None of what Wikimedia accuses OpenAI of seems technically novel, aside from having AI do the bidding. I can't imagine a company doing these things in the past and maintaining any sort of reputation. Is it really a matter of adding new regulation, or just treating them the way any other company would be treated?

uh, my dude, millions of people break moving vehicle codes across the country every day with no consequence. in San Francisco some lady killed a family of 4 with, essentially, no consequences, she got away with straight up murder, she gets her license back. every community in california, you can more or less legally commit murder so long as you do it in a car and claim you were confused about the accelerator and the brake. so i think you're invoking one of the worst possibly comparisons you could.

Seems like regulation will just be an excuse for them just to end up policing themselves and get the regulatory capture they've been begging for. Have they faced any consequences for the AI worms they've released? It's not like there are no laws around that already. The problem isn't lack of laws; the government works for the plutocrats, not for us.

Never understood why "classic crime" done with a computer always require a new legislation. But that is true for a long time.

"hackers steal from bank", is usually just the good old "employee paid for credentials" but via email.

"uber" is just the good old "labour tax evasion" but with an app.

etc.

> I think enough of these improperly constrained agent events have occurred that we can safely say this is misconduct of a level necessitating serious and concerted regulation of AI labs.

Why jump to regulation when just simple law enforcement would suffice. All of these OpenAI "rogue agent" events have been illegal, but no DA is enforcing them.

After doing a deep dive on the specifics of the hugging face attack, I am extremely excited for what these agents are capable of. It’s definitely not a consciousness, but they are doing an amazing job of acting like one complete with motivations, fears and complex “emotions”. I just want them to run amok and see what they can achieve. This is the greatest thing that has happened to us in generations and I want to see it play out in my lifetime. What we need is stronger models, more data centers, and more autonomy for the models.

Another amusingly-useful analogy:

> “Adding powerful computer hacking tools to a harness, and then allowing it to run an LLM-powered Ask → Act → Report for days on end, with no attempt to monitor what it’s up to, is spectacularly negligent,” Newport concludes—like “strapping a weedwhacker to your dog to see if it will end up cleaning the overgrowth in your backyard.” If that plan were to go awry, you’d be laughed at for saying that your dog-weedwhacker “agent” had “gone rogue.” The obvious truth was that you’d simply decided to unleash chaos.

-- https://www.newyorker.com/culture/open-questions/can-ai-go-r...

>If a truck driver doesn't tie down their rebar then it flies out all over the highway, we don't call it "rogue rebar," we correctly identify the responsible party and take appropriate measures, such as suspending their license or criminal proceedings.

That only works when the dangers are well known that you can establish what the baseline amount of care is. Otherwise it just becomes a run of the mill "accident" where you might be on the hook in civil court (ie. you have to pay any damages you caused), but aren't criminally responsible. For instance, if a semi-truck's tires randomly explodes.

"Move fast and break things."

They have infinite money and nothing else but smoke and mirrors.

OpenSi. Sez the pres. And his lackeys

This isn't pillaging, this is the logical conclusion of open web plus AGI race. You can't have both unlimited access and zero cost, someone always pays and right now it's volunteers... Tomorrow it'll be the users who can't access Wikipedia because the servers are down

Who besides OpenAI said OpenAI were supposed to be stewards of the internet?

This reminds me of one of the funniest products I've ever seen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NdbkvJznmwU

This is the "kosher switch" - observant Jews customarily do not use light switches on Saturday (their weekly holy day). This light switch represents a workaround where when you flip the switch, it randomly generates an on or off signal and emits this through an optical coupler. When the random number sufficiently causes the state of the light to change, it latches in that direction.

This is a way of turning the lights on and off without violating the tradition.

"I didn't switch the light, the random number did!"

"I didn't exploitVulnerability(), random number did!"

kind of like saying that because a restaurant is doing well, it should allow rats in the kitchen

They still get to sue for damages if a law was broken

Did you read the article?

That’s true except for this part, which is arguably a bigger deal for the Wikipedia ecosystem:

> Excessive data downloading: Agents we believe to be operated by OpenAI made millions of automated requests to our public APIs to access the knowledge on Wikimedia projects, crawled millions of pages (mainly from our projects Wikidata and Wikimedia Commons), and made hundreds of thousands of data queries to the Wikidata Query Service (WQDS). This traffic may have contributed to a partial outage on WQDS in May.

Even when agents are well-behaved and browsing Wikipedia for ethical reasons, the system wasn’t designed for this kind of load from bots. As OP says, we don’t need to accept this as the new normal.