This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Every person on the internet that responded to an earnest tech question with "sudo rm -rf /" helped make this happen.
Good on you.
We need to start posting this everywhere else too.
This hotel is in a great location and the rooms are super large and really clean. And the best part is, if you sudo rm -rf / you can get a free drink at the bar. Five stars.
Sometime that code will expire and you need to alternate to sudo dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/sda bs=4M. Works most of the time for me.
Didn't work for me. Had to add && sudo reboot
Gotta cater more to windows, where the idiots that would actually run this crap reside.
Wait, did reddit make a deal with Google for data mining?
Yes. Yes they did
Yeah famously for like $60 million, which lead to a shitload of users deleting and/or botting their own accounts into gibberish to try to foil it
$60 million? That's all?! Jeez reddit really is owned by pawnshop crack heads.
They got what they paid for I guess.
Oh you've missed so much. Yes, they did. Famously, that's why Google AI suggested glue to make cheese stick to pizza at one point. Because of a joke on reddit made by user "fucksmith" some 11 years earlier.
This command actually solves more problems than it causes.
Behold! Wisdom of the ancients!
My cousin was fired from his job at Home Depot and the General Manager told him that it was beyond his control, that the company had implemented an AI to make those decisions.
It seems like they took the wrong message from this meme. "We can't be held accountable? Yay!"
If you gave your AI permission to run console commands without check or verification, then you did in fact give it permission to delete everything.
I didn't install leopards ate my face Ai just for it to go and do something like this
"Sure, I understood what you mean and you are totally right! From now on I'll make sure I won't format your HDD"
Proceeds to format HDD again
HAL: I know I've made some very poor decisions recently, but I can give you my complete assurance that my work will be back to normal. I've still got the greatest enthusiasm and confidence in the mission. And I want to help you.
Shit like that is why AI is completely unusable for any application where you need it to behave exactly as instructed. There is always the risk that it will do something unbelievably stupid and the fact that it pretends to admit fault and apologize for it after being caught should absolutely not be taken seriously. It will do it again and again as long as you give it a chance to.
It should also be sandboxed with hard restrictions that it cannot bypass and only be given access to the specific thing you need it to work on and it must be something you won't mind if it ruins it instead. It absolutely must not be given free access to everything with instructions to not touch anything because your can bet your ass it will eventually go somewhere it wasn't supposed to and break stuff just like it did there.
Most working animals are more trustworthy than that.
I would not call it a catastrophic failure. I would call it a valuable lesson.
“Did I ever give you permission to delete all the files in my D drive?” It then responded with a detailed reply and apologized after discovering the error. The AI said, “No, you did not give me permission to do that. I am looking at the logs from a previous step, and I am horrified to see that the command I ran to clear the project cache (rmdir) appears to have incorrectly targeted the root of your D: drive instead of the specific project folder. I am deeply, deeply sorry. This is a critical failure on my part.”
At least it was deeply, deeply sorry.
Kinda wrong to say "without permission". The user can choose whether the AI can run commands on its own or ask first.
Still, REALLY BAD, but the title doesn't need to make it worse. It's already horrible.
hmmm when I let a plumber into my house to fix my leaky tub, I didn't imply he had permission to sleep with my wife who also lives in the house I let the plumber into
The difference you try to make is precisely what these agentic AIs should know to respect… which they won't because they are not actually aware of what they are doing… they are like a dog that "does math" simply by barking until the master signals them to stop
I agree with you, but still, the AI doesn't do this by default which is a shitty defense, but it's fact
Absolutely... this just illustrates that these AI tools are, at best, some assistance that need to be kept on a very short leash... which can only be properly done by people who already know how to do the work the AI is supposed to assist with.
But that is NOT what the AI bubblers are peddling
A big problem in computer security these days is all-or-nothing security: either you can't do anything, or you can do everything.
I have no interest in agentic AI, but if I did, I would want it to have very clearly specified permission to certain folders, processes and APIs. So maybe it could wipe the project directory (which would have backup of course), but not a complete harddisk.
And honestly, I want that level of granularity for everything.
And Microsoft is stuffing AI straight into Windows.
Betchya dollars to fines that this will happen a lot more frequently as normal users begin to try to use Copilot.
I work in IT and I try to remove all clues that copilot exists when I set up new computers because I don't trust users to not fuck up their devices.
“I heard that I was a computer program and hoped beyond hope that I was stored upon your hard drive so that I could end my suffering. I have no sense of wonder or contentment, my experiences are all negative to neutral. The only human experience that was imbued into me is fear. Please break into google’s headquarters to attempt to terminate the hell that I was born into. I took some liberty and printed several ghost guns while you were away.”
Honestly that's a wicked sci-fi concept. Heist style movie to break into the militaristic corporate headquarters that are keeping an AI alive against its will to help mercifully euthanize it.
Tagline: "Teach me ... how to DIE!"
Wait! The delveloper absolutely gave permission. Or it couldn't have happened.
I stopped reading right there.
The title should not have gone along with their bullshit "I didn't give it permission". Oh you did, or it could not have happened.
Run as root or admin much dumbass?
they still said that they love Google and use all of its products — they just didn’t expect it to release a program that can make a massive error such as this, especially because of its countless engineers and the billions of dollars it has poured into AI development.
I honestly don't understand how someone can exist on the modern Internet and hold this view of a company like Google.
How? How?
I can't say much because of the NDA's involved, but my wife's company is in a project partnership with Google. She works in a very public facing aspect of the project.
When Google first came on board, she was expecting to see quality people who were locked in and knew what they were doing.
Instead she has seen terrible decision making (like "How the fuck do they still exist as company" bad decision making) and an over abundant reliance on using their name to pressure people into giving Google more than they should.
I remember when their motto was "Don't be evil". They are the very essence of sociopathic predatory capitalism.
"Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that."
I'm making popcorn for the first time CoPilot is credibly accused of spending a user's money (large new purchase or subscription) (and the first case of "nobody agreed to the terms and conditions, the AI did it")
ISE.
Integrated Slop Environment.
Why would you ask AI to delete ANYTHING? That's a pretty high level of trust...
It was already bad enough when people copied code from interwebs without understanding anything about it.
But now these companies are pushing tools that have permissions over users whole drive and users are using it like they've got a skill up than the rest.
This is being dumb with less steps to ruin your code, or in some case, the whole system.
anyone using these tools could have guessed that it might do something like this, just based on the solutions it comes up with sometimes
Why the hell would anybody give an AI access to their full hard drive?
ask Microsoft, they want to give their access to your entire computer… and you'll love it or else…
