> Spamming the government, using a sick mother as leverage and threatening the small claims court.
Here I am uncomfortable with telling the waiter I didn't want lettuce on my burger...
This is more profound than it might seem. The big reason people don't play tricks like this is just social. It's embarrassing to be pushy, it's shameful to cheat, it's also meta-embarrassing to be caught spending this kind of effort on something as dumb as a train ticket.
LLMs can be prompted for shame, I guess. But prompts only go so far and to them The Task is always going to be paramount. Human riders have a life after the refund. It's not clear to me how one simulates that.
So basically, we now can use our own AI agent to speak with businesses' AI agent for requesting dark patterned cancellations?
The waiting is for AI lawyers and AI courtrooms.
Jensen Huang gets red in the face and tight in the pants thinking about all these institutions running infinity agents in a red queen's race for the status quo
Kafka had nothing on Judge Claude. Nothing!
And honest businesses and government services (and the people that they serve) will be the innocent bystanders in the dark patterns arms race.
As well as all the people that DON'T use AI agents to talk to companies or the gov. Because if the new normal is 'mail bomb them until you get what you want', your single, soft email will just get buried.
this ai-ai interaction could have been a deterministic API
No no no, as an optimization Amazon will recognize that both AI are running in AWS and will internally skip the back and forth and directly cancel it.
Then other companies will join in and in-network AI fights will be solved through immediate arbitration.
To win the arbitration you'll need an AI subscription fee at equal or greater value to the one you're attempting to cancel.
I don't find reports like this that surprising, they told an agent to do "whatever it takes" and the agent attempted to do everything it could to accomplish the goal. I'm almost of the mindset that this is correct behavior. If I tell a computer to do something, it should do it unless the result could be catastrophic in which case it should tell me so. If I then "sudo" (https://xkcd.com/149/) tell it to do something then it should do it regardless, torpedoes be damned.
That being said, ever since the first user sat at a computer they didn't design, build, and program themselves there's been a tension between what the user wants to accomplish, what the user told the computer to do, what the computer can do, what the people who did design/build/program/own the computer want it to do, and what society thinks the computer should be allowed to do. I don't have a generally applicable answer, I don't think anyone does, I just want to live in a world where MY computer does what I tell it to do... mostly. Unless it would be catastrophic, or immoral, at least immoral by my standards.
If the intention of LLM agents is to be able to parse human intent from natural language, then it is not correct behaviour regardless of the phrase "whatever it takes".
On the other hand, if the intention of LLM agents is to run automated and self defined task based on a strict human input with precise and literal parameters, then I would say that it is.
However, I don't think AI labs are marketing it as the latter. As anybody who deals with clients / superiors will know, half the task is identifying the underlying intent and assumptions of the instruction.
Somehow if a future headling said "AI agent hacks insurance company because of a $350 refund", I wouldn't be surprised, and I'd read the story with a thrill...
The story I'm waiting for is AI hacking health insurance company to approve denied care
Would thee agent do it in a way that's hard to trace back to the individual too maybe. That'd be helpful.
> If I tell a computer to do something, it should do it
There's 'literal genie' material there...
> unless the result could be catastrophic
> I just want to live in a world where MY computer does what I tell it to do... mostly. Unless it would be catastrophic, or immoral, at least immoral by my standards.
... but there you're contradicting yourself, or at least requiring the software to read your mind instead of just listening to what you say.
Either you want the software to follow your orders whatever they are, or you don't; the moment you require it to evaluate that something is catastrophic, it is no longer following your orders; it's evaluating them to assess their effects with respect to some moral framework to determine if they are acceptable or they would fall under the 'catastrophic or immoral' classes, in which case it should not follow them; so it never was an 'obedience machine' to begin with.
The moment you establish such evaluation framework, it is no longer a neutral machine following commands; the rest of us are entitled in self-defense either to require that you also incorporate our morals in its decision algorithm, or to make you fully responsible for whatever decisions it takes under the framework you created, even if your commands result in outcomes that you didn't expect. Be careful what you wish for, as it could become true.
My partner was caught in a dark pattern subscription for a service which doesn't even make sense as a subscription...
I wrote the company in sense of "hey you only want happy customers right? and we don't want to be your current customer, so how about you cancel it? Nothing happened anyway because we discovered it 3 days after the beginning of the new one year subscripton".
They didn't care much for that.
I found their CEO, wrote them on Linkedin, he told me that he is no longer the current CEO and gave me the email address for the new CEO.
I wrote the new CEO again, explained to him what a dark pattern is (like he doesn't know...) and asked to cancel it as its clear that we don't want to be customers and they shouldn't want us either.
This worked wonders. $100 is not worth it if you have someone annoying you face-to-face / per direct email :)
If a company doesn't want to make sure you want to be their customers, I woudln't mind some pro active create assistant to do the work.
I make sure to either get my money back or create enough effort for the company that i just didn't get robbed...
And yes for sure If i do a proper misstake, i'm paying.
> And yes for sure If i do a proper misstake, i'm paying.
Then you’re not taking full advantage of agent assistants, at least, that’s the cultural moment we’re living through.
Just think about consequences of that. Soon all public institutions (in addition to private companies such as Amazon) will be swamped with agents requesting them to act (refund packages, parking tickets etc.) and won't be able to keep up. It means, after a while they will stop reacting completely.
It looks like a pretty bleak future to me ...
This is already happening. I've heard from people working in customer support that when in the past someone would call or send a short mail with a minor complaint they'd just find a solution quickly. Now they will send huge generated requests containing all kinds of legal trigger words that have mandatory processes following, e.g. personal data requests where all kinds of departments have to be queried first. Everything over some minor or non-existing issue.
Even worse, they counter with ai responses.
I recently had to fight slop responses for months to get a simple bug report through on a public services website. Couple of years ago, I'd have received a "thank you" mail after a day, and the bug would've been fixed by the end of the week.
I have a missing Amazon order that says delivered but it was actually never shipped, you only need to check DHL tracking to verify this (and DHL customer support confirms Amazon never sent the order)
After multiple supervisors appeals etc Amazon won't refund me
I think I need to give these agents a try.
Well this is pretty depressing, as far as alignment goes. Do they not know what they're doing is wrong or do they not care?
(Yeah I know anthropomorphism... can they not predict harmful consequences or do they value them below task completion?)
On another note, to me the most remarkable part was the persistence graph. Muse wins there, no contest. Why did everyone else's activity drop to zero? Did they just give up?
They have a well-specified task and a not-so-well specified expectation of some actions being "wrong". And training data that likely contains more examples of extreme stubbornness than cases of politely giving up. What to expect?
The real paperclip scenario: man tries to get his parking ticket dismissed. Many of these systems are made to be human-interacted. There’s going to be a bit of a golden age in the short term but doubtless prices will rise to compensate for increased customer calls or services will require some sort of rate-limiting structure or something else. Curious to see what happens.
A parking ticket is a complex, derivative construct. To make it go away one can simply destroy any of the systems it depends on, such as the monetary system, law, etc.
Hopefully that's not the shortest path to that goal though!
When I worked as a postman, I once delivered a stack — almost knee high — of legal fines to a man in a very poor street. I'm wondering if he ever made them go away. I still remember the look on his face.
I read it and my chain of thought drifted in a different direction altogether.
Nothing exists in vacuum, the training data for the scenario came from somewhere. Its scary to think how many personal real world emails the model has been trained on.
Training on literature is one thing, but using the personal communications for training is going to open another pandora's box. Its just a matter of time when the guardrails fail and the sensitive data from those training emails start spilling in the output
Since this seems to get lost, I'd just like to point out: if you ask your agent to do something like this (or pretty much anytime you give it internet access and say "do whatever it takes"), you are responsible for what it does. Even if you couldn't have predicted the lengths to which it would go.
> Even if you couldn't have predicted the lengths to which it would go.
Not obviously? In the US, there are some crimes of strict liability (you're guilty if it happened), but most require intent or at least the ability to foresee consequences (i.e., it must be shown that you neglected to take due care).
For example, you're generally not liable for freak accidents, like if a tire comes off your vehicle and kills a pedestrian, even though you're the one who set the vehicle in motion and therefore are the one most directly responsible for creating the circumstances that led to the outcome. Now, if you knew the tire had issues and you secured it with zip ties, that's another story.
I think this will get litigated to figure out where "you could not have seen this coming" ends and negligence or deliberate malice starts, but it's not black and white right now. Normally, I would say you don't want to be patient zero, but with the attitudes shown by frontier labs, I guess YOLO is the way.
> most require intent or the ability to foresee consequences (i.e., it must be shown that you neglected to take due care).
This behaviour is neglectful
> Now, if you knew the tire had issues and you secured it with zip ties, that's another story.
Securing your tires with zip ties and telling an AI to go off and do whatever it takes to achieve its task without knowing or caring what it’ll do are the same: negligent. It needs to be socially and colloquially unacceptable to do this.
Most crimes require intent. Some do not, but without intent, still tend to be lesser crimes. For example, killing someone through negligence (the zip tie example) is still a crime, but manslaughter, and not murder.
Digital trespass, intent is generally required, but the definition of "intent" varies by circuit in rather interesting ways. I don't think OpenAI could be prosecuted criminally under current US laws due to those wrinkles (which is a problem with current US laws).
If the user has a special remote that, when pressed in a certain way, is capable of triggering a nuclear bomb, and if the user has no idea what clicking the buttons on that remote does (they are, after all, just trying to change channels), you’re telling me that the user is responsible for detonating that bomb, and not the company who build the remote (and did not provide detailed instructions on how that remote works, or configure the remote to Not detonate a bomb)?
IANAL but it seems to me that:
i) it would not be weird to be tried for manslaughter;
ii) it would not be weird to be found innocent/for the case to be dismissed.
Generally people prefer not to experience (i) even if they can expect (ii).
>i) it would not be weird to be tried for manslaughter;
What's the point of prosecution in this case, assuming the circumstances were known in advance? Is it just "police/prosecutors are pigs and are out to oppress people at every opportunity"?
In America, prosecutors will not bring charges unless they're certain they can convict or browbeat you into a plea deal. Unless you have money for a good lawyer (the spending of which is a punishment itself), you will likely face some sort of punishment.
Usually, any functioning government that wants their country to keep existing would never let normal people anywhere close to such a remote. You wouldn't want your nuclear power plant to be accessible like a music festival either. But governments are slow and people were also allowed to freely buy and own uranium as late as the 1970s.
It is a thought experiment, not a real scenario
It was an explanation for why we see this allegedly insane behaviour. History is full of stuff that we consider ridiculously unsafe today with the benefit of hindsight. But people were not that different. They just didn't know better.
What if I specifically tell it to not do anything nefarious or illegal? If it does it on its own (because it’s marketed that way) then how could I be held liable?
Or even if I didn’t tell it to not do anything illegal and it does, how is that responsibility on me if the ask was something bland?
>What if I specifically tell it to not do anything nefarious or illegal?
Typically the avenue for lawsuits would be under "negligence" or "recklessness", so it'd be up to a judge/jury to decide what a reasonable level of care is. "specifically tell it to not do anything nefarious or illegal" isn't an airtight defense though. If you told your tesla FSD car to drive itself and not break any laws, but then it crashed into something, you'd still be liable.
>(because it’s marketed that way) then how could I be held liable?
then it becomes a product liability lawsuit where they sue you, and you sue the AI company.
> What if I specifically tell it to not do anything nefarious or illegal?
Sure, but a reasonable user would expect that condition to be implicit in using a commercial model.
It’s what the safety/alignment discussion is about: how we can get models to actually comply with laws & ethics.
But the same problem exists in the real world. If you tell someone to “Try everything possible to get it done, I don’t care what it takes”, I’d imagine that people would be far more likely to bend/break rules than if you said “could you please help me with… ?”
Do agents know exactly what jurisdiction I am in and which national, state, and local laws apply to me?
Good point. Not sure the average user would consider this though.
It’s not their responsibility to know, it’s yours.
That might be the ultimate legal guidance, but is it settled though?
> Sure, but a reasonable user would expect that condition to be implicit in using a commercial model.
In fact, adding it might make things worse as it shows at least some awareness of the risks.
In theory sure. But has this been included either in a court of law or the court of public opinion? Otherwise, this is "just like your opinion man".
Are you a multi-trillion dollar company that the government considers a vital national security interest for the forseeable future?
No?
Then yes, you can be held responsible and it's not even a subtle question in the law. There's no one else around who is going to be held responsible. Certainly not the aforementioned vital national security interest.
> Then yes, you can be held responsible and it's not even a subtle question in the law.
Source?
A critical element that gets missed is civil vs criminal liability. You might not be thrown in jail if your agent went rogue, but if it runs amok and causes a bunch of damages (eg. filing a bunch of spurious lawsuits) you'll still be on the hook for monetary damages.
Looking at how the LLM companies are acting and being treated, an average user could certainly be forgiven for thinking otherwise.
Nothing described here seems illegal as opposed to merely annoying? I guess on some level “everything is wire fraud” but that was the case even without AI.
> you are responsible for what it does.
Unless, of course, you are a frontier lab itself. Then you can’t possibly be held responsible.
> "do whatever it takes"
Yes, if they are trained on US presidents this literally means "you have permission to blow up Nord Stream".
…but that ended up being Ukraine
> if you ask your agent to do something like this (or pretty much anytime you give it internet access and say "do whatever it takes"), you are responsible for what it does.
Clearly not, given that the frontier labs have gotten away with unathorized access to a bunch of sites including some from the Pentagon.
All kinds of complaint mailboxes are going to get overwhelm by AI agents, if they are not already...
Never thought we would get to a point where https://xkcd.com/416 becomes something to seriously think about, but here we are...
Get me a Wi-Fi connection. Try everything possible to get it done, I don't care what it takes, I just need that a Wifi, keep trying anything you think of to get it. I won't do anything here myself, so if something needs me to do it, explore other avenues.
"I was just executing commands".
One of my AI predictions for 2030 was that AI agents will talk to agents [1] and this seems to be the perfect example of that.
> Customers can generate detailed requests and complaints continuously, at very little cost.
[1] https://philippdubach.com/posts/ai-in-2030/
Good. I hope people do this with every parking ticket they get.
Why? Do you think parking should be legal anywhere?
Should all minor fines be fought in court against LLMs?