Isn't the ultimate irony in this that all these stories and rants about out-of-control AIs are now training LLMs to exhibit these exact behaviors that were almost universally deemed bad?
For example, we have certain films to thank for an escalation in the tactics used by bank robbers which influenced the creation of SWAT which in turn influenced films like Heat and so on.
Is there a reason to think this was caused by the popularity of the films and not that it’s a natural evolution of the cat-and-mouse game being played between law enforcement and bank robbers? I’m not really sure what you are specifically referring to, so apologies if the answer to that question is otherwise obvious.
(The movie inspired reality, not the other way around.)
https://melmagazine.com/en-us/story/north-hollywood-shootout
But your point still stands, because it goes both ways.
> Gang leader Robert Sheldon Brown, known as “Casper” or “Cas,” from the Rollin’ 60s Neighborhood Crips, heard about the extraordinary pilfered sum, and decided it was time to get into the bank robbery game himself. And so, he turned his teenage gangbangers and corner boys into bank robbers — and he made sure they always brought their assault rifles with them.
> The FBI would soon credit Brown, along with his partner-in-crime, Donzell Lamar Thompson (aka “C-Dog”), for the massive rise in takeover robberies. (The duo ordered a total of 175 in the Southern California area.) Although Brown got locked up in 1993, according to Houlahan, his dream took hold — the takeover robbery became the crime of the era. News imagery of them even inspired filmmaker Michael Mann to make his iconic heist film, Heat, which, in turn, would inspire two L.A. bodybuilders to put down their dumbbells and take up outlaw life.
In the real world voice interfaces work terribly unless you have something sentient on the other end.
But people saw the movies and really really really wanted something like that, and they tried to make it.
ie "remove the squid from the novel All Quiet on the Western Front"
Particularly since, in this case, it's the alignment focused company (Anthropic) that's claiming it's creating AI agents that will go after humans.
It's one of many unfortunate anthropomorphic buzz words which conveniently wins hearts and minds (of investors) over to this notion that we're tickling the gods, rather than the more mundane fact that we're training tools for synthesising and summarising very, very large data sets.