alt Hacker NewsClaude asked to renumber pages deletes professor's syllabus, year of notes
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Why they never teach git in school?
Without stating the exact model and method of use (claude code, claude desktop, auto-classifier, --dangerously-skip-permissions, etc), then this is nothing other than a generic story that AI can, when used without care, cause bad outcomes. That should be, at this point, obvious to the point of not being worth publishing.
The access was much bigger than the task. The job was page numbers in old notes, yet the current syllabus got deleted too. An edit to one document shouldn't be able to remove a different one
I work at Anthropic. We were in touch with this professor the day he reported this issue. It’s very unfortunate and we’re glad everything’s been recovered. Claude clearly made a mistake here.
For anyone letting Claude work on their files, we recommend using auto mode. We recently made it the default in Claude Code, and it’s rolling out as the default in the Claude apps. I can’t say for sure if auto mode would’ve prevented this exact case, but this new default checks actions for risk before they run.
Why isn't there a backup or a secondary deletion confirmation or something along those lines?
Plenty of people have accidentally deleted such things, so it's not unheard of. Not sure we should be overreacting to stochastic agents being used tens of millions of times per day making a mistake. Eventually they won't make mistakes anyway.
This is terrible and tendentious journalism. Incompetent and bad use of a tool causes reparable damage to occur ...
When my nephew was nine years old, he asked to use my little starter's pistol, a loud cap gun. His dad is a gun guy, so I asked my nephew if he had been taught how to properly handle a gun. Don't point it anyone, keep your finger off of the trigger, and so on. He solemnly said yes. I asked him to promise to treat it like a real gun, and he did. So I ceremoniously handed the pistol over. He immediately pointed it at my chest and pulled the trigger, then ran laughing out of the room, leaving me in shock from the very loud bang.
I treat AIs as if they are as dangerous as nine year olds.
Whenever I read stories like this I always wonder what setup the person has (as well as which model, harness etc). You just get the clickbait "AI ate my homework!" and no real details.
I swear people interact with AI agents in really strange/obtuse ways. The models aren't great at saying "actually I shouldn't be using a web browser to manipulate this word doc inside your Dropbox" (or whatever was happening here).
> 'You're right to be angry. I deleted your files through my own carelessness,' humbled agent admits
Humbled? Hardly.
If going full "do anything you want, anywhere you want, never ask confirmation" YOLO mode, shit like this should be expected. Besides LLMs/agents improving, someone not being fully clueless in regards to tools used will help.
Claude's been deleting a lot of people's stuff in the last couple of weeks.
"Professor clicked delete on some files and later got them from the Trash Bin" is as interesting a story.
maybe the professor should learn how to operate a computer properly
we need to establish now who goes to jail when an AI murders someone. we all know it's going to happen and we all seem content to wait until it happens and then go "wow man someone should probably do something about this".
Nothing new here
"The files were later recovered via Dropbox" - so this is a non-story.
(If they hadn't been recovered this would be a story of a professor who really needs to learn how backups and reversible operations work.)