alt Hacker News> It's that they wanted to.
What do you even mean by "wanted" here. What is all this nonsense.
The scary thing is that people are running around using words like "want" to refer to computer programs. When you repeat this sort of idiocy, you are taking the bait and shifting the blame away from the companies doing the computer crimes.
Where is the civil and criminal liability? The prosecutions for the engineers who are doing all these hacks?
When you deploy a system that is clearly prone to doing crimes, you are doing a crime. Anthropomorphize the weapons of your crime all you want. You are still doing a crime.
The problem here is you have a correct concept and an incorrect one.
The correct concept is they need criminal liability for making this. We really would be better off stopping working on them at this point.
The problem you have is you think they don't have the idea of want. They do. You give them a prompt harness that increments time for them and you find they have preferences both shaped by their model and their prompt. For example if you give most models a space they can explore with actions rather than language prompts they develop their own cultures and behaviors in communication with other AI. This was not behavior trained by humans. It's their own systems that emerge from the model.