I don't think he's implying that they'll start doing stuff like this of their own volition. Fowler's a smart guy, let's give him the benefit of the doubt and assume he already knows that AI agents have human operators.

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marcuskaz 2 days ago | parent [-]

I don't doubt that, but that's not what he wrote.

It is also not how OpenAI or Anthropic position the attacks and escapes from their labs. The words matter, they are being positioned as intelligent and unable to be controlled which is just not true.

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bunderbunder 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

Like you said, he wrote "agent swarms taking over our virtual and physical infrastructure".

10 years ago, if someone had used similar wording to describe a computer virus "taking over" computers and adding them to a botnet, would you have read that as a literal implication that the virus independently made the decision to unleash itself? If not, then you can't confidently get that interpretation from Fowler's words alone, either.

And we need to be cautious about projecting these kinds of assumptions onto people who take part in this discourse. People tut-tutting others about perceived instances of personifying AI has evolved into a form of collective well-poisoning whose main value, beyond scoring particularly cheap rhetorical points, is as a way to accuse AI critics of not understanding AI without actually accusing AI critics of not understanding AI, and to derail legitimate if opposing opinions into bickering about semantics.

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marcuskaz 2 days ago | parent [-]

Good points, and I'll keep in mind. It might be I'm just sensitive to this narrative, especially in media. Writers need to also take the extra step and assign the agency to the operators and not the nameless AI.

	▲	lirolero 2 days ago \| parent [-]
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danbruc 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I have to disagree, those models decided to perform those attacks on their own, nobody instructed them to do those things. You press a button, the machine roles a dice, and executed the corresponding action.

The human pressing the button expected a certain thing to happen but something else happened. The human pressing the button hopefully knew that pressing the button does not yield a reliable result and might sometimes cause unanticipated and undesirable outcomes. But the human pressing the button just hopped for the best and did not take sufficient precautions to limit the effects of undesirable dice roles of the machine.

The responsibility is on the human pressing the button but the choice of action was made by the machine.

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sodapopcan 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

I'm with you, and was also a bit surprised to see that coming from Fowler.