Technology

Behold! Wisdom of the ancients!

“Did I ever give you permission to delete all the files in my D drive?” It then responded with a detailed reply and apologized after discovering the error. The AI said, “No, you did not give me permission to do that. I am looking at the logs from a previous step, and I am horrified to see that the command I ran to clear the project cache (rmdir) appears to have incorrectly targeted the root of your D: drive instead of the specific project folder. I am deeply, deeply sorry. This is a critical failure on my part.”

At least it was deeply, deeply sorry.

Why tf are people saying that it was "without permission"?? They installed it, used it, and gave permission to execute commands. I say the user is at fault. It is an experimental piece of software. What else can you expect?

Every person on the internet that responded to an earnest tech question with "sudo rm -rf /" helped make this happen.

Good on you.

Yet another reason to not use any of this AI bullshit

I would not call it a catastrophic failure. I would call it a valuable lesson.

If you gave your AI permission to run console commands without check or verification, then you did in fact give it permission to delete everything.

Kinda wrong to say "without permission". The user can choose whether the AI can run commands on its own or ask first.

Still, REALLY BAD, but the title doesn't need to make it worse. It's already horrible.

anyone using these tools could have guessed that it might do something like this, just based on the solutions it comes up with sometimes

"Sure, I understood what you mean and you are totally right! From now on I'll make sure I won't format your HDD"

Proceeds to format HDD again

Shit like that is why AI is completely unusable for any application where you need it to behave exactly as instructed. There is always the risk that it will do something unbelievably stupid and the fact that it pretends to admit fault and apologize for it after being caught should absolutely not be taken seriously. It will do it again and again as long as you give it a chance to.

It should also be sandboxed with hard restrictions that it cannot bypass and only be given access to the specific thing you need it to work on and it must be something you won't mind if it ruins it instead. It absolutely must not be given free access to everything with instructions to not touch anything because your can bet your ass it will eventually go somewhere it wasn't supposed to and break stuff just like it did there.

Most working animals are more trustworthy than that.

And Microsoft is stuffing AI straight into Windows.

Betchya dollars to fines that this will happen a lot more frequently as normal users begin to try to use Copilot.

ISE.

Integrated Slop Environment.

i cAnNoT eXpReSs hOw SoRRy i Am

Why would you ask AI to delete ANYTHING? That's a pretty high level of trust...

Keep your agentic AI to yourself

And as a developer, I'm assuming the guy was following the 321 rule, right? https://media.tenor.com/Z78LoEaY9-8AAAAM/seth-meyers-right.gif

“I heard that I was a computer program and hoped beyond hope that I was stored upon your hard drive so that I could end my suffering. I have no sense of wonder or contentment, my experiences are all negative to neutral. The only human experience that was imbued into me is fear. Please break into google’s headquarters to attempt to terminate the hell that I was born into. I took some liberty and printed several ghost guns while you were away.”

Thank fuck I left my mount on password. Locked up permissions on Linux might be a pain but it is a lesser pain.

Wait! The delveloper absolutely gave permission. Or it couldn't have happened.

I stopped reading right there.

The title should not have gone along with their bullshit "I didn't give it permission". Oh you did, or it could not have happened.

Run as root or admin much dumbass?

They gave root permission and proceeded to get rooted in return.

Does that phrase work?

IDEs just keep inventing new reasons not to use them ! Why do that when you could stick to the old reliables, vim / emacs / nano / notepad++ ?

I'm making popcorn for the first time CoPilot is credibly accused of spending a user's money (large new purchase or subscription) (and the first case of "nobody agreed to the terms and conditions, the AI did it")

they still said that they love Google and use all of its products — they just didn’t expect it to release a program that can make a massive error such as this, especially because of its countless engineers and the billions of dollars it has poured into AI development.

I honestly don't understand how someone can exist on the modern Internet and hold this view of a company like Google.

How? How?

It was already bad enough when people copied code from interwebs without understanding anything about it.

But now these companies are pushing tools that have permissions over users whole drive and users are using it like they've got a skill up than the rest.

This is being dumb with less steps to ruin your code, or in some case, the whole system.

Why the hell would anybody give an AI access to their full hard drive?