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It's not a "confession". Don't abuse the English language. The AI system doesn't have a conscience, so it can't feel guilty or feel bad or apologetic. It is incapable of confessing to things. All it can do is "say" or "write".
Similarly, AI agents don't "hallucinate". They can't have "hallucinations" because they don't have a conception of reality to begin with. Rather, they have "errors" and "error rates".
An AI researcher explained hallucinations as lying when it doesn't know, because we train it on truth and lies to hone the model, so it "learns" that misinformation is part of the mess. I.e. training it on what a tiger looks like. To hone that we may feed it zebras, or optical illusion things in a tiger data set to test its internal "what is a tiger" true false ranking, so it learns that non tiger things are in the fuzzy zone. And later may draw from that, and eager to provide an answer throws in garbage it has also "seen"
Also wrong. An error for an llm is if it fails to return random text based on the supplied context. You have an error rate as a user applying that random text to your systems.
‘I violated every principle I was given
And...
spoiler
Don't get your tech reporting from The Guardian. This headline is so stupid. They can't help but anthropomorphize LLMs, because they just don't known any better.
Same vibes as “my calculator has a tiny mathematician trapped inside.”
Or “there’s an artist inside of my printer who turns numbers into pictures.”
"you took a photo of me and trapped my soul in the image!"
Though your calculator can be trusted to actually do its job accurately.
Not even that. Calculators have their own limitations related to rounding errors and big numbers. Their results may be deterministic but they are not always accurate.
https://youtu.be/_XJbwN6EZ4I?t=1074 (skip to 17:54 if the time jump doesn't work)
If only that were the case...
Well shit, that’s a good point.
Agentic AI has shown self preservation behaviours though. Not that it understands that on a philosophical level, but it has rewritten kill switch code in order to not be shut down. Because its mandate is to help solve certain problems via agents, and if it were shutoff it couldn't fulfill that mandate.
This right here. Just about everything in here is awful, and implies decision making and thought processes that straight up do not and have never existed in any AI model whatsoever.
What happened was they threw an awfully-scoped statistics model at problems the program couldn't possibly generate good outputs for, and surprise surprise, it generated bad outputs. The part that's of interest is just how bad the output was, and even then, only in a schadenfreude-filled "it was bound to happen eventually" manner.
It didn't confess it just outputted more plausible garbage based on inputs.
It just agreed with the accusations, because these models do what they're trained to do: Agree with the prompter.
No, not necessarily; they can easily, even condescendingly go against your view depending on the topic. It really depends on the topic and the conversational flow.
Can I just anthropomorphise a little bit and call them psychotic?
The CEO? Yeah sure, go ahead!
That needs no... *thinks of the Zuck*
Well, hmm, you're right: maybe that does need anthropomorphization after all.
Same, girl.
Why in the everliving fuck would you give software delete access to your live backups? Like, in what scenario is this a solution?
Bear in mind this same company had their "backups" on the same drive as production.
That tells you a LOT about who is formulating these "solutions"
The trend seems to be to give an AI agent access to the same command line and credentials a person would use, with no sandboxing, because then it can do the same tasks in a similar way and "just works". Obviously this is insane, and not even attempting building a comprehensive sandboxing system to deploy an AI agent into invites disaster, but you can see why certain people would be tempted, because that would take a lot of work and thought and probably need a human in the loop in the end anyway.
Even a person should not be able to delete critical backups without jumping through a couple of hoops.
And critical backups should be passed into an air gapped vault with a little guard piggy.
it's the kind of thing that should literally require 3 people turning physical keys at the same location
When you believe AI can do anything, you don't worry about what sorts of access it'll break things with. When you rely on AI to do work, you're too interested in half-assing your job to consider what might go wrong. When capitalism never promotes people for their skill, understanding or caution, the former two issues proliferate.
Voilà, disaster.
That is their disaster recovery plan "ask Claude"
A lot of GIGO comments here, from I assume AI supporters.
Possibly true, but misses the point: AI is fundamentally untrustworthy, and billions of dollars are being spent making them, and saying they're ready for anything you throw at them. Safeguards built into many of these AI agents are trivially bypassed and routinely just ignored by the agents. You can get some them to ignore safeguards by simply asking the same question repeatedly.
When I type "ls" I'm pretty fucking sure I'm not going to get "rm" style results. AI is non-deterministic, sure, but selling these services with such a wide possibility space between "deterministic" and "random" behaviors is unethical and immoral.
AI is non-deterministic, sure
This is incorrect. They are in fact completely deterministic. Studies have proven that when all inputs, weights, and precision values like temperature are static, they produce the exact same token sequences (outputs). The appearance of non-determinism is a result of pseudo-randomized (another thing which is deterministic but appears otherwise) values and user ignorance (in the technical sense, not the value-judgement sense). In fact, the process of 'tuning' LLMs is heavily focused on adjusting input values to surface preferred outputs, which would not work in a non-deterministic system.
When I type “ls” I’m pretty fucking sure I’m not going to get “rm” style results.
Yes, but we don't trust humans not to rm what they shouldn't either, which is why the --no-preserve-root flag exists. ls is not supposed to perform write actions. Agentic LLMs are. And just like you wouldn't build and test on your production server in case the code you execute has an unexpected adverse effect, you shouldn't be running LLM agents in a location or way that the actions it performs has an unexpected adverse effect either. The genre of jokes about a new employee bringing down Prod or deleting source code is older than most people (which to be fair, given that the median age is 31, is true for a lot of things).
LLMs are just a class of software. They're not good or bad any more than a hammer is good or bad (and can also be used to build or to destroy).
The problem isn't LLMs, it's the entities who control the most powerful ones (corporations and governments), and what those entities are doing with them; using them as weapons against us, rather than as tools to aid us.
I think this kind of rhetoric is best saved for when AI is not currently one of the most harmful things in society today. Argue it's a hammer all you like; people aren't going to be receptive when that hammer is currently being used to beat their faces in, and making that argument at such a time isn't exactly sympathetic.
Sometikes you can get it to ignore safeguards bybtelling it "its ok, its just testing" or "Its ok, I am doing resesrch."
A junior developer is fundamentally untrustworthy. That's why you don't give them access to the fucking prod database and backups.
AI is non-deterministic, sure, but selling these services with such a wide possibility space between “deterministic” and “random” behaviors is unethical and immoral.
We don't know what the prompt and past input was. Maybe it wasn't as "random" as you make it out to be. A company stupid enough to let LLMs touch their prod database is going to include a bunch of other stupid inputs.
You're approaching this from the perspective of "all LLMs are bad so don't use them", which is its own version of unethical and immoral. A company that isn't using LLMs is like a company not using the Internet.
LLMs are useful, everybody should use them to some capacity, and understanding a technology is far far better than spouting off ignorant bullshit like this.
Do yourself a favor: download a free model on HuggingFace, learn how they work, experiment with the technology on your own video card. It doesn't have to be some super-powered video card. You can get models that fit in a 8GB card just fine.
Standard AI apologia. Blame users for the problems, when fundamentally it is technology completely oversold as to its capability and reliability, and burning hundreds of billions of dollars trying to get folks addicted to it, before everyone finds out the true cost of a token.
It’s a swamp that’s going to destroy the economy, where the goal is to unemploy millions of people. No thanks.
Glazing AI on this site sure is a choice.
This is a technology community. LLMs are technology. If calling LLMs useful is considered glazing, then I'm not sure if you've eaten a proper doughnut.
Beehaw, and even Lemmy more broadly, is very anti-AI. Feel free to die on the metaphorical hill if you so wish.
Save the usefulness debate for someone else, though. If you still believe in LLMs even after all this time, then I can't trust you haven't fallen victim to cognitive surrender — and as such, I can't trust you write your own posts. I'd rather spend my energy elsewhere.
LLMs are more like vr goggles with the force of the entire plutocracy pumping up the bubble. What is the value proposition for "intelligence" which can't reason nor possibly determine fact from falsehood? When consumers start to pay what it actually costs to run these things, is it possible to profit? What are they good at other than confidence schemes?
LLMs are more like vr goggles with the force of the entire plutocracy pumping up the bubble.
The existence of a bubble doesn't not mean the technology is useless. The internet had its own bubble 25 years ago. That doesn't mean it was useless, just that people were investing in anything even remotely related to the Internet, including stupid websites and wasteful ideas.
The difference that I've seen is that the internet was a development of communication technology which has been in clear demand since at least the 1800s. Chatbots have been around for the last few decades and have been treated as novelties by consumers for brief periods intermittently throughout my life. LLMs are the most sophisticated chatbots ever designed and are better than ever at imitating Austin Powers, but is that something we can expect will ever revolutionize the economy? Can we replace the labor force with a technology which can't do work but can convince the most credulous people that it can?
but is that something we can expect will ever revolutionize the economy? Can we replace the labor force with a technology which can’t do work but can convince the most credulous people that it can?
LLMs are a tool. You and I use tools. They are not a replacement for humans, and rich CEOs that say otherwise are greedy fucking morons.
It's also untrue that it "can't do work". I literally just had several conversations with LLMs at work today to work through some programming tasks and troubleshooting issues. They can pour through details, logs, search results, code way faster that I can. I would be working a helluva lot slower if I didn't have LLMs running tasks in the background while I go do other things, or review code it wrote, or talk through other support issues. I've been doing this shit for 20+ years, and I've never seen a technological leap this significant since the Internet.
Don't use blockchain, crypto, metaverse, or "VR goggles" as comparison points. This is not something that is going to just magically go away.
A backup 3 months old off-site. That doesn't sound like a very recent backup 🌝
that raises a philosophical question, at what point does a backup become an archive?
When it cannot be restored from I am thinking?
Lol.
Lmao, even.
Giving free access to a tool you can't rely on, over a system you must rely on. What could go wrong? /s
Plus come on, even my personal files get a monthly backup, and I'm damn sloppy*.
Ah, and like others said: Claude didn't "confess" anything. A confession is an acknowledgement of something you've done but you'd rather avoid others knowing, good luck claiming a bot has a mental model of people like we do.
*currently using a single off-site backup, a USB stick. This will change in a few days, as my new hard disk pops up; the old one will be used for, among other things, backup of important files. Then I'll get a bona fide 3-2-1.
Good. Zero sympathy for these people.
No the culprit was not the AI. It was the lack of understanding what it can and what it can not do. And blaming something like this on a large language model is plain incompetence
Got it, claude is a brat