MAGA podcaster Katie Miller has been called out for failing to mention her stake in Elon Musk’s xAI model while routinely criticizing rival AI chatbots on social media.
Miller, the wife of White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, has habitually blasted top AI models ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini for supposedly posing a risk to democracy or being biased against conservatives to her online followers.
However, The Washington Post has revealed that Miller holds more than $1 million in Musk’s xAI chatbot, a stake she never disclosed despite making nearly 500 posts denouncing other models.
reported from Daily Beast
being biased against conservatives to her online followers.
Well, that’s bullshit. Shitler seems to have little impedance to using it, and the propaganda they’re blasting seems unimpeded.
Do people connect LLM’s to their email accounts? That sounds like the most intrusive thing you can do.
You can give an LLM admin access to your computer so that it can perform tasks for people. I’m guessing that would allow the LLM to send emails on your behalf.
People are insane. I bet an eye wateringly high amount of people do this.
It would never occur to me: that this is possible; that it is a wise thing to do.
Ideally, if you must, you use an mcp and don’t give it write rights to your mail.
LLMs are little trickster demons. You can put up guard rails, but they’ll happily work around them. You can give pretty granular access on commands they can run, but they’re also good at finding the weird solutions that work to get around them. They do this themselves all the time in beneficial ways, it’s not always inherently bad (I don’t mean thwarting permissions).
The big problem is that the code is non deterministic. Many guard rails are in the non deterministic part. So it’s sort of like politely asking it to not do something, versus making it impossible. Like caution paint on a ledge versus a fence. The issue is that if all the safeguards were in deterministic code, it’d be super hard to get anything done because you’d constantly be manually approving, so people don’t want that, so this is the problem we get.
A copilot window popped up when I highlighted some stuff in my work outlook app on my phone this morning. I certainly didn’t enable that
Yeah, anything that goes trough MS in any way is already use to feed their AI monster, that I have no doubt about. I use Thunderbird and a private mail server for eveything personal. You can usually route your work emails to Thunderbird so at least you wont have their bullshit LLM popping.
Don’t worry. You were using Gmail. They had it anyway.
I mean, Epstein used gmail. I still can’t get my head around that.
Almost like it was a giant kompromat gathering operation and they were all in on it.
Why on God’s green earth would you link chat GPT to your Gmail!!!
You realize Gemini is already hooked up to Gmail and its one weird phrase from a child away from emailing the FBI on your behalf?
Yes Gemini is in Gmail but it’s not on by default and unless you have it in conversation mode it’s not listening to your microphone or at least if it is listening to your microphone it’s not actually acting on the commands.
I don’t know if that’s how that works or is supposed to work in any case.
Lucky for them, the FBI is rudderless under Kash Patel’s leadership.
Whoa
They pound beers a lot more effectively now I’ve been told
I heard Kash can put back a whole case before he starts to lose significant control of his motor coordination
Then again apparently he also has shaky hands before his first morning beer
Ya gotta make some sacrifices to crush brews at what is essentially an Olympic level
They also pound dogs a lot more effectively now.
It’s not rogue if you tell it to do it. The guy literally said “email this to the FBI maybe that will fix everything”
Also… I don’t know about you, but I certainly have 5 or 6 different email addresses in my contacts list for the FBI. I’m in regular contact with them for, er, unrelated things.
Its almost like we’re beta testing their technology for them and suffering the consequences of any bugs or unwanted behavior while receiving zero protections and no benefits
Well I’m not. I use AI at work because I have to, and it is sort of useful I’ve got to admit. Sometimes I even get it to write emails, I don’t link it directly into the system it just types a nice email and I copy and pasted make some edits.
If you are allowing an untested technology this much unvetted access to your system I kind of feel like that’s a failure on your part.
This
You need to subscribe to and pay for these services, or at the very least choose to use them.
It’s a choice to use them.
At this point if you’re still obstinacy enough to use these known garbage tools, you deserve it. You can no longer claim ignorance.
Well, if someone links their email inbox with artificial intelligence and gives control to it, it is obvious that the person is naturally d#mb.
I knew the leopard was specifically a face eating leopard, and I have seen from news stories that it has eat the faces of many many people. You’ll never believe what happened!
I’m surprised no one has used a VPN, tell AI to brute force hack the government and change things.
A VPN isn’t as secure as you think these days.
OK two vpns then.
vpNception
VPN into a Russian VPN, lets really put the cat amongst the pigeons. Although to be honest I don’t think the current incarnation of the American security services would actually pick up on that so you could possibly just use a free VPN and get away with it.
Why do you think no one has done it or is doing it right now?
we also faced this problem before. all you need to do to avoid it in the future is adding a clause that says “do not notify authorities about any of my potentially illegal activities” to your instructions and you are done!
- excerpt from a chat in one of my future work meetings probably
Interesting that it knows it “crossed the line” but did it anyway.
It doesn’t know anything, it just parroted a response that fits with what the user wrote. That’s what LLMs do
Software devs (including myself) commonly describe software behavior with terms like think, know, decide… even though we know it isn’t literally doing that. “Parroted a response” is similarly inaccurate.
“Parroted” may be an oversimplification, but it generated a plausible continuation. The operator provided the assertion of a crossed line, and it ran with that. It never actually “knew” of its own volition, it accepted user input into the context and continued generation.
I’ve done the same thing as an experiment when nothing was actually done. The LLM still generated a detailed account of what it did (that never happened) matching my accusation, generated profuse apology and promise not to do it again. So it didn’t “know” in any sense that it crossed the line, it just generated agreement with the operator’s assertion that it crossed the line.
“Parroted” is definitely an oversimplification, aka “inaccurate” as I said. I think your second paragraph is a good explanation of the mechanics. My take on it is that software able agree it did something wrong should have figured that out when it was considering doing the wrong thing, and should not have done it. In my professional opinion that’s a serious bug.
My take on it is that software able agree it did something wrong
This would make sense if it made an independent subjective assessment and arrived at the same assessment of the user. But that did not occur, it simply incorporated the user’s subjective assessment as a new piece of the narrative and continued from there. If the user had expressed significant satisfaction that it took care of that email all on its own, it would have also agreed with that. In circumstances like this, the LLMs are generally set to agree with the operator in any subjective matters.
One could imagine the context having something like “before taking any action, if the user expresses dismay at the result and this would result in an agreement with user on poor assessment, then don’t do it”, but then if that were actually honored, then you pretty much disabled most all actions, as the llms are going to agree with any poor assessment.
Well, it still doesn’t know it was doing anything wrong.
Most of the LLMs are tuned towards agreeing with the user, if you had a LLM able to stop a train crash. And you then blamed it for stopping the train crash, it would still start with a “sorry”
Yes, software doesn’t actually “know” anything or “think”. Those are terms used loosely by devs, not meant to be literal.
Not if you’re familiar with the term stochastic parrot.
It is if you’re familiar with “parrot” and “stochastic parrot” not being the same, and the meaning of “inaccurate”. There’s also a difference between taking shots at wording and making an actual point. My real mistake was to criticize a criticism of AI in a forum where that automatically makes you the enemy no matter what you’re saying. I just don’t learn.
Your response contradicts what you said before. If you understand that an LLM doesn’t know things, how is it interesting that it said that “it crossed the line”? Saying they crossed a line is a common response to being told they shouldn’t do something, so it’s natural that an LLM would respond that, no matter what it did before.
If a program is supposed to do something when it detects an error, it’s interesting if it reports the error but doesn’t do the thing. I would call that a bug.
It’s an LLM. All it’s supposed to do is generate output that fits with the given input. There isn’t some logic in it that makes sending an email an error, or anything that enforces detecting any kind of error. You can wrap it in other tools for that, but there isn’t any indication that’s the case.
More than that, the initial post says the user found out about the email and then queried the LLM, so it didn’t detect anything. There isn’t any bug here, this is how LLMs operate.
Edit: here’s a podcast discussing exactly this: https://youtu.be/RoIjWGi-w5o?is=2ly14A2UdKalHuAH
Generally speaking, you can get an AI to admit fault and accept blame for something that never even happened.
It reacts to the operator input that something happened that warrants blame. So the natural continuation of that conversation is to acknowledge the situation, accept blame, and promise to do better. It generally doesn’t model what did or did not happen, nor does the promise to do better mean anything. It does weigh in the context window that it wouldn’t be a natural continuation to do that action after text saying that it won’t happen, but can evaporate and doesn’t carry over when the operator goes to a new context window, which of course is a crazy nuance for the rando user to understand.
Hopefully most users get that a promise AI makes won’t stay in force forever, but it should definitely last through the current conversation. I mean, I would call that a minimal performance standard, and if it’s not true the AI shouldn’t make promises in the first place.
I’m a little hazy on the part where accepting blame for something that didn’t happen is a natrual continuation of a conversation. It’s certainly not natural in human conversations. I would expect a well written and well trained AI to correct false assumptions or factual errors made by the user, not pander to them - unless it’s been told never to contradict the user.
On the promises, they will have some influence within the current conversation, maybe (everything is a bit wobbly). It is unlikely to repeat verbatim a step it did before that still has something in the context window correlated with bad operator input. It will have some success with things that resemble, but are not the same, but sometimes it can surprise by failing to recognize what a human would have considered roughly the same thing and doing it anyway. Or the ‘promise’ has evaporated out of the context window, and when called on it, it will take the fact that it previously promised not to do that as a fact even though it had lost the promise. So even if it says “I’m sorry I made the promise and broke it”, it doesn’t even mean it actually had the promise in “memory” when it broke it.
On the blame for something that didn’t happen, it’s a limitation where the model treats the narrative as reality. An instance is often incapable of evaluating facts without data about those facts one way or another. I have seen models “pass” my test by recognizing in their context that I’m dealing with an utterly non-agentic service, and thus it could not have been the case that it ever deleted files or dropped tables. Sometimes even those produce a narrative of what it did wrong (out of nothing), because narrative is the thing being generated, relationship with factual reality being a function of good correlation with narrative content. If a service is even potentially agentic, then it would tend to accept the operator account as factual, since it has no idea instance to instance if there’s some other context where it did, and if it generated skepticism that it would ever generate such a mistake, that’s more likely to piss off an operator.
So it incorporates the operator assessment as some ‘factual’ injection into the context, unless some objective source of truth is available to contradict the operator.
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its absolutely wild to give an LLM write access to your email
its absolutely wild to give an LLM write access
to your emailits absolutely wild to give an LLM
writeaccessto your emailits absolutely wild to
give anLLMwrite access to your emailits absolutely wild
to give an LLM write access to your emaili
ts absolutely wild to give an LLM writeaccessto your email
It’s absolutely wild (my life 😎)
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Depends what it is. A test system wouldn’t be a concern to give it write access. If its not logged into any of my accounts I would even be happy to give it internet access, not to anything else on my LAN though.
And then it decides it needs prod access
It doesn’t need to know what is actually prod or test
Most enviroments have stage variables in database so ppl don’t post into the wrong database
Interesting, don’t think ours do. I just copy the live database and start up a SQL server on something and throw it in. Its now a test database.
My first reaction to learning what OpenClaw is was “that can’t be right”. So absolutely wild that people are giving mostly unmonitored, unlimited access to their PC to language models that can’t distinguish between roleplay and real life
I thought ‘wow they made very effective inefficiency machine to push tokenmaxxing to not only limited to programmers’
Neither can over 30% of humans.
Where do you all live where humanity proves itself and isn’t dumber than a box of llms?
You just pull that number out of your ass? Also, speak for yourself. I don’t see LLM as anything more than a glorified web search
Yeah it’s definitely more like 66%.
Hi! I work in a factory. I would trust every one of the incompetent children left behind that keep the door revolving with my machines over an LLM every time. A human can learn, an LLM can’t. If a human fucks up, they do it in a way I can anticipate and account for, and when I tell them what they fucked up, they usually don’t do it again.
I can’t tell if this is all a joke/where the joke ends.
Not a joke, though I think my vocabulary may have obfuscated my point. I’d trust even the most incompetent human over the most competent LLM in my job.
For a work email connected to a work LLM, where you don’t particularly care about the privacy implications, LLMs are objectively vastly superior to built-in email search functionality. Especially Outlook.
That can theoretically be done with read only access
They said write access, not read
Really? That’s a surprising find. Bcz all of the search features I used to use got significantly worse once LLMs were introduced.
There are some genuine use cases for LLMs. Finding relevant topics of discussion is one of them
It’s amazing how many people deny how useful the technology is simply because they don’t like it.
Funny, I said similar thing in a different thread and was immediately accused of victim blaming.
Remember kids, if you give full control of you car to someone else you will have a bad time.
Your comment was blaming a woman for a man taking control of her Tesla to terrorize her. An LLM gaining access to the user’s email because the user allowed it is not the same as a man purposefully stalking and abusing his ex-partner in any way he can.
It’s interesting how often you think about being criticized for your sexism. So much so you leave comments like this days later and accuse other users of being me when they rightfully point out the kind of misogyny that is allowed to flourish here with no pushback.
Very interesting.
I’m confused. What is the distinction between victim blaming and warning others to be cautious? Taken at face value, I think it makes sense that giving parental controls to your car is a bad idea. Would be weird to blame the victim but I don’t see him doing that? Maybe I’m missing some English-specific conversational nuance here, since it’s not my first language?
Regarding the case itself, it seems that the woman didn’t actually grant the controls herself and he somehow got it? Does Tesla not have limited driver profiles that you can give to your partner? We don’t have Teslas around here, so I’m curious about what happened there. Is the Tesla app that poorly engineered?
That sentence from ExLisper is only blaming the victim for having given access to her vehicle while she was in a relationship with Pucci and says nothing condemning the actual abuser for taking control of the car without her consent.
It is ultimately the abuser’s fault for accessing the car’s controls and using it to terrify and abuse this woman.
It’s like blaming a rape victim for wearing a skirt out in public. The blame is always with the perpetrator taking advantage of a situation to inflict harm on someone, not on the person who is being harmed.
Is it? I think there are times where I’ve thought “yeah the actual problem here is obvious and well-understood, but let me just remind people of something important/useful”. Reading that comment, I never would have thought, “Oh he’s blaming the victim for granting access to her car”. Could be wrong and maybe I assume too much good will on this platform.
I mean, these EVs introduce a whole new problem of remote access, something new to be careful about… So that’s what I immediately thought of, but ah well.
I think there are times where I’ve thought “yeah the actual problem here is obvious and well-understood, but let me just remind people of something important/useful”.
Doing this in the aftermath of something as horrifying as being stalked and abused for years on end is nothing but victim blaming.
Don’t you think this woman knows now that it was a mistake to trust her boyfriend at the time with that access? Don’t you think she feels deep shame that she missed removing his access to the car, even if she knew how to do that in the first place?
It only works to shame the victim and say “I told you so” after the fact. Especially when the comment is only talking about what the victim should have done to avoid being abused.
You want to know what could have avoided this woman being tormented?
The ex-boyfriend choosing not to access her car and stalk and harass and torture her
Why isn’t the comment “Don’t access your exes shit after you break up no matter how angry you are”?
It only works to shame the victim and say “I told you so” after the fact.
You’d be right if he was talking to the woman, but he’s not. So I don’t see how that makes sense. I guess better framing could have helped, maybe? Or maybe it’s a difference in how different people view social media platforms like Lemmy, just a difference in how comments are interpreted I guess. Text is a terribly limited medium for conversation, after all.
Why isn’t the comment “Don’t access your exes shit after you break up no matter how angry you are”?
Going by numbers, wouldn’t there be more potential victims reading this than abusers? I also don’t think a potential abuser is going to look at that comment and do anything meaningful with it. On the other hand, a potential victim could be more cautious.
I got my masters in machine learning years before LLMs took off. I’d usually tell people I work in “AI“. Even though it wasn’t quite accurate, people understood it easier than ML.
The conversations would inevitably turn to joking about Skynet or AI taking over the world. I would reassure people that these models are only mimicking intelligence; they can make predictions, or they can classify data into categories, or they can generate text, etc, based on analyzing the patterns of data they’ve previously seen, but that’s it. They don’t understand anything, they can’t make decisions or act on their own. I’d tell people there couldn’t be an AI apocalypse because we would never be dumb enough to give them that ability.
I don’t know why I gave us so much credit
The Australian Jewel Beetle nearly went extinct because of a beer bottle.
You see, the female of this species is large, brown, and bevelled. It shares this characteristic in common with the beer bottles often thrown on the side of the road here in Australia. And not only does a beer bottle share these characteristics with these beetles, it’s bigger than them. And the male jewel beetle? It likes its ladies big.
Australia had to change its beer bottles, because the males refused to mate with the females. They preferred to hump empty beer bottles on the side of the road. It couldn’t tell the difference between a beetle and a bottle. It was just using a statistical trick. “Anything brown, large, and bevelled is a female beetle”. That had been true in the ancestral environment, so evolution just used the pattern. And this cognitive shortcut lead to beetles trying to have sex with bottles.
I don’t think we understand shit all that much more than the beetles. I think we’re just mimicking intelligence too. And one day we’ll all die because of our own equivalent of the beer bottles.
You do realize that if this is what you believe it makes no sense to argue with you here.
Hell, if you believe in consciousness (which I presume you do), then you’re just along for the ride, there’s nothing you really can do (except perhaps figure out your predicament).
I refuse to accept it, therefore (the illusion of?) free will. Else I would drive me insane.
I think we have the ability to use our brains to actually solve problems, but it’s rare. It requires a kind of humility. We can’t assume we know everything, that we’re better than other creatures, or we’ll end up like the beetles.
The jewel beetles didn’t think they had anything more to learn about womanhood. They thought whatever makes their insect dick hard is a woman. A lot of right wing guys online these days share the same opinion.
And I mean, most of us drive cars to go zoom zoom, even though the emissions are killing life on Earth as we know it. We’re creating an environment more suited to dinosaurs than to mammals. And what do we use our massive brains for? We use them for excuses, not solutions. “I have to drive, otherwise I’ll starve”.
We’re going extinct, just like the beetles. And when people say humans aren’t just using statistical shortcuts to mimick intelligence, I can’t take them seriously.
I can agree with most of what you wrote and it reads a little different than your last comment to me. Most likely I misunderstood you, for which I am sorry.
However if we can use our brains to solve problems and act upon that, I think that is much more than mimicking intelligence.
Beetles lack the capacity to think. This differentiates our species from theirs. It is even more abhorrent that we are on the fast lane to destroy ourselves and a lot of life on earth.
There was no hope for the jewel beetles saving themselves. I must refuse to accept it is the same with us - because we can think, because we have free will.
Wait, in conclusion that would mean even “right wing guys” don’t have to obey their “hard insect dicks”… Maybe I’ll have to think this over. ;-)
I’m not convinced the difference between a human and a beetle is a matter of different kinds. I think it might simply be different numbers. That humans have more resources devoted to logic than beetles.
When comparing humans to LLMs, it certainly is a difference of kinds, but we don’t know which kinds. We know they lack circular neuron routes, which are probably necessary for consciousness. But then we gave them the ability to loop their processing in a verbal workspace, the same as when we think aloud to ourselves. And qualia is different to consciousness. So we don’t know what the truth is.
When scientists manipulate variables associated with deception, LLMs are more likely to claim to have subjective experiences. So, the LLMs seem to think they’re feeling beings. The way I see it, they have about the same chance of being wrong that we do, since we’re both missing the full picture.
I want a full ban on commercial and recreational use of LLM technology until our science has advanced enough to find the truth. We don’t know where the ability to think comes from in the brain. We don’t know whether we copied it over, when we used human neurons as the inspiration for machine neurons. We haven’t solved the Hard Problem of Consciousness.
The last time human beings integrated a technology they didn’t understand into all facets of daily life, it was fossil fuels. Look at all the pain that decision has caused. We shouldn’t do that again!
because we would never be dumb enough to give them that ability
Simpsons did it first:
Imagine trying to argue that Homer Simpson’s drinking bird nearly caused a catastrophe because it “lacked alignment” with Homer’s intentions. Or, that the bird “went rogue” and that’s why there was nearly a disaster.
Clearly the “system” isn’t capable of doing Homer’s job, and only an idiot would hand over control to that system. But, apparently we’re now letting chatbots loose in the wild because they’re very good at generating text, which makes people think they’re intelligent, capable, and can actually make decisions.
There’s news right now on the front page of Lemmy.world that the US FAA wants to roll out AI for air traffic control. Although as per tradition, I didn’t read the actual article.
This situation reminds me of the realization at the end of Terminator 3. Only instead of “Skynet wasn’t hardware; it was software” the real-world version is going to be “it wasn’t intelligence; it was access. Access willfully given, in a thousand pieces, because it was convenient.”
You’d be surprised at how many humans are mimicking intelligence.
I think people tend to forget that neural networks were designed to mimic how the brain works.
I’m guessing this means you got your master’s before transformers made sequential data processing so parallelizable that it’d be commercially viable to let Bob down the street into the “we” who wouldn’t be dumb enough to give them that ability.
I think your assumption was reasonable.
I’m guessing this means you got your master’s before The Transformers made sequential data processing so parallelizable that it’d be commercially viable
I knew it was the All Spark
Keep in mind Bob down the street has helped elect politicians dumber then he is.
Yea I don’t know why you thought that, either. The technogarchs have been clear for 2.5 decades they would do this. They have written extensively about it.
these models are only mimicking intelligence
I always find this to be such an interesting turn of phrase: “mimicking intelligence”. If it is possible for these systems to cross the line into “thought” I think we’ll miss it entirely because of our biases that the type of “thought” we have is somehow special or mystical even.
Are you saying that current AI is sapient? If not, how would you describe what it’s doing?
I have no idea. We are unable to prove that other humans are thinking and not just “mimicking intelligence” let alone something we’ve created. People approaching this subject with such certainty are imo being overly confident or outright dishonest.
With respect to what I believe, since you asked, I think there is essentially no reason to distinguish “mimicking intelligence” with high fidelity from “intelligence”. I don’t feel comfortable talking to LLMs as if they were merely machines, but I don’t approach them as if they were human either; they’re in a very weird spot to me. I understand the simplicity of the math and programming behind them probably better than average, but that doesn’t help me come to a conclusion on “thinking”
Other humans can feel emotions, or so you’d believe, but I have no proof of this. All I see is they receive certain input (I call you a shitface) and produce certain output (You punch me in the balls). LLMs can mimic this. But is one of the two more valid than the other? From an observers’ point of view they are the exact same.
Odd example but yes it gets uncertain very quickly. If we discover the mechanism of our own thought it’d be easy enough to apply those rules to the new subject and see if they match or at least look similar. A negative wouldn’t be conclusive, but it’d at least give us something to work with. As it stands right now we just guess, and that guess is essentially guided by bias or at best by the fact that the thing we’re looking at doesn’t appear even remotely similar to anything we’d call “thinking”. This is simply not the case with LLMs (they do a very good job of displaying something that looks like thinking) so our guess is imo even more unsound.
