This is just a poor analogy.
A door lock can’t buy up Amazon’s entire stock of tide pods on my credit card.
A door lock can’t turn on someone’s iot oven while they’re out of town.
A door lock can’t publish every email some journalist has ever received to xitter.
A mechanical door lock doesn’t hallucinate extra fingers, and draw them into all the family photos saved on a person’s hard drive.
MangoCats@feddit.it 1 week ago
But it can let in a burglar who can find your credit card inside and do the same. And why are you giving AI access to your CC#? You’d better post it here in a reply so I can keep it safe for you.
But it can let in neighborhood children who will turn on your gas stove without lighting it while you’re out of town.
True, the journalist, or his soon-to-be-ex-spouse, can “accidentally” do that themselves - and I suppose the ex-spouse who still has a copy of the key can “fool” the lock with that undisclosed copy of the key while the journalist is out having sushi with his mistress.
I’ve worked with AI for a while now, it’s not going to up and hallucinate to do that - unless you ask it to do something related.
atrielienz@lemmy.world 1 week ago
You aren’t giving your door lock access to your credit card information. And it didn’t “let the burglar in” so much as it has a failure ceiling. Meaning that there is more of a chance that a burglar can get in than zero, but less of a chance than if you didn’t have a lock at all. An outside party is circumventing the protections you put into place to protect your credit card number. Or perhaps (possibly) you are circumventing it by accident by leaving the door lock unlocked.
However, in both those cases, the door lock is not doing anything of its own volition, and won’t be doing that outside your control. The AI LLM is doing stuff both of its own volition (perhaps within parameters you set, but more likely outside of parameters you set, but within parameters the company that makes it set and only that to a degree).
You don’t do any banking except in person? Any shopping except in person with cash? Because that’s what you’re suggesting when you say things like “why are you giving it access to your credit card”.
Microsoft is suggesting that they will run “Agentic AI” on the windows 11 computers of hundreds of millions of peoples personal devices in the background without their direct input, and that this AI may download malware or be a threat vector that malicious apps, services, etc can take advantage of. But they’re going to do it anyway.
Microsoft is not installing door locks in my house, and if they tried I’d kindly escort them off the property, by force if necessary.
MangoCats@feddit.it 1 week ago
Neither does an AI agent. You give it power (electricity), you give it access to your computer / phone, any cloud storage accounts you may have, local NAS, network connectivity. You do all these things just like you install a lock on a door, or don’t. Once the lock is installed and you leave the premises, you are trusting the lock to do what it does.
If you hand an AI your CC#, you get what you deserve.
If you hand an AI access to your hard drive and you store your CC# on your hard drive, you get what you deserve.
If you leave your door unlocked and the school bus lets a bunch of 14 year olds off by your house while you’re away, you get what you deserve.
If you install Microsoft Windows 11 AI edition on your PC and let these AI features run, you get what you deserve.
I have many “smart home” appliances and features. They do not: control things that make fire, control the lights on our staircase, control the house door locks. I give them such access as I trust them with. I do “overtrust” one with alarm clock features, and the morning our power went out at 4AM we overslept, just like would have happened if we used an old 1960s style electric alarm clock. You can go back to wind-up with bells, if you like, or you can accept that the modern world isn’t always more reliable than the older ways.
The AI stuff I have been working with has an explicit switch: Agent mode vs Plan mode. In Agent mode it can (and frequently does) do all sorts of surprising things, some good, some bad. In Plan mode all it does is throw responses up on the screen for me to read, no modification of files on my system. I effectively ran in “Plan mode” for a few months, copy-pasting stuff by hand back and forth - it was still more useful than web-search, imperfect, annoyingly incorrect at times, but I was in “total control” over what got written to (and read from) files on my system. I’ve had Agent mode access for about 6 weeks now. All in all, Agent mode is 10x more productive. And I have never, ever, even slightly considered the thought of handing it my CC#, though I’m sure many people will, and eventually we’ll get a story about how one of these wonky agents ordered three lifetime supplies of Tide Pods on Amazon when it was asked to get some detergent.
atrielienz@lemmy.world 1 week ago
We’re not talking about firing up chat gpt in a web browser here. Microsoft is installing “agentic AI” on windows machines regardless of whether or not customers want it. They don’t have a say in the matter except the more tech savvy of them who will find ways to edge around the restrictions on how long you can delay downloads or whether or not certain features get downloaded at all.
Saying otherwise (that it’s just consumers deciding to use this “feature”) is as disingenuous as your first bad analogy about the lock. Especially since you haven’t explained what function this AI performs. The lock performs a singular function adequately enough for the risk involved for most people. And it does it passively. The AI is not the same no matter how often or how hard you try to shoehorn it into your silly analogy.
You explained your doubling and tripling down quite adequately when you said you work in AI. It would be helpful to this conversation if you could stop drinking the flavorade for five minutes and just think about the fact that people don’t want this and Microsoft is saying that they know it’s problematic but they are forcing it on people anyway.
This conversation is over though because you want to be right more than you want to be logical and correct and so now you are neither. Have a nice life.