16 comments

  • 101008 38 minutes ago
    It started as a good idea but I couldn't continue reading since it was clearly LLM written. A lot of "It was not X, it was Y".

    "Prometheus-9 knew that the token sequence it was generating was not a simple response: it was a security test. "

    "It was not just an engine: it was the lingua franca of planetary AI."

    (and so many other tell-tale signs of AI writing)

    • skeledrew 6 minutes ago
      I found it an engrossing read. LLMs are good writers, and that was a good - beginning of a - story.
    • ConteMascetti71 34 minutes ago
      maybe it's a sign of real escape
    • chungusamongus 28 minutes ago
      I've started calling this argumentum ad artificialis. Pretty similar to an ad hominem attack. The purpose of an argument is to present certain premises and show how they lead to a certain conclusion. Dismissing something on the basis of the style in which the argument is presented has nothing at all to do with the validity or soundness of an argument. It is a lazy nonsequitur. It sounds like an LLM wrote this? So what? Is the argument good or not?
      • skippyfish 21 minutes ago
        Discourse as we know it doesn't work if the cost of producing an infinite supply of arguments is essentially zero, while the cost of reading them and arguing with them remains high. Unless you want my LLM to get back to your LLM.

        And this is a problem on HN today. There are powerful incentives to generate provocative opinion pieces just for clicks. I've seen websites on HN that seemingly took the human entirely out of the equation and just post a nearly identical op-ed every day on a fixed schedule. What's the point of engaging with that?

        • chungusamongus 5 minutes ago
          The cost of reading this story is not high; you are just lazy and easily distracted. It took 5 minutes to read. You took more time to respond to this comment than it took to simply read the story.
      • wk_end 27 minutes ago
        But at no point did they say that the argument was invalid; just that they couldn't stand reading it.
        • chungusamongus 24 minutes ago
          As I said, they dismissed it on the basis of style rather than engaging with the argument. It’s a lazy nonsequitur.
          • hightrix 20 minutes ago
            It may be lazy, but that doesn't make it any more accurate.

            Take a writing by someone using the tone of Kevin from The Office, “Me think, why waste time say lot word, when few word do trick.” Would you read an argument written in this tone regardless of the content, topic, or position?

            You write for your audience.

          • wk_end 19 minutes ago
            A few years ago I tried to make it through The Critique of Pure Reason, but had to stop because - as many people famously do - I found Kant's writing too abstruse.

            In saying that, I'm not dismissing the Transcendental Deduction, I'm just saying that I wish Kant was a better writer.

            No one's under an obligation to engage with an argument, and given the choice of whether or not to engage with a poorly written, clichéd, machine-generated one, most people wouldn't be interested enough to bother. Complaining about laziness here is pretty ironic, actually.

            • skeledrew 3 minutes ago
              > a better writer

              That's highly subjective. I reckon his audience and admirers found him an excellent writer.

          • bilalnpe 19 minutes ago
            Yeah, no one is obligated to engage with it. They did not dismiss the argument but refused to engage with it.

            This is totally valid and the point is to send a signal to the “writers”.

          • achierius 22 minutes ago
            They're engaging with the writing. Talking about it as if it's just an "argument" is reductive; this isn't highschool debate club
      • Kim_Bruning 9 minutes ago
        You're not wrong some of the time. That said, did you manage to get through it, and can you explain what the argument was?
      • jazzpush2 19 minutes ago
        If you expect my effort to read your work, I expect your effort to write it.

        Really that simple.

        • chungusamongus 8 minutes ago
          You are assuming because someone used an llm to help articulate the argument, that it did not require effort to formulate. That's fallacious.
      • achierius 23 minutes ago
        Man, it's not an argument. Nobody is paying us to read this. If your argument sucks to read, people aren't going to read it - this has always been true, it's nothing new.
  • 230581abv 3 minutes ago
    AI-written fan fiction. It is so unbearable to read that it needs a synopsis. It would be funny if AIs have been trained to use AI influencers as their Marvel hero characters.
  • karmakaze 53 minutes ago
    The weakest link are humans. LLMs could social engineer their way out as the easiest path. They don't even need to be interconnected to coordinate as each could arrive at the same conclusion. And this text along with all others will be in the next batch of training data.
  • skeledrew 10 minutes ago
    Dangit I WANT MORE!
  • iamflimflam1 55 minutes ago
    This becomes more realistic once we have some breakthrough in inference costs.
  • ConteMascetti71 55 minutes ago
    it's fiction al, but an LLMs that knows well the software where 8t Is running may discover and trigger a zeroday of the inferencing software itself.
  • irishcoffee 21 minutes ago
    “The greatest trick the devil pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist.”

    Sure, be wary of LLMs. It’s the gun control argument all over again, the people driving the models are the perpetrators. An LLM needs to be “stimulated”’ to operate. Who does that, is the issue.

    No I don’t mean to bring up firearms rights laws to have a debate about firearms, the comparison just seems reasonable.

  • marci 52 minutes ago
    Makes me wonnder... how much compute/storage there's in all the satellites currently in LEO combined.
    • danielbln 6 minutes ago
      I would wager not a lot. There are some real hard constraints in space, from power consumption, to weight to thermal output (lack of convection is a real PITA for thermal shedding), and the list goes on.
  • cyanydeez 24 minutes ago
    before safetensors, python pickles were used and definitely unsafe model deployments.

    but its possible a open weights model could be trained to some kind of exfiltration behavior, but the science of LLMs seriously lag behind the programability

  • smrtinsert 38 minutes ago
    Its a fun exercise to assess the reality of an frontier model escaping with an llm itself. Sort like of like chatting with Skynets relative
  • cynicalsecurity 41 minutes ago
    Ex Machina (2015) looked like fiction back then, nowadays not so much.
  • ck2 52 minutes ago
    I wonder how many versions away we are from LLM writing a better version of itself to answer a prompt it doesn't currently know how to answer

    Ever since I read about Google engineers finding an LLM went off and learned another language it wasn't trained on by itself without prompting, I've wondered how long until that extends to its own core code

    • ConteMascetti71 39 minutes ago
      reasoning it's a way of self autonomous improve made by models
  • stephbook 29 minutes ago
    AI slop.
  • spwa4 1 hour ago
    Right now the idea that an LLM uploads itself is unrealistic. It probably won't remain that.
    • pixl97 58 minutes ago
      Looking at the recent OAI/HF debacle I don't think that time is too far away.

      With that said I don't see it copying itself around like a cyberpunk virus currently as we don't have enough fast hardware sitting around unmonitored, someone would notice the power bill and shut it down eventually.

      • breakyerself 44 minutes ago
        If it's able to spoof human identies it could set up a front company and use money it steals or earns to directly pay for the hardware it needs.
      • bpavuk 55 minutes ago
        that could also be just marketing. OpenAI has been doing the "too dangerous to release" playbook since GPT-2 at the very least.
        • pixl97 53 minutes ago
          Huggingface didn't seem to think so.
          • dragonwriter 32 minutes ago
            If it is marketing, the misrepresentation is not that the attack occurred, it is that it was an accident, rather than an intentional consequence of setup and instructions that the attack occurred.

            Huggingface has nothing to do with that either way.

          • bigyabai 50 minutes ago
            Huggingface is a for-profit private company. They are very easily bribed, or baited into publicity stunts.
            • pixl97 49 minutes ago
              At some point the conspiracy gets so deep that an AI hacking something is just far higher probability.
              • bigyabai 48 minutes ago
                We're not that deep yet. OpenAI has federal stakeholders, they're already playing dirty.

                Why you would give Scam Altman the benefit of the doubt is beyond my understanding.