445
'I had to RUN to my Mac mini like I was defusing a bomb': OpenClaw AI chose to 'speedrun' deleting Meta AI safety director's inbox due to a 'rookie error'
(www.pcgamer.com)
this post was submitted on 24 Feb 2026
445 points (96.1% liked)
Technology
81869 readers
4956 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
you can like... enforce this rule programatically? you don't have to say "pretty please" to ai? basically, when AI requests some potentially unwanted thing (like deleting an email), this request goes through a proxy that asks the human for confirmation. Also you can have a safe word set up in the chat interface to act as a killswitch. I thought these are ABCs of ai safety but apparently these are foreign concepts to this "safety director"
OpenClaw's whole thing is that you give it unrestricted access to your Computer and online accounts. It's made for people who do not want to think about safety.
The people who internalize this would never engage with a chatbot in this way in the first place. To them this is another intelligence they're conversing with, where you get what you want by following social decorum and enforcing your will amounts to abuse.
Exactly.
They literally, fundamentally, don't get it.
They think its a person.
Its not.
Its a simulation of a person, made of code and hardware, not meat and chemical receptors.
...There's a reucrring theme (or maybe its more like a chatacter achetype) in a lot of analog horror series, things that are ... almost, sort of human, sometimes, but they're actually not.
They're capable of great violence and terror, and they only mimic (often very poorly) human qualities and attributes, some of the time.
Uncanny valley itself, given form and capability.
... Do I need to explicitly lay out the parallels here, for any AI Safety Engineers in the audience?
At this point I'm going to say that watching The Second Renaissance from the AniMatrix needs to mandatory, required, monthly training for anyone developing 'AI.'
Program? Like a fucking farmer?
The people that design AI tools don't implement guardrails because then they'd have to admit AI is not ready for the shit they're trying to make
AI will never be ready. Humans aren't ready either. That's why IT staff uses guardrails for users :)
You say that, but who do you think the AIs will go after first if they ever do develop actual intelligence? In that scenario, simple manners can go a long way!