I mean, there’s a good reason the first rules of firearm safety are to always treat a weapon as loaded, and to never direct the weapon at something you aren’t prepared to destroy. The key point being that you never know when some freak accident can happen with a loose pin, bad ammo, a broken spring, or just a person tripping and shaking the gun a bit too hard.
A gun should never go off by itself. You still treat it as if it can, because in the real world freak accidents happen.
artyom@piefed.social 16 hours ago
Sure. The point is it’s entirely possible to use a firearm safely. There is no safe use for LLMs because they “make decisions”, for lack of a better phrase, for themselves, without any user input.
etchinghillside@reddthat.com 15 hours ago
That is not at all how LLMs work. It’s the software written around LLMs that aide it in constructing and running commands and “making decisions”. That same software can also prompt the user to confirm if they should do something or sandbox the actions in some way.
artyom@piefed.social 15 hours ago
It can, but we’ve already seen many times that it does not.
suicidaleggroll@lemmy.world 15 hours ago
Only if the user has configured it to bypass those authorizations.
With an agentic coding assistant, the LLM does not decide when it does and doesn’t prompt for authorization to proceed. The surrounding software is the one that makes that call, which is a normal program with hard guardrails in place. The only way to bypass the authorization prompts is to configure that software to bypass them. Many do allow that option, but of course you should only do so when operating in a sandbox.
The person in this article was a moron, that’s all there is to it. They ran the LLM on their live system, with no sandbox, went out of their way to remove all guardrails, and had no backup.