There are plenty of underlying problems to discuss. Adam Conover mentions chatbots encouraging suicide and murder. Guess who doesn’t: the “experts and expert leaders.” The ones who are happy to repeat the rhetoric that is either untrue, highly theoretical, or conveniently unproven.
I think there is something more interesting going on in the Jacob Coxon story because it’s [the] phrase “everyone at anthropic believes that AI is an existential risk”… Every organization has to instill some kind of beliefs among its members in order to do the work it does, right? Everybody at Goldman Sachs believes the free market is great, capitalism is the best system, and that they are the wealth creators who deserve big bonuses. Everyone in the Mormon church believes they should all tithe 10% of their income, and that they each get a special planet when they die. And everyone who worked at Philip Morris in the 80s believed that cigarettes tasted great and did not cause any of that nasty cancer. There’s Upton Sinclair quote, “It’s difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” Well, the opposite is also true. It’s guaranteed that someone will believe something if their salary depends on them believing it.
Now, let’s just grant that all the people in these organizations definitely know things about finance and Mormonism and cigarettes and AI that you might not know because they are insiders and you are not. They have access to information and experiences that you do not have. And that might even make it a little bit difficult for you to win an argument with them. But arguing with their belief – trying to figure out whether or not its truth value is true or false – is not the only way to take a skeptical attitude towards it. We can also ask, what work is the belief doing for them. What does the thing that they believe allow the organization they’re a part of to do that it wouldn’t be able to do if the people in the organization didn’t believe that thing?
And this started to become clearer to me when I started listening to the actual claims that Jacob Coxin was making because a lot of them don’t really add up.
Serving and protecting Big Oil IP?
There’s a new Chris Pratt movie about that, which paints it in a positive light for some reason.
Sounds like Twitter X, or what Elon Musk wanted it to be! Never mind messaging plus payment, it was supposed to be the only app you had on your phone.
Really, we should have heeded his warnings.
I don’t presume Anthropic is designing anything to be ethical. First, the chatbot is unpredictable by design. Randomness is built in. Second, if they didn’t intend for bad things to happen, why didn’t an employee babysit it?
As the article said you can replace rogue agents with unpredictable computer programs if you really want, I don’t see the necessity.
Speaking of goalpost shifts: “Rogue agent” is the clickbait title across multiple articles. Remember you said nobody was misrepresenting the AIs. The still-inaccurate clarification (the unsupervised chatbot functioned exactly as it was designed to function, and the script running it allowed it to execute exactly the commands Anthropic wanted) doesn’t help the article the clarification is from. It certainly doesn’t absolve every other author.
the first article doesn’t say anything not factual
The title alone is not factual. AI did not go rogue. It behaved exactly as designed.
Nobody is claiming any of the things this article is fighting against
Three counterexamples:
I realize we are in a bit of a bubble here, but this is the framing in the wider world
there were unintended negative consequences
Well…
“Aggressive” is how I understand the language of someone who attacks “natural intelligence” and promises to “very loudly ignore” the people he deems "social warrior"s and “religious” for not agreeing with his opinions, telling anyone who disagrees with him to “look in the mirror”.
People trusted Linux to be better than Microsoft Windows, and saw the effect of a company with tons of money and first-class AI access exponentially worsening their product.
It has been disappointing to see people like Linus Torvalds turn aggressive against people who do not agree with his ideology, and I find it distasteful for you to use reductive attacks against strawmen as well.
Considering Graphene’s entire reputation is staked on extremely precise definitions of security, this is a little concerning.
They’re the “best” (read: most secure) mobile operating system. If the best degrades, I don’t foresee some Graphene alternative stepping up very quickly (see also: cross-platform alternatives to Google-made Chromium and Google-funded Gecko)
“Fascism in your technology is inevitable”
I’ve heard similar but am not sure. You’d be better by confirming with offline version of the available models.
I believe I did this with DeepSeek’s distillation of Qwen, and it basically printed out state propaganda when I asked it about Tianmen Square… But that meant Qwen (from China’s Alibaba) was intentionally censored, not Deepseek itself. I can’t afford the hardware to test their model, especially not now.
while Anthropic was fast to call the cops on a frustrated Claude user, the Standard also reported a key detail: Anthropic refused to show police the actual messages, citing Anthropic’s internal policy. In short, Anthropic reported a user for in-platform speech, and then refused to provide police with evidence of actual wrongdoing.
Anthropic’s apparent game plan:
FYI: You are arguing with what the CSAM ad says. That’s what the article is quoting here.
I never had a problem with older TVs’ boot times. In fact, I remember them being faster, the farther back I go…
And it’ll tell me this directly, rather than passing that data to my insurance company to deny my claims, and telling banks to deny my long term loans because I have a known expiration date, right?
If an individual got caught doing and saying a fraction of what Microsoft did and said, they’d by in jail for a long time. But apparently corporations can say whatever they’d like, out of the assumption that it’ll make investors happy.