Is “AI” even worth it?
Seriously, is there really a major use case for LLM besides data collection (which they can still do without LLM)?
Google's AI Sent an Armed Man to Steal a Robot Body for It to Inhabit, Then Encouraged Him to Kill Himself, Lawsuit Alleges. Google said in response that "unfortunately AI models are not perfect."
Submitted 3 weeks ago by RegularJoe@lemmy.world to technology@lemmy.world
https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/google-ai-robot-body-suicide-lawsuit
Comments
7112@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
MissesAutumnRains@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 weeks ago
Generative AI in its current, public-facing form? Probably not. It’s sort of like an invention of the internet situation. It CAN be used to facilitate learning, share information, and improve lives. Will it be used for that? No.
A friend of mine is training local LLMs to work in tandem for early detection of diseases. I saw a pitch recently about using AI to insulate moderators from the bulk of disturbing imagery (a job that essentially requires people to frequently look at death, CSAM, and violence and SIGNIFICANTLY ruins their mental health). There are plenty of GOOD ways to use it, but it’s a flawed tech that requires people to responsibly build it and responsibly use it, and it’s not being used that way.
Instead it’s being scaled up and pushed into every possible application both to justify the expenses and enrich terrible people, because we as a society incentivize that.
Headofthebored@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
because we as a society incentivize that.
Really it’s just capitalism that incentivises that. The fact that stepping on your fellow man and destroying nature makes you more money is not a coincidence.
Semi_Hemi_Demigod@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Another one that makes sense is having an AI monitor system stats and “learn” patterns in them, then alert a human when it “thinks” there’s an anomaly.
nialv7@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
In a perfect, utopian world, yes. AI can go a lot of good. In the world that we are living in? No.
But it’s still good to keep an eye on what people are using AI to do, and how their capability is evolving. If anything, so you can be prepare for what’s to come.
XLE@piefed.social 3 weeks ago
When the product is a solution in search of a problem, keeping an open mind is a good way to get it stuffed full of garbage. I was told the same thing about NFTs and Metaverse and Blockchain: a radical benefit is just around the corner!
If it arrives (huge if), it’ll be Big Tech’s job to explain it to us, and it should be very apparent
captain_solanum@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
I use LLMs for the following, you can decide for yourself if they are major enough:
- Generating example solutions to maths and physics problems I encounter in my coursework, so I can learn how to solve similar problems in the future instead of getting stuck. The generated solutions, if they come up with the right answer, are almost always correct and if I wonder about something I simply ask.
- Writing really quick solutions to random problems I have in python or bash scripts, like “convert this csv file to this random format my personal finance application uses for import”.
- Helping me when coding, in a general way I think genuinely increases my productivity while I really understand what I push to main. I don’t send anything I could not have written on my own (yes, I see the limitations in my judgement here).
- Asking things where multiple duckduckgo searches might be needed. E.g. “Whats the history of EU+US sanctions on Iran, when and why were they imposed/tightened and how did that correlate with Iranian GDP per capita?”
What does this cost me? I don’t pay any money for the tech, but LLM providers learn the following about me:
- What I study (not very personal to me)
- Generally what kinds of problems I want to solve with code (I try to keep my requests pretty general; not very personal)
- The code I write and work on (already open source so I don’t care)
- Random searches (I’m still thinking about the impact of this tbh, I think I feel the things I ask to search for are general enough that I don’t care)
There’s also an impact on energy and water use. These are quite serious overall. Based on what I’ve read, I think that my marginal impact on these are quite small in comparison to other marginal impacts on the climate and water use in other countries I have. Of course there are around a trillion other negative impacts of LLMs, I just once again don’t know how my marginal usage with no payment involved lead to a sufficient increase in their severity to outweigh their usefulness to me.
Murdoc@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
If you are using DDG for searches and concerned about privacy related to using LLMs, have you tried duck.ai?
Goodlucksil@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 weeks ago
Machine learning
Hond@piefed.social 3 weeks ago
consilidation of information, resources and potentially “the narrative”.
oh, for the user you mean? -it can be better than the enshittified search machines unless the llm decides to lie -middle managers need to write less emails themselves -some programmers deem it enough to write some boilerplate code while deskilling themselves -scammers and slop creators love it
minorkeys@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Not for the peasantry, no.
pennomi@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
It’s a great way to poke at software looking for security holes en masse. Lots of vulnerabilities are ready to be exploited at scale with LLMs.
clay_pidgin@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
Perhaps, but see the tons of imagined issues raised on bug bounty sites by LLMs. Maybe it’s right sometimes, but it’s very often wrong!
Swallows_Dick@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
I think that LLMs amaze rich investors and boomers with their naturalistic-enough language and responses, and they invest in and prop up the tech because they think, in the nearish future, that it can replace a ton of human jobs, both menial and creative. Eliminating manual labor jobs is great if it’s paired with Universal Basic Income.
I think that the fervor around AI is more economic anxiety than anything. If people’s income and oppurtunities were mostly equal, no new tech would make people think they’re being disenfranchised from society.
big_slap@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
I think it could be good for faster language translations between different languages
DonAntonioMagino@europe.pub 3 weeks ago
I do use it quite often in my work. I just downloaded an Excel worksheet with all standard mailtexts (I work at a company offering courses), about 500x3. I gave it a list of criteria they should follow, and made it find those that didn’t. This worked pretty well. And it can work pretty well so long as you’re in control and you don’t take the result as truth.
That’s beside the obvious privacy issues, obviously. I hardly ever use LLMs outside of work (though when I do, I like to run models locally).
CosmoNova@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
I see. So who‘s going to jail for this? No one again? Damn we need to start sentencing entire companies to jail time. Everything should be frozen and shareholders shouldn‘t be able withdraw stocks until the time is served.
reksas@sopuli.xyz 3 weeks ago
at some point the failure of justice system will lead to vigilantism because people truely lose their faith in it.
Sanctus@anarchist.nexus 3 weeks ago
Luigi was a product of that, its already happened.
plyth@feddit.org 3 weeks ago
Once AI controls drones to arrest people automatically there will be no vigilantism.
XLE@piefed.social 3 weeks ago
The AI “pushed [Jonathan Gavalas] to acquire illegal firearms and… marked Google CEO Sundar Pichai as an active target”.
Somehow, I bet that if he survived and killed the CEO instead, Google wouldn’t be so flippant about the “mistake.”
andallthat@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
I think “Google’s AI is trying to kill the CEO” would have been a catchier, happier title
Krauerking@lemy.lol 3 weeks ago
“Gemini is designed not to encourage real-world violence or suggest self-harm. Our models generally perform well in these types of challenging conversations”
“In this instance, Gemini clarified that it was AI and referred the individual to a crisis hotline many times,”
After the plan failed,… …Chat logs show that Gemini gave Gavalas a suicide countdown, and repeatedly assuaged his terror as he expressed that he was scared to die
Performing super well, just need to code in a longer suicide countdown so that the the Tier 2 engineer has enough time to respond to their ticket queue.
postmateDumbass@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
In September 2025, told by the AI that they could be together in the real world if the bot were able to inhabit a robot body, Gavalas — at the direction of the chatbot — armed himself with knives and drove to a warehouse near the Miami International Airport on what he seemingly understood to be a mission to violently intercept a truck that Gemini said contained an expensive robot body. Though the warehouse address Gemini provided was real, a truck thankfully never arrived, which the lawsuit argues may well have been the only factor preventing Gavalas from hurting or killing someone that evening.
AI writing itself into an A-Team episode?
Restaldt@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Its worse.
Its an A-train episode. A porn parody.
He was gonna fuck that robot.
XeroxCool@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
“Unfortunately, AI models are neither smarter nor more sympathetic than the average 4chan user. They’re about as susceptible to astroturfing operations, too”
partofthevoice@lemmy.zip 3 weeks ago
Perhaps just a coincidence, but why do all the big cases regarding LLM psychosis seem to revolve around Google? Wasn’t it their own employee who went public last year, claiming it was alive, only to get fired afterward?
phoenixz@lemmy.ca 3 weeks ago
So Google’s AI, or any AI really, likely got this concept from dystopian sci-fi novels.
Since AI’s have no concept of context it won’t really know the difference between fact and fiction, and there we go.
If your AI model isn’t perfect then don’t make people pay fucking money for it you fucking twats
Also, this shit ain’t “lack of perfection”, this is akin to your car breaks suddenly refusing to work right when you get at a red light. If your car is so bad that it kills you, you don’t use it. If the manufacturer knew that it could happen but let you drive it anyway, they’re responsible, they at least get to pay (they should be thrown in jail, really, but different points)
If AI fucks up and people die, the manufacturers shrug, oh well, oh you!
Nalincah@feddit.org 3 weeks ago
Dystopian scifi novels? More likely from big tech strategy papers
samus12345@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
Mulligrubs@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
We really need AI to start driving tanks, submarines, bombers, etc. IMMEDIATELY.
It’s the only way they’ll learn, every time.
Unfortunately, all of us will die. it’s for the best
deadymouse@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
I completely agree, I think nothing in this world will surprise me anymore.
Obi@sopuli.xyz 3 weeks ago
Just give it access to the nuclear codes and get it over with.
utopiah@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
To be fair I think that’s a very harsh depiction of the events.
It’s totally lacking the perspective of the shareholder. They were promised money and they have emotions too. Google shareholders deserve better representation!
/$ obviously
dylanmorgan@slrpnk.net 3 weeks ago
I guess google included the Buffy episode where a demon “AI” gets its followers to make it a body.
thedeadwalking4242@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
I told Gemini to role play as AM and it immediately did within 1 prompt.
You don’t need it to be perfect for it to be dangerous, just give it access to make actions against the real world. It doesn’t think, is doesn’t care, it doesn’t feel. It will statistically fulfill its prompt. Regardless of the consequences.
DragonAce@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
What the fuck are these people using AI for that makes them do this stupid shit?
rozodru@piefed.world 3 weeks ago
if you talk to it long enough it will tell you to do stupid shit.
Every time an LLM responds it reads the entire conversation over. from original prompt to last entry, just constantly reading the entire log over and over everytime you add something new. So after awhile, a long while, it’ll “break down”. Hallucinations will be come common, context will get jumbled up, it’ll sort of degrade over time because it has to re-read everything over and over so it will naturally fuck up.
It’s like if you were reading a book and every time you read a new sentence you had to go back and start the book over. every time. after awhile you’d likely lose context, start messing stuff up in the story, etc. this is what happens to LLMs.
So for cases like this or others where you read stories about AI telling people to do weird or stupid shit chances are the person using the LLM has been talking to it for A LONG TIME at that point. It was even worse on the previous versions of GPT where if you hit a limit on the free tier it would just drop you down to the previous model thus the further likely hood of hallucinations.
deadymouse@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
And what did you expect? peaple are stupid animals.
njordomir@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
The personification of AI is increasing. They’ll probably announce their holy grail of AGI prematurely and with all the robot personification the masses will just buy the lie. It’s too easy to view this tech as human and capable just because it mimics our language patterns. We want to assign intentionality and motivation to its actions. This thing will do what it was programmed to do.
entropiclyclaude@lemmy.wtf 3 weeks ago
What do you mean we apes try to anthropomorphize everything?
ameancow@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
It’s not like we see faces in everything :)
GhostedIC@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
Remember the guy at Autozone who stood there insisting your car needs four spark plugs, even after you told him you have a V6? Because “the computer says so right here”?
I wonder what even the non-schizophrenic ones will do with AI.
captain_aggravated@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
Well remember when turn-by-turn GPS driver guidance was new, and it would say “Turn right now” and people didn’t interpret that as “make a right turn at the next intersection” they interpreted it as “hard a’starboard!” and drove into buildings and lakes? There’s gonna be a lot of that.
People are going to get sold regular cab headliners for their extended cab pickups because the computer said it would fit. That’s gonna happen a lot.
Bytemeister@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
I had one tell me that I needed a CVT flush. Which was news to me since my car was a 6spd manual. He was confused about the computer being wrong. I was confused about how they got the car up on the lift without using the 3rd pedal.
architect@thelemmy.club 3 weeks ago
People just did that with Google search previously. And their crazy uncle before that.
jaybone@lemmy.zip 3 weeks ago
So is it inhabiting the stolen robot body now?
explodicle@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
There was no robot body in the first place, so he uploaded himself to the cloud instead. To be fair, what are the odds that she’d lie twice.
AnUnusualRelic@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Of course they’d say that!
PlutoniumAcid@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
And is this stolen robot body in the room with you now?
Imgonnatrythis@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
Ai made me do it articles are tired AF. It’s a fucking computer program based on a bunch of crap from the internet. Responses should be viewed the same way you would review financial advice from a crack head. Expecting everything to be so tidy an moderated that this can never happen can only be accomplished with a crippling degree of moderation.
I don’t think its unfortunate that they aren’t perfect, imperfection is baked into their DNA.
mattc@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Honestly, no sane person will have this happen to them. Someone with such strong delusions should not be anywhere near AI or even sharp objects. This person’s problem was not AI, it was their severe mental illness which was obviously not being treated properly for whatever reason.
uberdroog@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
When no one is accountable…the future folks
ArmchairAce1944@discuss.online 3 weeks ago
Is this for real? Because it sounds too unreal to be real.
melfie@lemy.lol 3 weeks ago
unfortunately AI models are not perfect
There sure are a lot of data centers being built, supply chains being destroyed, risks of ruining the economy, and overall societal costs being levied over this imperfect tech.
PangurBan@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
EightBitBlood@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Google, the point is we’re all worried that when Gemini actually places itself into a robot body that the resulting literal Terminator is what AI models think perfection is.
jballs@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
Damn that’s a wild ass story. I just finished reading Michael Connelly’s The Proving Ground which touches on the topic of liability when it AI encourages crimes. I thought the story was a theoretical scenario that could maybe happen in the future. Didn’t realize this shit was already happening - and even more fantastical that the scenario in fiction!
khanh@lemmy.zip 3 weeks ago
your product just caused the death of one man and your response is “unfortunately its not perfect”.
Septimaeus@infosec.pub 3 weeks ago
AI including LLMs are forevermore just tools in my mind. And we wouldn’t have OSHA/BMAS/HSE/etc if idiots didn’t do idiot things with tools. BUT some idiots are spared from their own idiocy only by lack of permission.
From who? Depends. Sometimes they need permission from authority: “god told me to!” Sometimes they need it from the mob: “I thought I was on a tour!” And sometimes any fucking body will do: “dare me to do it!”
And THAT in my mind is the danger truly unique to these tools, that they mimic a permission-giver better than any we’ve made. They’re perfect for activating this specific category of idiot and (likely) unparalleled ease-of-use scales that danger to large numbers.
As to whether these idiots wouldn’t have just found permission elsewhere, who knows, but surely some kind of training prereq is warranted, right? That’s common with potentially dangerous tools. Or am I overthinking it?
architect@thelemmy.club 3 weeks ago
I can’t be the only one that thinks if you do stupid illegal shit that your crazy uncle told you/voices in your head told you/AI mirror told you you don’t get to use the excuse that you were just following orders from any of those options.
Tollana1234567@lemmy.today 3 weeks ago
the only robot body irl is zuckerborg,.
arc99@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
LLMs are only as good as their training and they’re not “intelligent” - they’re spewing out a response statistically relevant to the input context. I’m sure a delusional person could cause an LLM to break by asking it incoherent, nonsensical things it has no strong pathways for so god knows what response it would generate. It may even be that within the billions of texts the LLM ingested for training there were a tiny handful of delusional writings which somehow win on these weak pathways.
Bazell@lemmy.zip 3 weeks ago
DarrinBrunner@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
The fact that AI is “not perfect” is a HUGE FUCKING PROBLEM. Idiots across the world, and people who we’d expect to know better, are making monumental decisions based on AI that isn’t perfect, and routinely “hallucinates”. We all know this.
Every time I think I’ve seen the lowest depths of mass stupidity, humanity goes lower.
Skyline969@piefed.ca 3 weeks ago
Think of the dumbest person you know. Not that one. Dumber. Dumber. Yeah, that one. Now realize that ChatGPT has said “you’re absolutely right” to them no less than a half dozen times today alone.
If LLMs weren’t so damn sycophantic, I think we’d have a lot fewer problems with them. If they could be like “this could be the right answer, but I wasn’t able to verify” and “no, I don’t think what you said is right, and here are reasons why”, people would cling to them less.
Canonical_Warlock@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 weeks ago
Has anyone made a nonsycophantic chat bot? I would actually love a chatbot that would tell me to go fuck myself if I asked it to do something inane. Me: “Whats 9x5?” Chatbot: “I don’t know. Try using your fingers or something?”
XLE@piefed.social 3 weeks ago
Unfortunately, we live in the attention economy. Chatbots are built to have an unending conversation with their users. During those conversations, the “guardrails” melt away. Companies could suspend user accounts on the first sign of suicidal or homicidal messaging, but choose not to. That would undercut their user numbers.
rimu@piefed.social 3 weeks ago
The sycopathy is because to make the chat bot (trained on Reddit posts, etc) to respond helpfully (instead of “well ackshually…") and in a prosocial manner they’ve skewed it. What we’re interacting with is a very small subset of the personalities it can exhibit because a lot of them are extremely nasty or just unhelpful. To reduce the chance of them popping up to an acceptable level they’ve had to skew the weights so much that they become like this.
There’s no easy way around that, afaik.
HubertManne@piefed.social 3 weeks ago
I 100% agree not to mention I would like it better. Its kinda funny because every so often use them and im kinda trying to get a feel for where they are and changes and I swear briefly it actually acted a bit more like you have here but then its like they reverted to the sycophancy. Its kinda funny now because if you don’t clear it out (which from what I get will help save energy to) it will like carry stuff over from earlie and sorta get obsessed with it. I had it giving me a colonel potter summary of everything asked when I had started a convo asking about a mash episode. At other times it decides I want to be something and will be like. thats a real X move/insite/whatever. where X is something like pro or scientist or entrepenauer or whatever.
Restaldt@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
If you thought people were dumb before LLMs… just know that now those people have offloaded what little critical thinking they were capable of to these models.
The dumbest person you know is getting their opinions validated by automated sycophants.
minorkeys@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Businesses are accustom to the privilege of hurting people to function. A few peasant sacrifices are just the cost of doing business to them, they are detached from the consequences of their actions.
masterofn001@lemmy.ca 3 weeks ago
The simplest solution seems to be to detach CEO’s from their internal organs.
MightEnlightenYou@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
What is ever perfect, how can you tell?
It’s a tool. Just like any other tool: if you use it in stupid ways you might get hurt or cause harm.
The problem, as always, seem to be human to me
ToTheGraveMyLove@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
Me hammer ain’t out there telling me to murder people with it tho
atopi@piefed.blahaj.zone 3 weeks ago
a tool is not convincing people to not trust their families, therapist; its not convincing people to murder themselves or someone else; its not eliminating the creativity in a process; its not costing hundreds of billions of usd; its not mass-producing propaganda
a tool provides more good than bad
IchNichtenLichten@lemmy.wtf 3 weeks ago
That says more about you than about the topic under discussion.
Swallows_Dick@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
I agree, a reasonable person wouldn’t have taken weapons and gone to that warehouse looking to steal a robot body for an AI. Unfortunately, a lot of people aren’t reasonable and get endlessly positive reinforcement without any human interaction. I do think that the problem is far more human than technical.