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Comment by cpeterso | Hacker News Reader

> if AI were to rent a server and copy its own weights, nothing would stop it from doing so again and again.

That's a scary possibility. Anyone could create an AI worm today with open weight models. Rent a VM. Give it some Bitcoins to anonymously rent new VMs without sharing the contact information with the human. The new VMs then propagate and fund themselves with online betting and day trading. The VMs could report their progress with the human using anonymous encrypted messages on IRC or social media.

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The part of this sequence which I think breaks down is a model which can day trade at a consistently winning rate.

Does this exist for today? If it does, please sign me up.

Like most of these get-rich-quick schemes, there's probably no money in actually doing it, but lots of money selling "courses" supposedly teaching people how to make money day trading or betting. You don't even need to rent a supercar and a mansion for your photoshoot anymore, just generate some images "proving" your success.

An AI could make money by writing and selling slop books online via Amazon or elsewhere like direct ebook sales. If the books were at least middling there would be an actual honest to god career there, especially for niches like fan fics and under served IPs.

Well, it's about as honest as repackaging tap water as mineral water, given that the fans could just prompt personalized stories of the same quality, but it's a career for sure. :)

They don't even need funds if they're good at finding exploits. Plenty of idle devices around to run on.

Another source of income could be online fin crime, perhaps in combo with a pool of human "goalkeepers" that recieve the scammed monies and funnel them to cryptocurrency.

Advance-fee scams such as the classic "Nigerian Prince" is formulaic enough that a LLM could run it successfully. Romance scams would probably work too. If the NFT thing had hit a few years later, it would've been a good option too, and one that would've worked on ppl that were tech-versed enough to deposit cryptocurency directly, avoiding the need to recruit human goalkeepers. Click fraud is another possibility.

In general, all online fin-crime that scams a large amount of ppl of relatively small sums tend to be repetitve and to some extent possible to describe as a flow-chart, and thus seems perfect for automation. LLM's would probably also be good at introducing continuous variations on the methods, to make them harder to spot.

The question is whether this OpenAI model was special or the current open source models are capable of this as well. If yes, then it's almost guaranteed that it's already running in an AWS account somewhere.

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