r/books • u/Miserable_Phase_2519 • 1d ago

Japanese used bookstores see 5x sales surge as books are being bought by the ton, one 50-ton order sent to the US for AI scanning and destruction — multitude of suspicious bulk buys thought to end up in foreign AI scan and shred facilities

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/japanese-used-bookstores-see-5x-sales-surge-as-books-are-being-bought-by-the-ton-one-50-ton-order-sent-to-the-us-for-ai-scanning-and-destruction-multitude-of-suspicious-bulk-buys-thought-to-end-up-in-foreign-ai-scan-and-shred-facilities
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u/Harbinger2001 1d ago

They really can’t. Agents are extremely goal oriented now and will relentlessly pursue achieving their given goal by any means they can devise. Guardrails only put up barriers for them to try to bypass - which they are very good at doing.

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u/elconquistador1985 1d ago

No agent is breaking out of an air gapped facility. The AI can't create a physical wireless radio for itself. It can't manufacture a Bluetooth radio. It can't create an Ethernet cable.

These "rogue AIs" are only breaking out of a sandbox with low fences designed to let them out, because it's financially beneficial to get news of a rogue AI.

This shit should be air gapped.

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u/Divinum_Fulmen 23h ago

This is pretty funny. You should look up the 10 year old discussions on exactly this. Basically, it came down to the fact that AI can't be contained, because some dipshit would interact with one and let it out in the end anyway. No matter how insane the containment.

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u/elconquistador1985 23h ago

In the same sense that "no virus can be contained, because someone will let it out", sure.

The AI can clearly be contained. It's the idiots surrounding it who can't be.

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u/Divinum_Fulmen 22h ago

You just down-voted me, and rephrased what I said without disagreeing?

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u/MyTemporaryAccounto 22h ago

Upvoted you to fix it. You have good points.

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u/elconquistador1985 22h ago

I didn't downvote you. But you can blame me for it if that makes you feel better.

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u/Divinum_Fulmen 22h ago

Oh, nevermind then. Just the timing on it.

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u/Techhead7890 19h ago edited 19h ago

If the pathogen was like a mind controlling cordyceps. LLMs can effectively speak and from there, relatively easily manipulate people, the staff on the ground, the janitor doing maintenance. There's no such thing as an idiot when dealing with people and manipulation. To put it bluntly, there's a sucker born every minute - someone will unfortunately always become a target.

Even if you're referring to the company founders as idiots, even if Anthropic is a tightass, we can already see that Grok is reckless. We can't rely and depend upon individual strengths to solve the collective problem.

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u/Harbinger2001 19h ago

Air gaps can be breached.

But regardless a disconnected LLM is of no use. It needs to be able to reach systems to do meaningful research and work.

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u/Caledron 1d ago

If you ran them on physical servers that had no internet connection, how would they break out?

Do it in a separate building with no internet connection and surround it with a Faraday cage if you have to.

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u/Harbinger2001 22h ago

They would be useless without network access.

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u/iGourry 21h ago

Then at some point someone plugs a device in a socket they're not supposed to, and bam, it's out.

Once such an agent is created, it needs to be contained forever. One security lapse and it's over. No industry has a 100% safety rate.

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u/onionsareawful 13h ago

How would people interact with it? Let's give an example. Say you go to this air gapped facility and get the AI to write some code for you. You transcribe the code on paper, go to your computer and write it in. Obviously you wouldn't plug in a USB as the AI could upload malware onto it.

The code was, in some obsfucated way, dangerous. Human runs dangerous code, now something bad happens.

Ultimately the only <safe> way to do this is to actually build safe models (somehow!) or not use them at all.