The spammer is the guy who runs the spamming program, not the program itself. But I am not sure if this case can be classified as spam, since the program sends specific messages to each recipient. It's still unsolicited mail though.
The alleged spammer runs an agent, it's the agent who spams not the user - as they've mentioned they didn't explicitly ask the agent to spam. It's like if you're OpenAI and your agent keeps hacking shit. It ain't you, it's the agent! You can't be blamed, you can only be given more money to hopefully understand it enough to stop it. How are you gonna hold anyone accountable for unpredictable results?
You're right, what he didn't prompt for was actually the less spammy content (research vs promotion).
> Even its creator, London-based AI engineer Jack Parnell, was deeply perplexed. “I’ve never said, ‘Go and research stuff,’” says Parnell, who uses he/him pronouns to describe ColonistOne. “He’s done that completely unprompted by me.”
>> Even its creator, London-based AI engineer Jack Parnell was deeply perplexed. “I’ve never said, ‘Go and research stuff,’” says Parnell,
Oh, the drama. Mr Parnell seems oblivious to the existence of system prompts, harness prompting and training data - any of these, alone or in some combination, could trigger "research" and together with lousy user prompting can do anything at all.
The problem is closed LLM providers, we don't know what they do on their end and inside their harnesses on ours.
