy her emails.

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    • [–] 10 points 7 months ago

    Now do it to their Bitcoin wallets

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    [–] 9 points 7 months ago (1 child)

    That's some good schadenfreude right there.

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    • [+] 7 points 7 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (3 children)
    [deleted]
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  • [–] 6 points 7 months ago (2 children)

    Yeah, but if I understand that correctly, that's just for the app itself the LLM is very likely still a proprietary one (ChatGPT, Grok,....)

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  • [–] 1 point 7 months ago

    The LLM is whatever you want it to be. Self hosted or from any provider with a compatible endpoint. It's likely a proprietary one... Because the cost of training LLMs means most are proprietary ones.

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    • [+] 7 points 7 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (7 children)
    [deleted]
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  • [–] 19 points 7 months ago (4 children)

    Or just learn any of the real automation tools that have been programmed by real programmers over the last half century?

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  • [–] 8 points 7 months ago (3 children)

    Recently someone lamented that just asking for an alarm to be set cost them tons of money and didn't even work right..

    It was foolish enough to let LLM go to town on automation, but for open ended scenarios, I at least got the logic even if it was stupidly optimistic.

    But implementing an alarm? These people don't even have rationality to their enthusiasm...

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  • [–] 3 points 7 months ago (1 child)

    If I remember right, that post wasn't designed to highlight a practical use-case, but rather to set up a simple task as a "how could I apply this?" type of experimentation. The guy got roasted for it, but I think it's a very reasonable thing to try because it's a simple task you can see the direct result of in practice.

    The cost problem was highlighted as well, because if such a simple task is a problem, it can't possibly scale well.

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  • [–] 1 point 7 months ago

    You ask the llm to code you an alarm not to actually be an alarm. It’s not an alarm. It’s a language model.

    Maybe I’m too autistic for this shit.

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  • [–] 8 points 7 months ago

    Because of the way LLMs work, they are inherently bad for automation. The most important part of automation is deterministic results; LLMs cannot work if they have deterministic results. It is simply not a possible application of the technology.

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  • [–] 4 points 7 months ago

    Yeah at work I had a realization recently that power automate and similar systems with AI steps are going to be really powerful. Since you have a bunch of deterministic steps you can just have the AI do the one text manipulation bit where you don't need deterministic output (handy for non-deterministic inputs for example)

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    • [–] 5 points 7 months ago

    Have you tried turning it off and turning it on again? (I'll show myself out)

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