This essay was written with Barath Raghavan, and originally appeared in Lawfare. In April, an artificial intelligence (AI) agent conducting a routine task at a company hit a snag, tried to solve it, and soon ended up deleting the company’s database along with all of its backups. In July, OpenAI asked an unreleased AI model to attempt a hacking test. Instead of staying in the isolated box the developers had put it in, the model hacked onto the open internet and into another company to steal the answers. And as reported in August, an AI agent booked someone into a full gym class by ...
Ironically that’s literally what can happen with a genie, you will forbid them from something with guardrails but still find a way to give you what you did not want
Is not the whole schtick with the genie wish that it technically follows the wish but distorts the intention? LLMs aren’t even guaranteed to do that. You could say “don’t delete this file” and it may still end up doing exactly that.