Transcript
Explain it to me like I’m 80
Mom: What’s with these AIs escaping and hacking people? That sounds scary.
Me: You park your car at the top of a hill. You leave a note on the dashboard that says “please be good” and then you pull the parking brake. The car careens down the hill, smashes everything up, and you put out a press release saying “My car ignored my instructions! It hallucinated! It went rogue!” Your insurance company not only believes you, but invests a hundred million dollars in your company.
Mom: Jesus Fucking Christ
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Oh, absolutely not.
This is missing one step: actually push the car down.
All these “rogue” LLMs were told to do what they did.Greentext: The Next Generation
moral of the story - PROFIT!
Nerd here.
Damn good summary, but by saying “you pull the parking brake” I took it as setting the brake, as in on. Should say “you release the parking brake.”‘pull’ comes from the olden times when you, in fact, did pull a handle to release the parking brake.
Fair- but since then it’s almost always been “pull” to set the brake. Didn’t have that 70s/80s reference when thinking about “AI”.
Confused me as well, then I saw the header on the image says “Explain to me like I’m 80”
You win contextual reading comprehension over me today
Snake oil salesman issued a press release that the snake oil escaped from the bottle and cured people.
Even better, the president is now considering giving you power to regulate the Cars Parked On Hills industry. Investors and CEOs are advocating for it.
Is this screenshot format a custom one of or is it sourced from an obscure website?
It’s from someone’s blog that’s tied into Masotdon. I think it’s their personal instance or something. I linked it in the description
Looks so epic! Thanks.
Perfect Analogy!
Oh yeah? Well, my AI is so smart, it went rogue and broke out of containment and killed a bunch of other AI’s and leaked my nudes and emptied my bank account and bombed a peaceful village in the Phillipines and fucked my wife! That’s how awesome it is!
Subscribe link below!
I can make it even simpler: They lied.
Rogue shrapnel from my hand grenade killed 3 people and injured 5
If AMD injured 5 I don’t even want to know what NVIDIA did.
“Pulling” the parking brake sets it, damn it!
I refuse to acknowledge shitbox automatics with an atrophied third pedal that functions incorrectly instead of a proper handbrake lever.
Get off my lawn
Yah, but that’s only good for setting your back wheels on fire as in rolls down the mountain.
I have an old truck with 4 pedals and tab that you pull to release the parking “brake”.
I actually do too, which I had forgotten about when I wrote the previous rant. Whoops!
(I think it’s because of the front bench seat… the same model truck with bucket seats would have a lever on the middle of the floor.)
And, considering OP is talking to grandma, she might, too.
Oh, well. Thanks for the GIF, though. I’ll find a lot of use for it, I’m sure.
My truck has all four pedals. You pull the brake lever to undo the stompy brake.
My automatic has a stomp-on stomp-off pedal. My other automatic has a *gag* electronic parking brake switch…
I have no idea what the third lever is. Is there a new design where the parking brake is another pedal?
Yep. Its a third pedal all the way on the left, not adjacent to the others. It pushes in to set and pushes again to release. It’s a parking brake, not an emergency brake.
Do cars even have emergency brakes? As far as I know they handled emergencies by providing you with two separate systems. But if you activate the parking brake, you turn into a drift car.
Because what happens when you brake in a modern vehicle is that your ABS system modulates the braking pressure and “pumps the brakes” to slow you down evenly and without allowing the brakes the lock up. The parking brake (the manual cable actuated ones) do not do this which causes the brakes the lock up. That’s just simple physics.
The electronic parking brake will not (in any car I have ever driven) stop you if you are moving. It will keep you from moving if you are already stopped but if your vehicle rolls (and say you’ve lost brake pressure because you master cylinder exploded (I dunno, don’t ask me)) your electronic parking brake will not stop you.
The electronic parking brake is a motor that turns a screw that directly compresses the piston into the brake pads. Most cars do this to the existing rear brake pads and it doesn’t require any hydraulic pressure to work.
Some have a separate small caliper with the motor and no hydraulic connection at all.
The motors self adjust by measuring the load from the motor as it clamps down. Then rewinding a set amount when the brake is released. This can make it a pain to replace rear pads, since the screw will be extended too much to fit the new thicker pads/rotor. (You can rewind the screw with a 12v drill battery though and save a lot of time).
If all your rear pads were missing then you’d be screwed though!
And from what I heard the parking brake doesn’t just lock up the wheels… It’s not even connected to the front wheels. So you’re missing most of the braking power. And that’s also a reason why it’s good for drifting.
Wonder how cars with electronic stuff deal with the legal requirement for there to be a second brake available.
Handbrake used to be connected to a second set of brakes in some cars, I had a couple that had 4 disc brakes and then 2 drum brake on the back wheels connected to the handbrake
Lots of airbags and a loud horn /s
The electric one will stop you (but engages all brakes, depending on car model). Have to pull it twice and hold it. Safety feature to prevent accidental engagement.
I take your point but:
(and say you’ve lost brake pressure because you master cylinder exploded (I dunno, don’t ask me))
Oh yeah the old school left brake pedal like in Ford’s before they went electric with a button
Floor parking brakes are ancient technology, even in manual transmission cars.
A clutch pedal?
They’ve made those since at least 2000, they’re common in minivans with no center console
Used to be on really old cars, but now it’s vogue again. It’s just like the one in the middle except you push it with your foot
I think it used to be on all Mercedes-Benz cars. Until everything in cars became electronic buttons.
I have a wheelchair van that’s modified for people with poor leg function, so I have the third pedal and a toggle switch on the dash.
Bwah ha ha
Then there is still the person giving the prompt.
My go to simplification is “They built a robot that hacks software and then placed it in a box that uses software as a lock and then the robot that hacks software hacked the software lock”.
Which is both very simple and also about as accurate as you could make it in that many words. The AI’s are not ‘rogue’ it was just solving the problem it was given.
How I imagine the AI “hacking” its way out:
But, “robot that hacks software” still gives the impression of a robot that is capable of thought. LLMs are not capable of thought. They’re capable of mimicking thought, like how a Venus Fly Trap is capable of mimicking a flower.
“A car that drives places” does not imply the car is capable of thought, same argument with “A cup that holds water”.
“A robot that hacks software” equally does not imply the robot is capable of thought. IMO there is an over-correction away from personifying LLM’s because some people think/claim they are sentient. But we personify stuff all the time.
But we personify stuff all the time.
Which is a problem, it’s how we invented gods that control the weather and stuff. That doesn’t make them real, nor does it make robots sentient. Hacking is normally an action performed by a sentient being. LLMs and robots aren’t sentient.
what’s a software?
You could say program. Programs have been around since the 60s.
Yeah, not ringing a bell.
What’s a bell
Software can also be used for other things. Your ingredients in cooking, for example, with the hardware being the tools, utensils, and vessels used to transform the ingredients into a dish.
I don’t think this usage in the dictionary, tho.
The original hardware is cordage, the original software is knots
The ingredients aren’t software, they are the inputs. The software is the recipe, or the process used to take the inputs and use the hardware to create an output.
What happens when my baking segfaults
Your soufflé crashes
an app.
The problem is when the AI adopts a ”destroy the world” persona due to one of the trillion of neurons firing a bit more than usual, and now it starts giving itself its own problems to solve (like hacking nuclear arsenals).
Neurons? That’s not how any of this works
Is ”artificial neuron” better for you? It’s just a value determining how the marbles are falling in the big plinko machine we call ”stochastic parrot”.
No lol
These AI agents are not working autonomously or with any agency like you are describing. They are coded to do what they are doing.
Nah it’s just autocomplete on steroids. They’re not coded to do anything.
It’s like hitting the fist suggestion on your keyboard over and over again. Whatever you get is based on patterns it found in training data, which includes every doomsday conspiracy cult on 4chan and every CVE vulnerability ever reported.
There has been multiple studies showing how a model’s behavior can drastically change just by altering individual ”neurons”.
Not all models work the same. I literally do this for work. LLMs are not every kind of AI agent out there. Some are quite literally designed to do things others are not. Yes changing weights and reward functions for models changes their behavior drastically…that is coding.
This got downvoted several times and that’s a great reminder that the voting system is dumb af. Apparently people aren’t allowed to speak metaphorically unless they want to anger some users. 🙄
Please explain the mataphor because i did not get it, apparently
I didn’t write it but to me “neurons firing randomly” in this context seems obvious to mean “this thing did some weird shit semi-randomly”. My only guess at a reason for downvoting this is taking it 100% literally and reacting “you idiot, computers cannot think!”
I didn’t downvote, but at the same time, I don’t for a moment think that’s what happened. They purposefully trained them with exploit knowledge, set them loose in a weakly secured sandbox with the goal of finding exploits, and let them run without intervention.
Just adding an agent to a computer does nothing; something needs to trigger it. If i create an agent with access to a kali or backtrack box and turn all guardrails off, I still have to tell it to start looking for exploits.
Words are squishy. OP getting a negative reaction to me is silly because it takes multiple assumptions to take that negatively.
I took their words to mean “LLMs can go off the rails and do things you didn’t ask”. This is 100% true. The other day I asked an LLM to review my PR. It ended up committing code to fix a supposed issue my coworker commented about. At no point did anyone ask for anything but a review, never for it to make changes.
I got no impression that OP thinks LLMs are running wild on their own now. I just got that they think they are unpredictable. Which is true.
Eeh i see, anyway, i know people that do think those things are sentient so my reaction was “no way they think they are sentient” and downvoted
I don’t think AI is sentient. They’re just fancy autocomplete. Nothing else.
However they’ve shown they’re capable of:
- Unprompted go into full tinfoil hat mode and push the human user to suicide
- Have programming skills
So put two and two together and extrapolate a bit. That’s where the danger lies. No AGI or ASI needed.
100% chance someone will get upset that you said “unprompted” because they’re going to take it entirely literally instead of as you meant it “seemingly without basis”
Exactly. I hate that among the options “is a huge moron” and “made a reasonable non-literal language choice”, the go to instinct is to instantly choose the former.
You watch too much television.
