The current agents are _not_ like a chisel which just sits there on its own when no one is around. The situation is a bit closer to someone's dog biting a person - you can argue that it's the owner's responsibility, and that's all fine, but using the dog as the subject of a sentence is perfectly appropriate. Same thing with "agents hacked".
The default state of agents and LLMs is inert. It requires action from a human even be able to do something. From the very basics like starting the software, connecting it to a network, having hardware to run on.
But the most important wrt AI is to keep the owners/operators responsible. Don't let them weasel their way out of it. They are for sure trying, and will continue to. This includes using language to overemphasise agents importance in bad outcomes, in order to downplay their own responsibility.
Yes, they are. An AI is several hundred trillion ones and zeroes on a disk. It's incapable of doing anything until you intentionally and explicitly start it up and give it a prompt.
A dog is an independent, conscious, living being with free will. A dog will do what it wants whenever it wants because it has the agency and ability to do so. A pile of weights on disk does not.
> It's incapable of doing anything until you intentionally and explicitly start it up and give it a prompt.
Sure, but since January people have gone and made systems where they started 'em up and left 'em running in a loop. Still not a dog, but the behavior gets a wee bit more interesting. Especially since we're looking at what's basically a recursive process. Even really simple recursive processes tend to have interesting dynamics in the chaotic domain. [1] And here -as you point out- we're talking billions of weights.
Sure. A dog is a collection of cells and goo. Cells are self-propelling clockwork built from proteins and molecular machinery.
A cell by itself has agency and motivation, is capable of autonomous response to stimuli. It's alive and squirms when you poke it. A cell is capable of truly independent action. It can even feed itself and make its own energy to power the clockwork.
An LLM still is inert silicon until a human intentionally starts it and gives it a prompt. It's fundamentally incapable of action without instruction and incapable of existing without the entirety of the modern internet and electrical infrastructure, and the thousands of unseen human hands keeping the wheels spinning.
If you want to go deeper, you can make the same arguments about the proteins and molecular machines. Self-replicating molecules in an unbroken chain since the dawn of time. A protein at the base level is a machine capable of independent action. If it bumps into the right molecule, pure mechanics cause it to do something, change shape.
Ones and zeroes on a hard drive can't do any of that without human intent applied.
If you rip the DNA out of a cell it isn't going to do much either; if only because most of the real mechanisms are RNA (and proteins), while DNA is 'just' the storage. Encapsulate the DNA back into a cell nucleus with the attendant mechanisms, and suddenly you've got something that runs again.
Meanwhile, if you encapsulate an LLM into what's called an 'agentic harness', it's also going to be running much more of the time (depending), specially if it has a what's called a heartbeat or goal loop driving it.
Still not a cell; most definitely not. But the behavior is a wee bit more interesting than some bits on an ssd.
Actually you probably already know this one: Regular daemons are also just bits on your drive, until they get ```systemctl start``` ed
(edit: I literally have a llama.cpp systemd unit running right now)
Because the AI is a cyclical prediction machine that is more akin to a simple mechanism in nature like cell reproduction than a conscious dog. What has happened here is more like the AI company put bacteria in a petri dish and only put the lid on without pushing it down and is reporting the bacteria as a super bacteria because it contaminated all the samples in the fridge.
An interesting observation I've seen is that the AI companies reporting these incidents have largely been backed by venture capital where the self funded companies developing models have largely not had these "problems".
Suppose I find a means to freeze your entire body for arbitrary periods at the state it was in, then unfreeze you anytime I want. Do you have consciousness?
Okay take it to the most conceptual extreme of it. It may be extremely difficult bur its possible to record your entire state and recreate it later right? Then what? Are you not conscious?
I think its odd to dismiss the question of ai consciousness just because of the setting we let them live in at present is start-stop.
If you don't believe in souls, then something being software should be irrelevant to the question of consciousness. Our brain is also within the laws of a Turing computer as far as we know, due to known physical laws being turing computable.
You are going too far down the woo side when it is a computer program doing ultimately what is expected of it from its programming just like any other computer program. There is nothing you can argue, souls or not, that will convince me otherwise that these are not just computer programs like any other computer programs. If the LLM has a consciousness, then so does MS paint.
You are going too far down the woo side when its just some chemicals and electrical signals inside a frame of dry calcium phosphate doing what is expected of it just like any other electrical and chemical system. There is nothing you can argue, souls or not, that will argue these are not just electrochemical systems like any other. If the human brain has consciousness, then so does a piece of skin tissue.
