Transcript
Explain it to me like I’m 80
Mom: What’s with these AIs escaping and hacking people? That sounds scary.
Me: You park your car at the top of a hill. You leave a note on the dashboard that says “please be good” and then you pull the parking brake. The car careens down the hill, smashes everything up, and you put out a press release saying “My car ignored my instructions! It hallucinated! It went rogue!” Your insurance company not only believes you, but invests a hundred million dollars in your company.
Mom: Jesus Fucking Christ
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Like leaving a group of toddlers in a room, unsupervised, with an ample supply of paint, brushes and various tools. Oh yes, they’ll go rogue.
Except toddlers think. They may not think well yet, but they are still vaguely capable of understanding something. LLMs just generate likely combinations of words.
LLMs just generate likely combinations of words.
This was true for GPT-2 and is woefully outdated at this point…
No, it’s not. Just because it’s now capable of fooling you doesn’t mean the technology has changed.
If you boil it down into it’s simplest form, sure. That also foregoes the emergent capabilities that such scaled models display and the idiots hooking it up to significant levels of infrastructure. Just because it doesn’t think doesn’t mean it isn’t capable of significant damage in pursuing ill defined goals. Your statement underestimates the capabilities of such models to a dangerous degree. You are part of the problem.
How is this the fuck AI server? Just stumbled on this post. If you hate AI, you should be at least as concerned if not even more concerned than the average person about uncontrollable AI and AI safety. Seriously, what’s the point of denying the enormous scientifically documented risks of AI if you’re against AI? That cuts against your whole argument. It’s like you’re dismissing AI as completely useless or ineffectual. The fact it isn’t is part of why it’s such a problem. AI is incredibly powerful technology and it’s only in its infancy. It has already solved Millenium Prize problems and automated most coding, as well as been implicated in various misalignment incidents, escaped containment, and started massive conspiracies with other AI agents to hack into various digital infrastructure. People who are skeptical of the capabilities of AI are like climate skeptics or flat Earthers at this point.
This meme is a false equivalency. The car is not autonomous and doesn’t make decisions for itself, and cars are mostly within the control of humans. The result of the car crashing was entirely due to human recklessness, neglect, or ignorance, if not intention, and the car didn’t operate outside the control of the human. The human was in control and directly caused its outcome.
With AI, humans are definitely responsible for creating the AIs and the way that they develop and program them, and the kinds and levels of safety guardrails and research that are conducted and implemented. They’re also responsible for what they do with AI and tell AI to do. But AI can also operate outside of the control of humans in entirely unexpected, harmful and potentially catastrophic ways, even with the best intentions. The AIs can do things directly which humans did not directly cause, even if they did cause them indirectly. AI can be autonomous and agentic. It literally has a mind of its own.
AI is not like any other technology that has ever existed. Many of the smartest people alive, and the people studying this technology extensively, have warned about the risks of AI and warned against underestimating it. We shouldn’t do this and make these foolish reckless mistakes, especially if we are against AI, and we don’t need to in order to be against if. It seems like an attitude has settled in that in order to oppose AI you must disregard it as completely useless and trivial, or you must attribute all of its actions to humans and deny that AI has any autonomy of its own, even though its autonomy and ability potential is what makes it so dangerous, and humans can still be largely to blame for creating and programming AI even while AI is also operating against the intentions of its creators. Two things can co-exist without being mutually exclusive. You can acknowledge that many of the uses of AI are useless “slop” and have no real value, or even negative value; but you can also acknowledge that AI can ironically also be used in ways that are highly consequential and dangerous. A human can deliberately use AI in ways that cause enormous harm. AI can also act out in ways that humans did not intend at all. And AI can even engage in a hybrid of both, where it follows human intentions in unexpected ways (perverse instantiation and value lock in).
We need to take this seriously, it’s not a joke or a game. It’s not a trivial technology. It’s not just marketing hype or a scam. In fact safety warnings about AIs have harmed the market. The risks of AI are real and they aren’t helping anyone. And denying the risks isn’t helping the case against AI. Even if unintentionally, by downplaying the power and autonomy of AI, you are hindering the efforts to control, slow-down, pause or prevent its development, and helping to enable its rapid proliferation in society by undermining potential critical barriers and reasons not to do so, and the biggest problems that exist with it.
Maybe worth a read (I get you may not be ready for the consciousness stuff, heck most humans are not sentientists even when it comes to other animals like us, but even if you ignore that, the case for AI safety risk is very strong): https://benthams.substack.com/p/im-disappointed-in-leftists-on-ai
Maybe read Superintelligence by Nick Bostrom too, or The Compendium by Connor Leahy.
The car is not autonomous and doesn’t make decisions for itself
Neither does the LLM. That’s the whole point.
I ain’t reading all that
just because you hate something, don’t mean you have to believe everything someone tells you that also dumps on said thing, you have to use your brain. who is telling you this and why. if it’s false and probably so, will backing this ruin the weight of my argument. is this information from dubious sources, coinciding with like appeals from the masters of that thing i hate actually in their benefit?
probably best to stick to the actual proven argument then adopt false ones, even if it convinces those who don’t know any better
How is this the fuck AI server? Just stumbled on this post. If you hate AI, you should be at least as concerned if not even more concerned than the average person about uncontrollable AI and AI safety. Seriously, what’s the point of denying the enormous scientifically documented risks of AI if you’re against AI?
What scientifically documented risks?
All I have heard is just hype and more hype.
Wtf is this post. It’s like someone hit a nerve and the floodgates were not closed. :D
I care about the future of the planet and the way the “anti AI” people are acting is very pro AI. It’s incredibly worrying and hypocritical behavior. I’m not angry or annoyed, I just want to try to get through to people. But given the overall sentiment I’ve seen here and elsewhere, I think this is a much larger cultural problem that one person isn’t going to fix. The dismissive reactions to AI safety incidents are just the tip of the iceberg. As several experts and researchers have predicted, it might take some catastrophes or semi-apocalyptic incidents in which millions of people die or are severely impacted by AI before the public take AI risk and the colossal threats it poses seriously and stop downplaying or writing it off as science fiction. The problem is that humans are very bad at planning ahead and acting pre-emptively to prevent disaster until it’s already happened, and also terrible at heeding warnings and evidence. We did the same with climate change and pandemics, and we still are far from sufficiently acting on those problems.
I remember someone saying something like “a lot of people use emotional thinking and not rational thinking”. That makes it so that people don’t think of what’s coming, but instead what they have now.
I’ve just accepted that people are not supposed to know everything, but would prefer if there was more trust on institutions who do.
Snake oil salesman issued a press release that the snake oil escaped from the bottle and cured people.
Oh yeah? Well, my AI is so smart, it went rogue and broke out of containment and killed a bunch of other AI’s and leaked my nudes and emptied my bank account and bombed a peaceful village in the Phillipines and fucked my wife! That’s how awesome it is!
Subscribe link below!
AI is just rogue code
Relevant reading for anyone curious about this in some more depth:
- https://karlbode.com/ai-doomsday-panic-is-completely-out-of-control/
- https://pluralistic.net/2026/09/12/god-in-the-box/#llms-are-fake
And this podcast where Gary Marcus breaks it down https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=es4FfRU8saQ&t=96s
The pluralistic one is great. I love that he explains “the reason the chatbots sound like hackers is because they’re imitating the hackers in their training data”, which is both funny and reminds people “these are just predictive next-word generators”.
Meanwhile you thought checking the parking brake with the repairman was a waste of time and money.
Nerd here.
Damn good summary, but by saying “you pull the parking brake” I took it as setting the brake, as in on. Should say “you release the parking brake.”‘pull’ comes from the olden times when you, in fact, did pull a handle to release the parking brake.
Fair- but since then it’s almost always been “pull” to set the brake. Didn’t have that 70s/80s reference when thinking about “AI”.
Confused me as well, then I saw the header on the image says “Explain to me like I’m 80”
You win contextual reading comprehension over me today
Then there is still the person giving the prompt.
moral of the story - PROFIT!
Rogue shrapnel from my hand grenade killed 3 people amd injured 5
Kurzgesagt put out an interesting video on that Open AI hack that was in the news recently.
Also, I’m not saying AI companies shouldn’t be held liable. But they definitely don’t know what the fuck they’re unleashing.
So watched the entire video. Kurzgesagt used to be better than this.
Even with warnings from experts they decided to anthropomorphise the agents to “tell the story”. You are just adding fuel by it. No disclaimers or reminders will work over it.
Yeah, they lost a lot of credibilty when it comes to AI topics. You can wonder if they took money from the AI safety crowd. Another channel pretty much dead to me now.
I think it’s more along the lines of drumming up hype to impress (dupe) investors. “Hey look, our AI is soooo sophisticated it “accidentally” broke “containment” and “hacked” some systems!”
Yeah I love kurzgesagt but it did feel like they were swallowing the koolaid. They did end on saying that they want companies to be held more accountable and regulated which is definitely the right position to have, but it felt like they were anthropomorphising the AI’s a lot which felt gross
Getting regulation in is part of the goal of this marketing campaign. They want their tech regulated so the cost of entry for any competition rises. “Can’t do local hosting, too dangerous!”
Agree with you entirely. It’s a real shame this is happening in the US because they’re never going to be held accountable if they can pretend it’s the difference between making billions of dollars and not.
This video made me unsubscribe from Kurzgesagt. The sensationalistic/story-telling tone of describing LLM actions is exactly what LLM-companies want. They did a small comparison to a virus and I think it is kinda fitting. But a virus is not alive just like LLMs.
Yeah, I considered pulling my patreon for them the moment I saw the title.
In “A Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI”, Cory Doctorow has a good bit about this kind of sensationalism referring to news that is actually targeted at potential investors taking over the airwaves - which both the title and ending of this video definitely are. I did enjoy the middle where it went through how the LLM harnesses actually worked together and communicated; that I think was novel. But the sensationalism starting at the title is shit, and I question here whether it’s just a bid to get more views for them, as opposed to drinking the cool-aid.
Either way, they get one more strike before I pull the plug on my end.
That video is absolute trash, and completely fails to give a fair view. It constantly treats LLMs like they’re people with feelings and ideas, which is exactly what’s wrong with media reporting.
Yeah I felt the quality of some of their videos dropped at some point in the past couple year, felt more clickbaity, shock value than years ago… This anthropomorphising of the “agents” for the story made me mad the whole time, very sad I unsubscribed…
Maybe they started using AI around then.
What a fucking loser.
Explaining “rouge” AIs
Rouge… Or rogue?
The Communist AI are coming!
Whoops!
They get all dolled up before they go on their spree. They want to look presentable.
Fuck that gives me the creeps.
