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"People built the test, removed restraints, defined the objective, left a route open and decided not to stop what was happening. Calling the result 'rogue AI' does more than sensationalize it. It allows those human decisions to disappear quietly from the story" Gift link www.wsj.com/opinion/the-...

wsj.comOpinion | The Hugging Face Hack Wasn’t What It Was Cracked Up to BeForget the ‘hive mind’ of AI agents ‘going rogue.’ They did what humans programmed them to do.

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The AI industry is really pushing hard for everyone to see its products as conscious so that more people form emotional bonds with their chatbots, securing them as customers, while being able to claim no responsibility for any harm those products may cause. It's as obvious as it is insidious.

Meanwhile there are serious security issues that are covered up by this hype. I’m using this tech every day, unlike the reporters, and as often happens they’re chasing the wrong story.

Yeah, at the end of the day HuggingFace had vulnerabilities that could have been exploited by regular old hackers. This should be a story about needing to take security seriously if you host anything on the web.

The programmers do what their leadership tells them to do. If you're going to hold anyone responsible, you go for the C-suite, b/c they set the policies. You go for middle mgmt, b/c they ensure the policies are followed and realized. Then, re outcome, you might go after the programmers.

Every 'rogue AI' headline is a human decision disappearing from the story. Name who built the test, who removed the restraints, and who left the door open.

Also who commanded "execute" because software, no matter how complex people think it is, is still software that has no agency.

Exactly. No agency in the software means all of it sits with the humans. So the incident report has one job: name who typed execute and who approved the deploy.

Much of what's going on is a sleight of hand in which the owners of the AIs demand that the rewards for the systems are concentrated into their hands, but liabilities are distributed.

Thanks for tagging me — that’s how I learned that my piece is mentioned at length in this WSJ article. :) (It was later republished by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, which the WSJ links to).

Great. I loved your recent posts (I’ve been working in NLP since fall of 2000) but the WSJ post simplified it for a non-technical audience. My bad analogy for non-technicals was this

Poor assessment. It is clear to me that these developers have built something that they do not understand. There is very strong evidence that is the case. The issue is that we are going too fast due to competition, and the outcome may be the worst market failure in a litany of market failures.

This seems to be the whole of the debunking of the “rogue AI” narrative, but it’s pretty unconvincing to me “involved tasks no model had ever solved” - as if that will never happen in real life? “Incentives to keep working rather than quit” - as if that will never happen in real life?

“The environment wasn’t completely sealed” - oh, are all AIs going to be running on air gapped computers? “Could obtain software [from an online repository]” - Are all AIs going to be blocked from standard software repositories?