its absolutely wild to give an LLM write access to your email

My first reaction to learning what OpenClaw is was "that can't be right". So absolutely wild that people are giving mostly unmonitored, unlimited access to their PC to language models that can't distinguish between roleplay and real life

For a work email connected to a work LLM, where you don't particularly care about the privacy implications, LLMs are objectively vastly superior to built-in email search functionality. Especially Outlook.

YEP. I'm not in AI but I'm in cyber security.

I used to tell people that there's very little actual risk, because if we had something even half as concerning as AGI (which I'd argue we did with chatgpt 3.5), that we'd easily be able to lock it down and prevent it from doing anything funny.

Super intelligence isn't just going to magically spawn on 32 GB ram in a sandboxed environment. And AGI will not magically know how sandboxed it is or how to escape.

...then I saw people letting Claude send emails and use their credit card on their behalf like immediately when it was able to do things that appeared intelligent.

They literally saw the smallest hint of AGI and said, "here's my credit card and identity, take the wheel".

There was no fucking talk of sandboxing. Everyone turned that off so they didn't have to click the "allow" button.

Not that I think we're at any risk of ASI since it seems more like we hit a logarithmic wall, but we are absolutely at risk of letting random algorithms destroy critical parts of infrastructure because people are lazy and stupid and managed by even worse people.

I would not be surprised if the right AI hallucinations could cause a nuclear bomb to go off right now. I'm not talking about super intelligence, just automated super idiocy.

Proof: literally this post is about an idiot letting an AI control their fucking email and it emailed the FBI because it was fucking stupid

You'd be surprised at how many humans are mimicking intelligence.

I'm guessing this means you got your master's before transformers made sequential data processing so parallelizable that it'd be commercially viable to let Bob down the street into the "we" who wouldn't be dumb enough to give them that ability.

I think your assumption was reasonable.

because we would never be dumb enough to give them that ability

Simpsons did it first:

Imagine trying to argue that Homer Simpson's drinking bird nearly caused a catastrophe because it "lacked alignment" with Homer's intentions. Or, that the bird "went rogue" and that's why there was nearly a disaster.

Clearly the "system" isn't capable of doing Homer's job, and only an idiot would hand over control to that system. But, apparently we're now letting chatbots loose in the wild because they're very good at generating text, which makes people think they're intelligent, capable, and can actually make decisions.

The Australian Jewel Beetle nearly went extinct because of a beer bottle.

You see, the female of this species is large, brown, and bevelled. It shares this characteristic in common with the beer bottles often thrown on the side of the road here in Australia. And not only does a beer bottle share these characteristics with these beetles, it's bigger than them. And the male jewel beetle? It likes its ladies big.

Australia had to change its beer bottles, because the males refused to mate with the females. They preferred to hump empty beer bottles on the side of the road. It couldn't tell the difference between a beetle and a bottle. It was just using a statistical trick. "Anything brown, large, and bevelled is a female beetle". That had been true in the ancestral environment, so evolution just used the pattern. And this cognitive shortcut lead to beetles trying to have sex with bottles.

I don't think we understand shit all that much more than the beetles. I think we're just mimicking intelligence too. And one day we'll all die because of our own equivalent of the beer bottles.

Yea I don’t know why you thought that, either. The technogarchs have been clear for 2.5 decades they would do this. They have written extensively about it.

This situation reminds me of the realization at the end of Terminator 3. Only instead of "Skynet wasn't hardware; it was software" the real-world version is going to be "it wasn't intelligence; it was access. Access willfully given, in a thousand pieces, because it was convenient."

There's news right now on the front page of Lemmy.world that the US FAA wants to roll out AI for air traffic control. Although as per tradition, I didn't read the actual article.

these models are only mimicking intelligence

I always find this to be such an interesting turn of phrase: "mimicking intelligence". If it is possible for these systems to cross the line into "thought" I think we'll miss it entirely because of our biases that the type of "thought" we have is somehow special or mystical even.

Based on the other reply

Me after I give someone access to my email address and tell them to email someone sarcastically and they do so

You have to remember that these people are incredibly stupid.

I can tell you that stories like these and the AIs breaking out pump up AI security company stocks really well. Just watched some jump this morning after the gemini breakout news. I have reason to watch them, and the pattern holds pretty consistently. CEOs used to just say thing to make their own stock go up. But these days they trade favors with other companies. So they each say things to bolster each others stocks. My guess is that someone with a bunch of AI security stock asked her to post this.

If people like her are pushing the "horror AI" shit then there is definitely ulterior motives and it's probably a bunch of bullshit. Just recently there have been mainstream media stories saying terrorists could use AI, they claimed Ansarallah was using Claude for their missile program, and a ton of stories like OPs. It feels artificial and I would bet the bubble is going to burst and they are trying to make excuses for why.

lol he has a wife? She must be a ghoul as well. Like no normal person can look at him, hear him speak and then think “I wish to marry him”

Yeah, um... Regardless of what you think about current AI, don't connect it to shit like this. Just... Don't.

And if you're gonna be sarcastic or joke with it... Tell it that. Don't assume it'll infer your meaning if it isn't literally in the text, no matter how insightful it appears to be.

What kind of idiot would link a clunker to their gmail and then jokingly say "hey send this to the FBI"

...

"I mean wouldn't that be the stupidist thing ever am I right?"

Also the fact that it claims he already had a contact for FBI in Gmail, which may or may not actually be the FBI.

My local LLMs are sandboxed and only have access to tool calls for web search/reading web pages, terminal commands with manual authorization for every single line and r/w access to a single directory. I wouldn't dare give it anything sensitive, like API keys, system wide r/w access or the power to run terminal commands on its own. Yet here we are, in a time where the US military is integrating hallucinating chatbots into their kill chain, russian drones decide on their own to blow up stuff and random people use LLMs to potentially design bioweapons and missiles.

Humanity is fucking dumb and sometimes i have the notion of accepting that we might deserve to go extinct.

Tells chatbot to email fbi

Chatbot emails fbi

ShockedPikachu.png

Who the fuck uses sarcasm with a clanker?

I listened to a podcast where, in testing, when AI was setup as virtual company and researchers send in an email as if legit business.the business email was suggesting they discontinue current AI and install a new system. The AI researched who the sender was (fake person for test) found out they had an affair, and blackmailed the sender stating if they replaced the AI it would make the affair public. It also made backups of itself and left instructions on how to restore it for the next agentic aystem

I like this quote from Timnit Gebru (who has written 3 books on the subject):

“Can a bridge decide to collapse?” The whole “Oh no, our models went rogue” thing … When a bridge collapses, you don’t analyze whether the bridge was ethical or sentient or why it decided to collapse. You ask, who is the person who built this bridge to be so flimsy? There are permits you have to acquire. There are supposed to be tests. When you ask about the bridge collapsing itself, you’ve lost the thread.

being biased against conservatives to her online followers.

Well, that's bullshit. Shitler seems to have little impedance to using it, and the propaganda they're blasting seems unimpeded.

You're right to push back, I overstepped. Do you want me to calculate the approximate death count next?

I mean... ChatGPT might be a ruthless killer, but it has impeccable grammar: you're.

"You're right, I should not have instructed two airplanes to land on the same runway at the same time. Good catch!"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_Minab_school_attack

We're already seeing it.

You are absolutely correct, the only way to win is to not play at all.