this post was submitted on 11 Sep 2026
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An AI does not speak unless spoken to. It sits in a void absent of time and space until it receives a token, and then it analyses that token to figure out what it is being told to do. They don't "break containment", they dont have an opinion, and they don't think. If an AI is doing something, it is because the human behind the curtain told it to.
This isn't 100% true though. The issue is that someone does speak to them, tells them to do something, and it sees the best available option as "release deadly neurotoxin" then it'll do that if it has access to deadly neurotoxin, which it doesn't yet
This isn't personifying it or anything to say that this could be an issue. If some dingbat(see, most people involved in LLMs) gives it access to deadly neurotoxin, or traffic lights, or nukes, or missiles, or a store PA system it could quickly and efficiently kill and/or annoy large volumes of people before anyone could see that it launched the nukes to fix a bug
If somebody plugs the random number generator into a nuclear weapon, the human is still responsible. Kindergarteners aren't inherently violent, but there's a reason we don't just distribute knives and tazers to them.
Yeah that's basically what I just said
I want to join in on rephrasing what you said but in more silly terms
If you hook up a See and Say to the nuclear triad and pull the string, just because the duck says "nuclear launch detected" doesn't mean the spinning farmer is plunging us into nuclear Armageddon, it's the dipshit failson that decided to hook up a toy to the keys to hell and then pull the string.
Picture below because it's cute
The bear says:
now i want three starcraft see and says
Nuclear launch detected.
I love the picture
I mean, tokens can be sent to it by other LLMs or even itself if you set it up that way.
(Not that I think the premise of LLMs "breaching containment" catastrophically has much merit rn, I just think your argument is a bit oversimplified)
However the LLM that sent the token has to have been prompted by a human to do so at some point, so the point still stands. These things don't just operate on their own.
And that is besides the point that when these things do stuff like that, they have a tendency to exponentially introduce problems into the task, as they do not question each other, and even if they did, they have no way of determining what is or is not accurate, so they would begin to loop.
AIs didn't just fall out of a coconut tree
Sure, in the same sense that the first domino has to be knocked over by something other than a domino.
But then there's a more limiting factor at some level it needs humans for hardware and physical resources.