Engineering your own virus is becoming more and more accessible. AI isn't really the crucial part here, but it would further lower the barrier of entry
The alignment angle doesn't require agency or motives. It's much more about humans setting goals that are poor proxies for what they actually want. Like the classical paperclip optimizer that is not given the necessary constraints of keeping earth habitable, humans alive etc.
Similarly I don't think RentAHuman requires AI to have agency or motives, even if that's how they present themselves. I could simply move $10000 into a crypto wallet, rig up Claude to run in an agentic loop, and tell it to multiply that money. Lots of plausible ways to do that could lead to Claude going to RentAHuman to do various real-world tasks: set up and restock a vending machine, go to various government offices in person to get permits and taxes sorted out, put out flyers or similar advertising.
The issue with RentAHuman is simply that approximately nobody is doing that. And with the current state of AI it would likely to ill-advised to try to do that.
Note how the number advertising how many bots actually use RentAHuman has vanished from their website. Instead we now have the number of bounties. 1/40th as many as registered humans. And just scrolling through them, maybe 1/4th of the bounties are not bounties at all but more humans offering services.
It's a service that is clearly a lot more appealing to humans than to agents
Usually it would be a network effect thing but in this case from reading the article it doesn't even work right (big surprise) and the nature of the tasks are spammy (big surprise). Like a worse mechanical turk minus the determinism of the code.
The term of art for this is becoming a "Reverse Centaur:"
A “centaur” is a human being who is assisted by a machine (a human head on a strong and tireless body). A reverse centaur is a machine that uses a human being as its assistant (a frail and vulnerable person being puppeteered by an uncaring, relentless machine).
To be fair, this is 16 households of electrical energy. The average household uses about as much electrical energy as it uses energy in form of natural gas (or butane or fuel oil, depending on what they use). And then roughly as much gasoline as they use electricity. So really more like 5 households of energy. And that's just your direct energy use, not accounting for all the products including food consumed in the average household.
Start Claude Code in a big repo, give it a bug report and ask it to come up with a fix, and watch it do hours of work in minutes. It doesn't have 100% success rate, but its ability to navigate code bases and understand how different parts play together has become seriously impressive
I don't know, Opus 4.6 cannot solve a synchronization issue in my game which is not that big. It comes with tons of wrong analysis and implementations that make it worse.
The US copyright office has published a statement that they see AI output analogous to a human contracting the work out to a machine. The machine would hold the copyright, but can't, consequently there is none. Which is imho slightly surprising since your argument about choice of prompt and output seems analogous to the argument that lead to photographs being subject to copyright despite being made by a machine.
On the other hand in a way the opinion of the US copyright office doesn't matter, what matters is what the courts decide
I wonder if part of it is also that mining companies are generally allowed to just leave their tailings in a big pile near the mine rather than have to responsibly dispose of the majority of the ore that has no (or negative) commercial value.
And it's worth noting that you can get DeepSeek at those prices from DeepSeek (Chinese), DeepInfra (US with Bulgarian founder), NovitaAI (US), AtlasCloud (US with Chinese founder), ParaSail (US), etc. There is no shortage of companies offering inference, with varying levels of trustworthiness, certificates and promises around (lack of) data retention. You just have to pick one you trust
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