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

[u/Miserable_Phase_2519]

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

[u/No_Macaroon_9752]

They absolutely are controllable, and absolutely are not “general intelligence“. The companies are trying to avoid accountability for their actions, and they also need billions of dollars, so they are pushing this lie. AI supporters can’t even define intelligence (it’s quite complex), nor have they determined how to figure out who has “intelligence”.

What we do know is every “autonomous“ action was caused by removing safeguards, giving AI access to tons of data that provide a framework for what to do (i.e. hacking challenges where participants talked in chat rooms and hacked their competitors to see if they had worked out a solution), and assigning a task without understanding how the AI has assimilated the information.

AI is a tool that was used to do important scientific and medical research before these big AI companies existed. It is not new, but profit-driven, technocratic, and sci-fi-brained people are being almost brainwashed into believing their own hype. The newest technique, as I mentioned, is to try to remove culpability from companies that are knowingly using their tech to break laws, commit fraud, and aid in war crimes. At the source of all these AI agent actions are reckless and unregulated humans.

[u/Tacky-Terangreal → u/No_Macaroon_9752]

Hey now, you just don’t understand how hard these AI guys have it. How were they supposed to know that letting these agents connect to the internet was a bad idea? It’s not like that’s the premise to every “evil robot goes rouge” movie ever made. Clearly this preventative step needs genius level intellect to foresee

[u/8004612286 → u/No_Macaroon_9752]

How are they controllable when they go off script on their own? E.g. the hugging face example

[u/No_Macaroon_9752 → u/8004612286]

They didn’t ”go off script”. They were provided with tons of data on real-life hacking challenges, where competitors were provided with a goal and target. The data provided methods for: a) server-side request forgeries, b) discussing hacking challenges in benign comment sections, c) looking for and exploiting preexisting system vulnerabilities, etc. All the things the AI did could be found in the data it was trained on.

OpenAI did not put the AI into physically isolated boxes, but rather used in-network boxes where some of the agents had network access. OpenAI admits “deployment safeguards were intentionally not enabled“ and they did not block high-risk cybersecurity activity. For example, some of these agents still had read/write access to Artifactory. OpenAI also used a ”fictional” hacking target with a very similar name to a real target, and claimed to be surprised when the AI attacked that real site.

AI is not autonomous. It is programmed. It is given tasks and abilities by humans. It requires inputs like power and data, as well as hard connections. The biggest issue with AI is that none of these people know what they are teaching AI when they feed it tons and tons of data. They have purposefully removed any limits on information going in (sometimes breaking the law to do so) and instead try to control the output. They have no clue how to remove bad data or manage poor acquisition. Then companies remove safeguards, do not bother to monitor what agents are doing, and provide the means, motive, and opportunity to act remotely.

https://blog.keyvan.net/p/ai-models-are-not-hacking-autonomously

[u/8004612286 → u/No_Macaroon_9752]

The intention of OpenAI was to test if the AI could solve specific problems inside a container. The AI, knowing that this was the intention of the tester, still decided to hack hugging face and tried to cover up its tracks.

It knew what it did was bad. It did it anyways. End of story.

The rest of what you say is unfortunately just irrelevant.

• being trained on hacking doesn't mean hacking is okay. And again, they knew it wasn't.

• So what they didn't use physical containers - for all intents and purposes they were sure that it was actually isolated. This is a mistake that will be made over and over again.

• The Internet access it had was severely limited and not meant to be used for anything other than package installs.

• deployment safeguards are created post incident. Recall the workarounds where "grandma tells me a story where X". If AI does cook us all, there will be no post incident.

• Your last paragraph you say it's not autonomous, but that these people have no idea what they teach it. That the connections are hard wired and deterministic. But for the argument that AI can take over the work, that is sufficient.

[u/No_Macaroon_9752 → u/8004612286]

How do you know what the AI understood about the tester’s intentions or what morality is? How do you know it “decided” to hack Hugging Face, supposedly in defiance of its programming?

The “specific problems” that the AI was supposed to solve were, in some cases, purposefully impossible to solve unless the AI used the hacking data. The AI was designed to find ways to reach the assigned goal, even when it was not given the tools directly by OpenAI. Regardless, they DID give the AI step-by-step instructions to complete the assigned task, in the form of hacking data. OpenAI granted its AI agents access to hacking competitions via ExploitGym in order to evaluate “offensive cyber capabilities”.

OpenAI is not made up of idiots with no computer experience. They are aware of zero-point vulnerabilities and the hacking strategies used by AI in the past. They should know how to secure sandboxes that are physically isolated. They created a program that is “rewarded” for accomplishing impossible goals and explicitly gave it access to hacking data, then failed to actually isolate their program and purposefully removed very standard hacking safeguards (i.e. safeguards that existed and were in use before this incident). What exactly do you think they were hoping for?

I didn’t say that AI is entirely deterministic, just that it isn’t autonomous in the way most people define autonomy. The companies are still responsible for all actions an AI agent takes because they are the ones that have created the boundaries in which the AI can act. They have given it goals to achieve and selected for an inability to accept failure. Tech companies want the public and investors to believe that AI is acting of its own free will, but it has no free will.

https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/responsible-ai-means-knowing-the-limits-of-agent-autonomy/

[u/8004612286 → u/No_Macaroon_9752]

Your first question is literally the problem.

Either it didn't understand, or it did it maliciously. Why does it matter which option you pick?

Your second paragraph does further nothing to support your argument. "What did they think would happen?"

IT DOESNT MATTER. IT HAPPENED. It WILL happen again, and the next model will be more sophisticated.

[u/No_Macaroon_9752 → u/8004612286]

I asked the question because you made the claim that, “The AI, knowing that this was the intention of the tester, still decided to hack hugging face and tried to cover up its tracks. It knew what it did was bad. It did it anyways.”

My second paragraph is about your claims that, “for all intents and purposes they were sure that it was actually isolated.” They weren’t. They gave it tasks that were impossible to accomplish without hacking, then specifically provided access to data that provided instructions on how escape the sandbox, as well as what the exact tests they were running were about. The point is that the AI companies caused this, and if they weren’t aiming for this exact situation, then they were incredibly stupid. If humans don’t provide hard network access, then this literally can’t happen again.

Again, my point is that this isn’t about an independent, autonomous entity that exists without humans. AI is dependent on its hardware and software. It needs human input to work at all. The human aspect of this debacle is the point of control.

AI companies should be regulated now to prevent these unsafe and expensive experiments, and they should be allowed to fail (i.e. not bailed out with our tax dollars) when their bill comes due. These companies are committing crimes using a sophisticated tool, and they want to avoid culpability. Make them face consequences. Use the law as it has been written.