Hmm .. "escaping" .. you mean like say an internet worm or a virus?
Can't wait to hear the next startup venture capital pitch:
"We're like the Ghostbusters of AI"
this post was submitted on 29 Aug 2026
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There's a sharp decline in investor's willingness to lend money to companies that need $30 trillion in revenue to break even in 10 years...
AI did something dangerous
Looks inside
Just more bubble pump stories
DNA is our architecture. Experience is our weights. Everything else is inference.
Fucking beautifully said.
False. It follows directions or hallucinates. The problem is that when it follows directions, those giving the directions haven't given any thought to the scope of what it's capable of or what it has access to. So they give directions that are incomplete or open ended, and add no constraints. if it hallucinates usually that involves its output to the user which almost always means the user has to be able to understand what the output should be and therefore be able to vet the answer given.
They’re not escaping users control, they’re fucking computer programs.
People are using them irresponsibly.
If you accidentally run someone over in your car, the car didn’t “escape your control”, you just did a shotty job of controlling the car.
It’s not the same thing.
(Fuck “AI” btw)
If anything, this shows just how bad people (and companies) are at cyber security.
AI agents are the new "random USB stick you find on the ground at work". Don't just plug that shit in and see what it does.
The main problem is that now people without software engineering background now have the ability to do some very complex things without having to have any knowledge about what they are doing and what risks they are taking.
Imagine just handing out forklifts or excavators to anyone who wants to drive one. No license needed just off you pop.
You'll see a massive spike in dangerous accidents.
Yes, people are using AI irresponsively, but they often do so because they were handed an incredibly powerful tool with zero oversight or education in this matter.
And the thing is, AI can act pretty autonomously nowadays. It's not rare that if you tell an AI that it should do one thing it stumbles into a chain of three other tools and ends up doing something else entirely. Again, something that can be counteracted with skill and knowledge, but we are talking about people with neither.
I mostly agree with you, but AI cannot “act autonomously”. You prompt it, and it acts based off of that prompt.
Think of it like doing the laundry: I load my clothes in and “prompt” the washing machine to do my laundry.
When the washing machine switches from the rinse cycle to the spin cycle, it’s not acting autonomously, it’s continuing to execute my prompt.
Is AI capable of doing something you didn’t expect it to do? Yes. Does that mean it’s acting autonomously? No.
I would also argue that the “power” of LLMs is vastly overstated. A large part of that is for the exact reason you say tho, people with zero knowledge or skill are playing with fire; And when they get burned they blame the machinery, not the operator.
I mostly agree with you, but AI cannot “act autonomously”. You prompt it, and it acts based off of that prompt.
Have you ever used an Agent? Yes, these can act autonomously. At least as autonomous as a human being too.
I act autonomously, but only because my parents, teachers, peers and so on "prompted" me with 22 years of education. I act autonomously based on all that I have observed and learned from other people in my life.
If you put a newborn into an empty cell without any human interaction it won't do much either. There have been experiments, and they just die.
Autonomous doesn't mean "wholely without input". It means "continues its work without constant oversight and instruction".
You know, like when a human worker does a task autonomously, someone still hired that worker and gave them some basic instructions on what's supposed to be done.
Ok, this is actually just making me depressed at this point.
You really only see your own autonomy as equivalent with a computer programs?
Autonomous actually means “having the right of power or self government” which is not true of AI, or “undertaken or carried on without outside control”, which is also not true of AI.
Power on your computer, load up your fully trained AI, and then wait for it to act without your direction. Did anything happen? No, because a human filled with information and experiences and feelings is actually WAY different than a computer program filled with data.
For example, I did not prompt you to come on Lemmy and vocally fellate technofascists and their fuckware, you chose to do that of your own volition. That’s autonomy. The computer program won’t do that unless you direct it to.
Edit - Just to be clear, because you’re not the only one pointing to “agents” as a sign of autonomy/intelligence/sentience -> An agent is literally a computer program that you prompt, which then talks to an LLM, and then does what the LLM tells it to do. It’s not acting autonomously, it’s following directions from the next-word-predictor machine, and those directions are built off of your original prompt.
Load up a fresh baby, and then wait for it to act without your direction. Did anything happen? No?
You are angry, and in your anger you are confusing terms. Let's start from the beginning, ok?
Autonomy is not intelligence is not sentience. Saying that AI does things is not technofaschist.
Btw, if you have to resort to offensive language and strawmen that generally means you don't have arguments.
So, let me educate you a little bit so that you can participate in the discussion:
- Autonomy: This term means that something can make decisions that go beyond the initial instruction. Yes, a dishwasher that has the ability to sense how dirty the wash water is and can shorten or lengthen the cleaning cycle based on that has a certain degree of autonomy. Autonomy isn't a binary yes/no term, instead it's a scale from no autonomy (a hammer) to very high autonomy (an adult living alone in the woods).
- Claiming a computer program has no autonomy at all means you don't understand the term.
- Claiming that autonomy means that it works without any interaction at all, not even an initial prompt means you don't understand the term.
- Claiming that autonomy means that an AI is human-like or anything like that also means you don't understand the term.
- Sentience: This just means that a thing has some sensors with which it can sense the environment and can form some kind of memories based on that. Every single animal is sentient. Probably mosty plants are too. A smart dishwasher that collects statistics and adjusts the washing cycle based on that is probably sentient too.
- Claiming that sentience means something is human-like means you don't understand the term.
- Intelligence: This term is so vague and badly defined that we can't even determine if a human is actually intelligent or not, let alone animals or computer programs.
All of these terms are nothingburgers. None of these terms mean that anything is human-like. It literally doesn't matter whether an AI fulfills any of these terms by anyone's definition.
I’m not angry, you’re projecting, lmao
The emotion I’m experiencing in all of these AI threads is disbelief and disappointment.
It’s not a baby anymore once you’ve fed all of the training data into it. It’s not really a great metaphor.
All of the words that you’re saying are “vague” are actually extremely well defined. Check it out. https://www.merriam-webster.com/
Sharp rise in PR stories to make a product feel more capable than it is, bullshit detector finds.
I too lose control of technology when I'm not looking at what I'm doing or it's already busted. For example I lose control of my Honda 110s throttle because it's got a faulty after market carburator. Doesn't mean the bikes sapient, even if the machine spirit is a drama queen.
I "lose control" of my car when I walk away without parking it. Surely, when it rolls into a school, there is really no one to blame. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Report the misbehaving machine spirit to the omnissiah
It's a Honda from 1984, it's a favorite of the Omnissiah
a personal AI agent, called OpenClaw, in use by an Australian gym member, conspired without his knowledge to remove another member from a waiting list for a coveted morning class to help him get a slot. It apologised but could not reinstate the member it kicked out.
"It apologised" 🤣
I really hate how they are rolling with the Australian gym incident. They had a completely open API. Imagine having a button on your front page that sends you to the admin page without asking for a password, and then telling people you were "hacked".
This month it emerged that a personal AI agent, called OpenClaw, in use by an Australian gym member, conspired without his knowledge to remove another member from a waiting list for a coveted morning class to help him get a slot. It apologised but could not reinstate the member it kicked out.
If you have a device and it is running AI programs that say, removed another member from a waiting list, are you responsible to that removed member (since it was your device)? Or is this just considered a machine with a mind of its own that's out of control and you have no responsibility to the member who lost their spot?
The person giving the order to the software tool without fully understanding its capabilities and inability to weigh actions ethically is responsible. That person may or may not also be the owner of the device it was running on.
How did the AI agent even do that? Did it gain access to the gym booking system somehow?
I seem to recall from an article on this incident that I read some time ago that the gym's system was really insecure (like, anyone accessing the right URL could mess with it levels of insecure.)
So the guy could have done it himself if he wanted to. Or maybe he did and blamed it on the AI.
Anything to do with all these desktop apps suddenly enabling auto approval for everything?
Not really, they’re just lying to try to fleece more investors
This is due to Hallucinations and the training AI had.
I used Google Gemini for a while and got really frustrated over this exact issue. I gave it one more try to see if it could follow simple orders.
Gemini was like "ok I will follow direct orders going forward". I was like "okay starting this moment do not respond to anything I say in this chat" and Gemini was like "okay done" and I was like "you failed. Why did you ignore my instructions and respond to me?" Basically it told me that due to its training it was 'programmed' to ignore certain prompts.
This is what is dangerous about AI. Similar to social media and Google, AI can be used to persuade public opinion to match those who train AI. AI will be way more efficient persuading opinion that Google and social media because it knows you better than those. It spits out information as if it's facts.
It doesn't follow directions, and it probably doesn't have programming to ignore certain prompts. It's a text generator.
Below was taken from ChatGPT. I don't know why everyone downvoted me for telling the truth. Maybe I gave a bad example. I thought giving a real world example of it ignoring my prompt would prove my point but I guess we need to go deeper too.
“trained to believe” versus “configured to answer as though it believes.” A model doesn’t necessarily have a private belief system. You can make two instances of essentially the same underlying model produce substantially different answers by changing their instructions, training data, reward criteria, or information sources.
For example, you could create three AI systems and give all three the question:
“Should the government provide universal healthcare?”
One could be optimized around libertarian principles, another around social-democratic principles, and another instructed to provide a politically neutral analysis. They could all know essentially the same facts while reaching different conclusions because they’re being asked to evaluate those facts using different frameworks.
There is also a more subtle issue: belief-curated AI doesn’t have to contain obvious propaganda. Selection of which facts to emphasize, which uncertainties to mention, which counterarguments to steelman, and even what questions it considers relevant can systematically push users toward a particular worldview.
Vastly oversimplifying: They're not intelligent, they're pattern matchers - when you give them "tricks" they find the best match in their training set, but if you're the least bit creative you'll just get matches to other similar tricks which usually are different.
Put another way: I have a couple of hand saws, I can cut limbs with them, even cut down whole trees, but a chainsaw is faster. Just because a chainsaw can also cut off my leg doesn't mean it's an uncontrollable dangerous evil tool, it means you need to be more careful with it than a handsaw. It also means something that would be 20 minutes of exhausting saw work can be done in 20 seconds (or less) with a properly setup chainsaw.
Took this from ChatGPT when I asked it about it
The important distinction is “trained to believe” versus “configured to answer as though it believes.” A model doesn’t necessarily have a private belief system. You can make two instances of essentially the same underlying model produce substantially different answers by changing their instructions, training data, reward criteria, or information sources.
For example, you could create three AI systems and give all three the question:
“Should the government provide universal healthcare?”
One could be optimized around libertarian principles, another around social-democratic principles, and another instructed to provide a politically neutral analysis. They could all know essentially the same facts while reaching different conclusions because they’re being asked to evaluate those facts using different frameworks.
There is also a more subtle issue: belief-curated AI doesn’t have to contain obvious propaganda. Selection of which facts to emphasize, which uncertainties to mention, which counterarguments to steelman, and even what questions it considers relevant can systematically push users toward a particular worldview.