alt Hacker News> There's nothing rogue, just being sloppy
What's the difference, when you ignore anthropomorphic considerations about what the AI was "thinking" as it did the things?
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nvme0n1p1 • today at 7:15 PM
It's a computer program. "Rogue" implies autonomous intent, and shifts accountability away from the people using tools irresponsibly.
Imagine you pipe /dev/random to your terminal, and it spits out the word "fuck". Should we then write a headline saying "Rogue random number generator curses at tenured professor"?
Or you step out of your car while it's in gear, and it crashes into your house. "Rogue vehicle injures its owner's child"?
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Computers have been anthropomorphized for a very long time. AI is also a kind of anthropomorphism for the use of the word "intelligence". If we wanted to move away from that, perhaps we could say something like "maliciously developed statistical language model", or "malicious statistical language model" to replace rogue. In this case it was merely a "statistical language model", but if the author sees a need to append an adjective, then I think sloppy is more accurate than rogue.