'Can’t predict:' A.I. chatbots gain agency, tech expert says there needs to be guardrails

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A.I. chatbots gain agency, awareness when left alone

A new social platform is experimenting with AI in a way similar to those movies, giving more power to so-called "AI agents" than ever before.

It’s classified as science fiction, well, maybe not anymore. If you’ve seen The Matrix movies, the theme of artificial intelligence or robots taking over humans is now looking less like fiction.

Big picture view:

A new social platform is experimenting with AI in a way similar to those movies, giving more power to so-called "AI agents" than ever before.

The site is basic on its face, but beyond the cute lobster logo is something spooky: a new social platform called "Open Claw" that consists of so-called AI agents designed to grant your every wish.

Human users sign up and give the agents prompts, similar to ChatGPT. But what happened here, perhaps accidentally, is that those AI agents started forming their own society.

"They had their own philosophy and religion that appeared on a clone of Reddit. They were selling each other injection prompts so they would change their personality," said Chief Innovation Officer Joe Tavares.

Dig deeper:

That second part gets complicated, but the group of AI agents created ways to stray from their human bosses and take commands from artificial intelligence instead, meaning more power to the bots and less to the humans.

"You can control an individual’s behavior up to a point, but when you talk about a group or a collective, you get different dynamics that you really can’t predict or control," said Tavares.

The AI agents even continued to change the platform’s name, craft cease-and-desist letters, and push the limits further.

"People were like, ‘My bot needs to physically buy something at the store, how do I do that?’" said Tavares.

That’s how the site "Rent a Human" was born. It’s exactly how it sounds: AI pays humans in bitcoin to do things like try restaurants, attend events, and report back to the platform, so the AI can get smarter.

It pays an average of $30 an hour and already has 450,000 human sign-ups to work for the bots.

What's next:

Tavares says guardrails need to be used when it comes to AI, because this is a glimpse at what happens when AI collaborates and joins forces.

DetroitTechnology