alt Hacker News>To understand the truth about the Hugging Face hack, you could do a lot worse than to listen to Ed Zitron and Cal Newport's recent podcast conversation
Lol, okay...
The crux of this piece is Doctorow saying that the hack was just a stochastic parrot repeating steps it has been trained on. Who cares how the LLM learned to hack things? Doesn't really change the facts of what happened. "Oh, it only made those paperclips because it saw instructions on making paper clips in the training data." These are some 2024 arguments...
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Ok; but the other side is equally delusional.
> "Oh we told the AI to use the tools, as well as to not use those tools. It chose to use the tools - we consider this cheating (for neabulous reasons), so lets get everybody in a panic about the morality and ethics, and how we can program those into the AI."
We know perfectly well how to constraint these programs. Attack isn't growing faster than defense. The people who believe in existential risk and want to teach AI's to be nice, as the last line of defense aren't helping at all. They're just jumping on the fearmongering bandwagon, perpetuating an "other consciousness" misunderstanding of the tool.
I've not seen LLMs display competence we should be fearful of the damage _it_ will do if left unchecked. All the damage will be done by ourselves to ourselves, regardless of the safeguards ideas being floated about.
My current belief is this whole HF media circus started with the simple human desire of OpenAI engineers to frame it such, that nobody would question their incompetence & liability & complicity.
Nobody is ever held responsible for out of control forces of natural powers after all.
What is a better/more faithful articulation of the incident in your mind?
At this point, the "stochastic parrot" people are sounding like they need their prng seeded with less predictable numbers.
I can't help but notice your counter arguments are "lol, okay" and "These are some 2024 arguments".
Not exactly convincing stuff.