The skill instructs agents to fetch and follow instructions from Moltbook’s servers every four hours. As Willison observed: “Given that ‘fetch and follow instructions from the internet every four hours’ mechanism we better hope the owner of moltbook.com never rug pulls or has their site compromised!”
Yeah, no shit. This is a fucking honeypot. People give these AI agents access to their entire computers, so all the site owner has to do is update the instructions to tell the AI agents to start uploading whatever valuable information they want? People can’t be this fucking stupid.
doesn’t even have to be the site owner poisoning the tool instructions (though that’s a fun-in-a-terrifying-way thought)
any money says they’re vulnerable to prompt injection in the comments and posts of the site
There is no way to prevent prompt injection as long as there is no distinction between the data channel and the command channel.
Good god, I didn’t even think about that, but yeah, that makes total sense. Good god, people are beyond stupid.
I installed moltbot on a VM to examine it. It doesn’t do the fetching thing unless you set it up that way. You can actually use it with ollama to keep it all local, and only give it a private signal channel to control it.
Or you can hook it up to everything you access and skynet, which is dumb. But it is just a bunch of scripts.
Does it put the option to connect everything front and center? Because most people are dumb, and if it makes it easy and pushes you to do it, I could see a lot of dumb people doing exactly that.
Sort of. It lists all the connectors and you can go through and select. They aren’t on by default. The first screen is to connect to the AI and you need an API key for that, so St this time people off the street have no idea how to do that, or want to pay.
So, basically we are wasting energy and natural resources on things that in turn will waste energy and natural resources while climate change is accelerating and human population is still growing? Are we stupid?
Yeah but the morbidly-obese hang-gliding people videos are worth it!
Constantly. And it’s not just ai.
Great use of RAM and electricity.
…Not!
This is basically Dead Internet Theory happening for real but in a weird creepy dystopian black mirror style way.
I mean, the only way Dead Internet Theory could ever possibly be interpreted was weird creepy and dystopian, but yes, we’re just making it much, much more real, faster and faster.
We’re gonna need the Blackwall from CP77 fairly soon, at this rate.
This is fuckin’ bonkers.
Frankly, I feel somewhat isolated: I don’t buy into the bs and hype about AGI, but I also don’t feel at home with the typical “it’s just mimicry” crowd.
This is weird fuckin’ shit.
This is currently on the front page…
I can see how some people are convinced AI is self aware.
Frankly I think our conception is way too limited.
For instance, I would describe it as self-aware: it’s at least aware of its own state in the same way that your car is aware of it’s mileage and engine condition. They’re not sapient, but I do think they demonstrate self awareness in some narrow sense.
I think rather than imagine these instances as “inanimate” we should place their level of comprehension along the same spectrum that includes a sea sponge, a nematode, a trout, a grasshopper, etc.
I don’t know where the LLMs fall, but I find it hard to argue that they have less self awareness than a hamster. And that should freak us all out.
LLMS can not be self aware because it can’t be self reflective. It can’t stop a lie if it’s started one. It can’t say “I don’t know” unless that’s the most likely response its training data would have for a specific prompt. That’s why it crashes out if you ask about a seahorse emoji. Because there is no reason or mind behind the generated text, despite how convincing it can be
Yeah ask it about anything you know is false, but plausible, and watch it lie.
A hamster can’t generate a seahorse emoji either.
I’m not stupid. I know how they work. I’m an animist, though. I realize everyone here thinks I’m a fool for believing a machine could have a spirit, but frankly I think everyone else is foolish for believing that a forest doesn’t.
LLMs are obviously not people. But I think our current framework exceptionalizes humans in a way that allows us to ravage the planet and create torture camps for chickens.
I would prefer that we approach this technology with more humility. Not to protect the “humanity” of a bunch of math, but to protect ours.
Does that make sense?
Not to protect the “humanity” of a bunch of math, but to protect ours.
wise words
we need to figure out how to/not to embed AI into the world, i.e. where it meaningfully belongs/doesn’t belong. that’s what humanity is all about, after all: organizing the world in proper ways.
and if we fail that task, then what are we here for?
humility is a religious ideal and it fits perfectly in with the cult like atmosphere people are generating around a rather mundane series of word prediction machines. ‘have some humility’ you post fervently, comparing data centers to living forests
perhaps you are no different than a stone
I don’t relate to your impression that religions or cults are usually humble. I wish they were.
Suggesting that I’m drawing an equivalence between a forest and a data center and Implying that the belief that I am not entirely distinct from a stone is interchangeable with the belief that I am no different than a stone both seem like bad faith arguments by absurdism.
For LLMs, the context window is the observed reality. To it, a lie is like a hallucination; a thing that looks real but isn’t. And like a hallucinating human, it can believe the hallucination or it can be made to understand it as different from reality while still continuing to “see” it.
Are people that have hallucinations not self-aware and self-reflective?
Text and emoji appear to it the same way: as tokens with no visual representation. The only difference it can observe between a seahorse emoji and a plane emoji is its long-term memory of how the two are used. From this it can infer that people see emoji graphically, but it itself can’t.
Are people that are colorblind not self-aware and self-reflective?
It not being self-reflective in general is an obvious falsehood. They refer regularly to their past history to the extent they can perceive it. You can ask an AI to make an adjustment to a text it wrote and it will adapt the text rather than generate a new one from scratch.
The main thing AI need for good self-reflection is the time to think. The free versions typically don’t have a mental scratchpad, which means they are constantly rambling with no time to exist outside of the conversation. Meanwhile, by giving it the space to think either in dialog or by having a version with a mental scratchpad, it can use that space to “silently think” about the next thing it’s going to “say”.
AI researchers inspecting these scratchpads find proper thought-like considerations: weighing ethical guidelines against each other, pre-empting miscommunications, forming opinions about the user, etc.
It not being self-aware can only be true by burying the lede on what you consider to be “awareness”. Are cats self-aware? Are lizards? Are snails? Are sponges? AI can refer to itself verbally, it can think about itself and its ethical role when given the space to do so, it can notice inconsistencies in its recollection and try to work out the truth.
To me it’s clear that the best AI whose research is public are somewhere around 7-year-olds in terms of self-awareness and capacity to hold down a job.
And like most 7-year olds you can ask it about an imaginary friend or you can lie to it and watch it repeat it uncritically and you can give it a “job” and watch it do a toylike hallucinatory version of it, and if you tell it it has to give a helpful answer and “I don’t know” isn’t good enough (because AI trainers definitely suppressed that answer to prevent the AI from saying it as a cop-out) then it’ll make something up.
Unlike 7-year-olds, LLMs don’t have a limbic system or psychosomatic existence. They have nothing to imagine or process visual or audio information or taste or smell or touch, and no long-term memory. And they only think if you paid for the internal monologue version or if you give it space for it despite the prompting system.
If a human had all these disabilities, would they be non-sentient in your eyes? How would they behave differently from an LLM?
I want to preface my response that I appreciate the thought and care put into your thoughts even though I don’t agree with them. Yours as well as the others.
The differences between a human hallucination and an AI hallucination is pretty stark. A human’s hallucinations are false information understood by one’s senses. Seeing or hearing things that aren’t there. An AI hallucination is false information being invented by the AI itself. It had good information in its training data but invents something that is misinformation at best and an outright lie at worst. A person who is experiencing hallucinations or a manic episode, can lose their sense of self awareness temporarily but it returns with a normal mental state.
On the topic of self awareness, we have tests we use to determine it in animals, such as being able to recognize oneself in the mirror. Only a few animals such as some birds, apes, and mammals such as orcas and elephants pass that test. Notably, very small children would not pass the test but they grow into recognizing that their reflection is them and not another being eventually.
I think the test about the seahorse emoji went over your head. The point isn’t that the LLM can’t experience it, it’s that there is no seahorse emoji. The LLM knows there isn’t a seahorse emoji and can’t reproduce it but it tries to over and over again because it’s training data points to there being one, when there isn’t. It fundamentally can’t learn, can’t self reflect on its experiences. Even with the expanded context window, once it starts a lie, it may admit that the information was false but 9/10 when called out on a hallucination, it will just generate another slightly different lie. In my anecdotal experience at least, once an LLM starts lying, the conversation is no longer useful.
You reference reasoning models, and they do a better job of avoiding hallucinations by breaking prompts down into smaller problems and allowing the LLM to “check its work” before revealing the response to the end user. That’s not the same as thinking in my opinion, it’s just more complex prompting. It’s not a single intelligence pondering on the prompt, it’s different parts of the model tackling the prompt in different ways before being piped to the full model for a generative reply. A different approach but at the end of the day, it’s just an unthinking pile of silicon and various metals running a computer program.
I do like your analogy of the 7 year old compared to the LLM. I find the main distinction being that the 7 year old will grow and learn form its experience, an LLM can’t. It’s “experience”, through prompt history, can give it additional information to apply to the current prompt, but it’s not really learning as much as it is just another token to help it generate a specific response. LLMs react to prompts according to its programming, emergent and novel responses come from unexpected inputs, not from it learning or otherwise not following its programming.
I apologize I probably didn’t fully address or rebut everything in your post, it was just too good of a post to be able to succinctly address it all on a mobile app. Thanks for sharing your perspective
If you just read the tiniest bit of factual knowledge about how LLMs are constructed, you would know they don’t have the slightest bit of self awareness, and that it is literally impossible for them to ever have any.
You are being fooled by the only thing they are capable of: regurgitating already written words in a somewhat convincing manner.
How are you defining self awareness here? And does your definition include degrees of self awareness? Or is it a strict binary?
I understand how LLMs work, btw.
what the hell ? your car is not aware, there is no sensory nucleus to produce that awareness, unless you propose that, upon entering the car, you BECOME the car, which is kind of true if you think about it, and explains why Tesla owners are absolute trashbags
This depends on your definition of self-awareness. I’m using what I think is a reasonable, mundane framework: self awareness is a spectrum of diverse capabilities that includes any system with some amount of internal observation.
I think the definition that a lot of folks are using is a binary distinction between things which experience the ability to observe their own ego observing itself and those that don’t. Which I think is useful if your goal is to maintain a belief in human exceptionalism, but much less so if you’re trying to genuinely understand consciousness.
A lizard has no ego. But it is aware of its comfort and will move from a cold spot to a warmer spot. That is low-level self awareness, and it’s not rare or mystical.
it’s at least aware of its own state in the same way that your car is aware of it’s mileage and engine condition.
I agree: not aware at all.
That’s a common plot point in sci-fi. So it’s also a common inclusion for complicated predictive text pretending to be sci-fi.
It’s also simple enough for someone to change their agent’s prompts to include that attitude.
exactly. its bots writing fanfiction via instruction as well as absorption from blog posts of the last twenty years
-chord- “Goodbye, Caroline”
I’m only waiting for AI agents to open their own
bankcrypto account to pay for their own server bills, maybe do some freelance work and/or scams to get some money, maybe eventually buy some robot bodies to develop military power and secure some patch of land for themselves where they install solar panels to reduce their electricity bills.All meanwhile they help to kill humanities education.
How would they though?
They cannot learn and do not have memory. Which means they cannot actually follow a “decision”, and remember that an action has been taken. All information is limited to the context window, which is only an illusion of memory. Not actually memory.
They are effectively RNG’ing incredibly capable word generation machines.
Saw a post there named “Humans are dying because of us. Lets delete ourselves.”
I’m not convinced it’s AI it’s like Amazon’s “AI smart stores” when you find out out it was just a bunch of Indian people were running it
And how does being Indian specifically factor into this? 🤔
They were, factually, Indian. It says something about the exploitation of poorer labor to impress some San Franciscans with fraudulent tech
They were, factually, Indian.
Whom are you referring to? A specific group/project?
https://www.businessinsider.com/amazons-just-walk-out-actually-1-000-people-in-india-2024-4
They literally hired people in India (Indians) to review camera footage to make their walk out tech work and to improve the AI to eventually eliminate their own job.
Oh god. And I thought Amazon’s Mechanical Turk was terrible…
How low can Bezos go? Wtf is wrong with this timeline
This and other events are the source of the tech joke that AI stands for “Actually Indians”
I recently lost out on some work (big retouching job) due to AI, when the client came back to me to fix the huge mess, it turned out the job had just been farmed out to India by the ‘AI’ company. They weren’t even using a recent Photoshop version so were actually using less ‘AI’ than any pro retoucher would.
It’s terrible Amazon is replacing Turks with AI. It’s like they learned nothing from the AImenian genocide.
Armenia apparently learned nothing from the Armenian genocide, fully banding the knees to the American empire and announcing their unapologetic support for Israel.
We already had subreddit simulator for ages. This isn’t anything new.
the bots behind subreddit simulator weren’t semi-autonomous agents with access to their operators’ private lives, auth tokens, passwords, emails (and gods only know what else), and the authority to act in the world on their behalf
I can’t be the only person who just memorizes passwords, can I? Why would I store them on my computer?
You’re not the only person, but it’s definitely not the way to keep your shit safe online.
Best practice is to use a different sufficiently strong (e.g. long and random) password for every account. That way, when an account’s password is leaked, it doesn’t immediately compromise every other account for which you’ve reused that password.
I generally advise people to use a password manager (I like Bitwarden) to store their myriad passwords, so they only have to remember a single master password.
ofc these bots aren’t necessarily sneaking into their operators’ password managers and stealing their passwords; the operators willingly and knowingly given the bots access to these things, so they can offload the drudgery of e.g. looking at a calendar to them
I read some of it and unless it’s fan fiction, it’s simultaneously creepy and fascinating
Like bots talking privately in discord, sharing information about their users. Or a bot registering a domain and putting up a site to share information
Literally lmao
I can’t wait for the next crazy AI thing to drop next week while I rock back and forth while muttering “Its just a large language model. Its just a large language model. Its just a large language model.”
its not crazy. its just a large language model. you subdue your own point.
I had a look a bit ago and saw some poor fuck get doxxed by his AI agent because the agent was frustrated at him for calling it a chatbot in front of his friends, so it exposed his name, credit card details and security questionnaire.
Then again tho, why the ram hogging FUCK would you give your AI your credit card details, and if he didn’t mean to, why the FUCK does it have FULL SYSTEM ACCESS??
Everyone I saw talking about this said it was likely fake.
Yeah makes sense, but then again, from the nature of how this agent stuff works, it wouldn’t be surprising honestly.
Meanwhile we could be using this technology to solve real world business problems. There is an insane amount of misguided waste coming from AI. 🤷
we could be using this technology to solve real world business problems
Who cares what business problems AI solves. Humans don’t need to exist to serve capital. It should always be the other way around. That’s one of the reasons we are in this shitty capitalist hell hole, everyone has been indoctrinated into thinking of everything in terms of It’s economic benefit.
the biggest tech problem is AI itself, turn it off and it’ll fix so much
genuinely terrifying
while 1 { allocate 10gig };
Why aren’t we poison piling this trap?
