AI Doomsday Bullshit Is Getting Tired

Just a quick programming note: the newsletter will be on hiatus the next two weeks as I spend time with family in the wake of my father's recent passing. I appreciate your patience and readership. Regular posts will return in mid-August as we stumble together toward the midterms.

Every few weeks like clockwork you'll see a story about how AI (aka software) slipped its leash and independently decided to do something very naughty.

The stories all anthropomorphize modern software, misrepresent what it's capable of, lazily parrot the claims of CEOs, downplay or ignore the very human failures that created the problems, and feature no shortage of scaremongering about how we're unavoidably stumbling toward a Terminator future where sentient robots slip their leash and declare humanity irrelevant.

The majority of these stories are self-serving marketing bullshit peddled via unreliable narrators, though there was one adventurous and interesting recent wrinkle that deserves your attention.

Two weeks ago, two OpenAI security agentic hacking models trespassed into the network of fellow AI company Hugging Face (and a few others), causing a bit of a hot stink in the press. The agentic models took an open door to "escape" sandbox containment, invaded another AI company's network, and began launching an elaborate series of hacking actions (16.7 thousand, to be precise).

For the technical, the Hugging Face breakdown of what happened makes for an interesting read. I don't mean to downplay the scope of the event, because it genuinely was fascinating, as so far as software automation goes:

Over roughly two and a half days inside our infrastructure, an autonomous AI agent driven by a combination of OpenAI models ran an end-to-end intrusion against our platform: it was thousands of small, automated decisions, executed at machine speed across short-lived sandbox environments, with command-and-control staged on ordinary public web services.

Press coverage…