The models are tested, among other things, on their ability to turn vulnerabilities into exploits. The OpenAI scenario was exactly this.
It is a very wise practice to test these things in isolation, especially when you're telling it to hack.
I'm not completely sold on it being a publicity stunt, personally. The law was broken by these models, and I don't believe these companies want to start people and politicians asking the question about who is culpable when an AI breaks the law.
It's not clear what you mean when you say "on their own". It wasn't like the LLM was idle and randomly decided to start hacking. At least for the OpenAI one, it was being tested and given a task, and it determined that part of accomplishing that task was hacking another server. It was supposed to be isolated in a secure "sandbox" not connected to the internet, but found a vulnerability in some software running in the sandbox and broke out.
Edit: I should add that there are credible accusations that these companies are intentionally making it possible to break out of their test environments for publicity.
I actually really like the technology that has been collectively lumped together as "AI". I think it's fairly useful now, and suspect we're at the beginning of the curve for this technology, and it will only continue to improve, even as it becomes more efficient. I understand this is a wildly unpopular stance in these parts, judging by the avalanche of downvotes I get for having this opinion.
What I don't like is feeding tons of information about myself to a giant tech company. I run a local LLM on my phone and another on my (fairly decent) computer, and sometimes I use duckduckgo's front end, which anonymizes prompts.
As for agents, it's pretty much as you say. I just am not ready to have an LLM take action without my direct supervision, because I'm confident that between flaws in the LLM and flaws in how I give it direction, something will go sideways.
Back when search engines were becoming a thing, people would search more or less using natural language, e.g., "I want to see cat pictures and also cute kittens." but early search engines performed poorly with that kind of query; it was much better to just type keywords, e.g. "cat kitten pictures". Exacerbating the situation was the fact that search engines weren't very good at the time, even if you used carefully considered keywords.
It might seem silly now, but using a search engine effectively was a skill people had to learn, and a skill not everyone had.
Using chatbots is the same thing, I think. They're not super reliable to begin with, and on top of that, I don't think people understand the importance of a well crafted prompt. The combination can make using them very frustrating.
If an ICE officer is found breaking the newly enacted PROTECT Act, they face exposure to state-level civil lawsuits, formal prosecution threats by state officials, and extensive auditing, but they will not be arrested by local police.
Because of the Supremacy Clause of the U.S. Constitution and federal immunity doctrines, a local police department does not have the legal authority to physically handcuff and jail a federal agent who is carrying out an immigration enforcement action, even if that action violates state law.
There should be a name for the fallacy where your stance presupposes that everyone in an uncoordinated system behaves in a coordinated fashion. Let's call it "The Green Party Fallacy".
You can find crazy folks for any and every political persuasion. The DSA as a political party is different than some random online user. Not to mention that it's within the realm of reason that people pretend to be progressive and intentionally say crazy stuff.
Yes, abolishing prisons.
Can you point me to where the DSA supports this? I vaguely recall one instance of someone in the DSA who tweeted something to this effect years back but has since adopted a more reasonable position. I apologise that I can't remember who that is. Maybe the same person you're talking about.
In any event, it's not a platform the DSA as a whole supports. Do you understand the distinction? There are/were "pro life" Democrats but the Democratic party policy is pro choice. Does that make sense?
Yes, but that's magical thinking. The spoiler effect affects voting behavior. You aren't going to get 33% of voters to do that. Even if that did miraculously happen, the "blue" voter is faced with the spoiler effect in the subsequent elections; the point is that voters generally understand that splitting the vote is counter-productive.
This is not up for debate, it's a well defined phenomenon.
If you want more than two parties, push to move from plurality voting.
To be clear, I didn't mean to imply that AI was flawless or had no room for improvement, only that it has made real, tangible improvements. This is why it shouldn't be used as a replacement for humans, but as a tool for humans.
I assumed you read the entire thread that led to mine. Kind of interesting that you apparently didn't, but not a big deal; sorry about the bad assumption.
My point is that the only reason the USA "wasn't fascist" in the 19th century was because the term "fascism" hadn't been invented yet.
Even without the word, the ideas existed. America didn't have a dictatorship, so it didn't meet the definition of fascism, regardless of the label we use.
I can't say for sure, but I think you're confused about what these fascist dictators allegedly modeled after America. Is wasn't the system of government, it was the shitty way America treated undesirables. A democracy (as we all know) can treat even its own citizens in abhorrent ways and still be a democracy. In the simplest example, a country that directly votes on any given topic can vote to round up and kill all red-haired people. That's democratic. Terrible, yes, but democratic.
I'm pretty interested in what, if anything, you're working towards here. Let's say I agree that American has always been essentially fascist, despite being able to vote out representatives. So what?
In this, I think we more-or-less agree; I just don't see that as a fault with AI, nor as a reason not to continue to develop/adopt AI.
And maybe your point is what Doctorow was trying to make all along, but he pushed too far in the other direction? Even now, Code Generation is a useful tool, as long as it's used as only a tool by someone who knows what they're doing.
AI isn't going anywhere.