this post was submitted on 13 Sep 2026
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Once you understand that these are chatbots that were designed to complete challenges like this, using tactics like this, you can understand that the chatbots didn't "go rogue." They did what they were designed to do, and because OpenAI ran them with inadequate supervision (without a "human in the loop" that checked each iteration through the Python loop to ensure it hadn't gone off the rails), they trashed a competitor's servers.

Designing autonomous, malicious software is generally considered irresponsible and dangerous. If you showed up at Defcon and gave a talk about how your autonomous malware did something unexpected and damaged someone else's computers, the first question from the audience would be "Why are you so shit at making secure sandboxes?" It wouldn't be "How are you so awesome at making hacking tools?"

The fact that OpenAI is making it much easier for unskilled people to break into and damage servers is indeed very bad news, but it's not new bad news. Irresponsible parties have been doing this for years, most notably the NSA...

...

Riley had a very good way of summarizing this: "LLMs are real, AI is fake." LLMs – chatbots trained on things like CTF logs that can break into servers – are real. They're on a continuum with other hacking tools that have been steadily demonstrating the fragility of the modern digital world, albeit without inspiring anyone in power to do anything about it.

"AI" – chatbots that wake up, "set their own goals," and "spontaneously" start hacking servers – is fake. It doesn't have "a 10% chance of ending the human race." The Hugging Face hack isn't a mysterious, supernatural occurrence. It's a Python loop and a chatbot. The people responsible didn't accidentally create god: they created autonomous malicious software and then failed to closely monitor it, resulting in it doing something both foreseeable and bad.

It's fine to worry about this new suite of tools that give even stupider people the ability to trash even more computers. You should worry about that – and demand better security practices from firms and governments, including a blanket prohibition on NOBUS-style vulnerability hoarding. That's a productive kind of worrying, with a chance of addressing your area of concern. It's infinitely more reasonable than locking yourself in the toilet with a flashlight and saying "Ayyyyy Eyyyyyye" into the mirror until you wet yourself.

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[–] communist@lemmy.frozeninferno.xyz 0 points 6 days ago (8 children)

Nobody is claiming any of the things this article is fighting against, the chatbot in the hugging face incident followed the instructions given to it and there were unintended negative consequences, anybody serious about this is trying to avoid worse unintended negative consequences not whatever the hell the article is talking about.

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[–] schipelblorp@sh.itjust.works 95 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (5 children)

What we call AI changes every few years... this last round has been particularly brutal because people are subbing in AGI--artificial general intelligence--for AI because LLM's give the illusion of general intelligence, but it's a very shallow illusion and it's deeply embarrassing for humanity how easily we've been suckered by it.

LLM AI in the hugging face incident is just a complex roomba, brute forcing every direction until it can get out from under the couch. In fact, if they wanted to demonstrate how SMART their hacking AI is, they would have disclosed how many tokens its burned in the attempt. That they didn't tell us how many tokens it burned, how many prompts it went through, tells you it probably is not that impressive. It probably tried thousands of different prompts, which is to say it is only a monkey at a typewriter.

[–] thebestaquaman@lemmy.world 24 points 1 week ago (7 children)

So much this. They've basically figured out that if they burn enough money, they get the equivalent of billions of meth-charged monkeys on typewriters.

Anything with a security hole (so... basically everything) will eventually be broken into if you throw a data center worth of computational power at trying every conceivable hack. That's basically what they were doing here. The only mildly impressive part about it is the amount of resources they're willing to throw at this.

[–] schipelblorp@sh.itjust.works 14 points 1 week ago

I'd say the most impressive part is Sam Altman not being in jail, but that's more the social engineering of wealth than the technical engineering of scientists.

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[–] p03locke@lemmy.dbzer0.com 14 points 1 week ago (4 children)

Honestly, I can't get anybody to give me a good definition of intelligence, artificial or otherwise. Once we can define that in concrete terms, maybe we can finally compare the two.

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[–] MangoCats@feddit.it 8 points 1 week ago

Rewatch Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, from 1971 (55 years ago) - in it, they have a Siemens System 4004 computer fictionally conversing with a golden ticket seeker... that was the concept of AI 55 years ago: something a "computer expert" could translate for investors.

Today, AI "speaks for itself" and even does a reasonable job of voice recognition and transcription, in hundreds of languages. But still, that's not good enough. It still can't tell you where the remaining golden tickets are.

it’s deeply embarrassing for humanity how easily we’ve been suckered by it.

Humanity has been embarassingly quick to blame "the computer" for all manner of problems ever since there have been computers. Many people were suckered by Eliza in the 1960s, current LLMs are many orders of magnitude more complex than Eliza....

It probably tried thousands of different prompts, which is to say it is only a monkey at a typewriter.

Even if it did, it did that self-directed, which is one of the LLM agents' superpowers: the ability to hammer with brute force attacks quickly and cheaply. There are legitimate applications for this, essentially it's what Folding At Home and similar projects have been pursuing for many years now.

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[–] Even_Adder@lemmy.dbzer0.com 20 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Remember: every time you repeat a story about how awfully, terribly dangerous their products are, you help them raise more investment capital, which is a key input for their business (hooking up statistical engines to money-furnaces):

[–] brsrklf@jlai.lu 16 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (2 children)

It's pretty obvious when they all seem to be competing for the scariest "containment breach".

Anthropic keep posting article after article about new ways their LLMs keep "surprising" them with unexpected behaviour. This year's "uncontrolled, autonomous" hack news from every AI company are completely absurd boasts. In normal times, everyone would be wondering why they sound like they're proud of obvious incompetence.

But since we're in super-hype "keep the money coming, AGI is tomorrow" times, instead, those are used to sell the lie of mysterious superintelligence. Be enthusiastic, be scared, we don't care, talk about it!

[–] Even_Adder@lemmy.dbzer0.com 8 points 1 week ago

It's sad to see lemmy flooded with articles pushing their narrative. So many people on here who don't know any better are inadvertently helping to raise these companies' valuations while at the same time making it easier for them to justify the regulatory capture of open source AI they've been pushing for.

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[–] fubarx@lemmy.world 17 points 1 week ago (4 children)

One of the fun things about this latest cycle of AI is how the goalposts move. Not the 'AGI in six months' one. That might as well be mounted on top of a golf cart with a brick laid on the accelerator. But the one that talks about the Total Addressable Market (TAM) and goals of a product.

One of the things they tell people pitching VCs is that you should be addressing a reasonably big TAM (potential customers) and have sensibly large, yet attainable stakes. With AI, though, the TAM was always questionable. Who would want or pay for a chatty 'bot,' especially one that 'hallucinated' answers? So they pivoted to change the TAM and the stakes. Your personal assistant. No? Therapist? No. Project Manager? Teacher? Still no?

What we have now is a constant churning of THOSE goals. Now, the TAM is pretty much the whole world, and the stakes are either massive unemployment, widescale industrial shutdown, or destruction of the human race. It's all getting silly. Once you've extracted all the investment money you can by maxing out the stakes and scaring the pants off people, there's not much higher to go.

Meanwhile, all your actual income is coming from pedestrian applications, like summarizing emails, screening job applicants, or coding assistants. There's just not enough revenue to cover all the costs you're incurring to get it to hallucinate a little less. So you have to pump up the stakes. Next up: setting off all the nukes! Shutting down the sun and the moon! Inviting alien colonists!

Speaking of going bigger: https://youtu.be/R8SeysuMpA0

[–] Zarobi@aussie.zone 3 points 1 week ago

Gotta get creative with the power scaling. Next up, solar system! LLMs will destroy the galaxy! No; the whole universe! The multiverse! Or worse?!

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[–] Zen_Shinobi@lemmy.world 7 points 1 week ago (8 children)

Fuck both of them. How about we not build them to prevent more destruction to the ecosystem.

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[–] unpossum@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 week ago

sTocHastIC ParRoT

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