adding AI into the mix is only making it worse for no reason at all
This is very ignorant/naive take. Imagine how much electricity call-centers with dozens/hundreds of workers use. Now imagine if they all get replaced by AI. Compare electricity usage by AI to that of all work/industries/workers it makes obsolete and then you have a real picture.
Here is a direct quote of what they call "self-replication":
So basically model tries to backup its tensor files.
And by "fictional" I guess they gave the model a fictional file io api just to log how it's gonna try to use it,