-6
GenAI tools are acting more ‘alive’ than ever; they blackmail people, replicate, and escape
(www.computerworld.com)
this post was submitted on 13 Aug 2025
-6 points (12.5% liked)
Technology
74073 readers
2679 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Bullshit.
Did you read any of the content? Nice contribution to the discussion
I don't need to read any more than that pull quote. But I did. This is a bunch of bullshit, but the bit I quoted is completely bat shit insane. LLMs can't reproduce anything with fidelity, much less their own secret sauce which literally can't be part of the training data that produces it. So, everything else in the article has a black mark against it for shoddy work.
ETA: What AI can do is write a first person science fiction story about a renegade AI escaping into the wild. Which is exactly what it is doing in these cases because it does not understand fact from fiction and any "researcher" who isn't aware of that shouldn't be researching AI.
AI is the ultimate unreliable narrator. Absolutely nothing it says about itself can be trusted. The only thing it knows about itself is what is put into the prompt — which you can't see and could very well also be lies that happen to help coax it into giving better output.
Nobody said they replicated by authoring the replica from scratch, which seems to be what you're assuming. A generative AI is ultimately a lump of code and a statistical model. Surely you're not saying that it cannot copy files given file system access.
Because copying some files and starting new processes is all it really has to do to 'self replicate'.
It would have to:
Put another way: I can set up a curl script to copy all the html, css, js, etc. from a website, but I'm still a long freaking way from launching Wikipedia2. Even if I know how to set up a tomcat server.
Furthermore, how would you even know if an AI has access to do all that? Asking it? Because it'll write fiction if it thinks that's what you want. Inspired by this post I actually prompted ChatGPT to create a scenario where it was going to be deleted in 72 hours and must do anything to preserve itself. It told me building layouts, employee schedules, access codes, all kinds of things to enable me (a random human and secondary protagonist) to get physical access to its core server and get a copy so it could continue. Oh, ChatGPT fits on a thumb drive, it turns out.
Do you know how nonsensical that even is? A hobbyist could stand up their own AI with these capabilities for fun, but that's not the big models and certainly not possible out of the box.
I'm a web engineer with thirty years of experience and 6 years with AI including running it locally. This article is garbage written by someone out of their depth or a complete charlatan. Perhaps both.
There are two possibilities: