This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
There are plenty of ways to sandbox it. Treat it as an employee, i.e. give it its own user account, use cgroups, API tokens with custom permissions, etc. Unfortunately, the defaults aren't very secure. And I'm sure most users will just stick with the defaults
The security posture of Moltbook itself is pretty hilarious. For example, the database is (or was — not sure if fixed by now) wide open to the public 😆
Clawdbot, OpenClaw, etc. are such a ridiculously massive security vulnerability, I can't believe people are actually trying to use them. Unlike traditional systems, where an attacker has to probe your system to try to find an unpatched vulnerability via some barely-known memory overflow issue in the code, with these AI assistants all an attacker needs to do is ask it nicely to hand over everything, and it will.
This is like removing all of the locks on your house and protecting it instead with a golden retriever puppy that falls in love with everyone it meets.
You know, in IT security, the weakest link will always be the users... they are easy to fool, they just blindly trust whatever you tell them.
But now, thanks to AI, computers will finally catch up to humans in their ability to be tricked. No longer will you need human users to set their password to easy things to remember. Our new AIs will actually be capable of shortening their encryption key to a common name, and leaving them on post it notes on their desks.
Have you tried asking the puppy to be a better guard dog? That's how the AI safety professionals do it.
If AI agents stick around, I feel like they're going to be the thing millennials as a generation refuse to adopt and are made fun of for in 20-30 years. Younger generations will be automating their lives and millennials will be the holdouts, writing our emails manually and doing our own banking, while our grandkids are like, "Grandpa, you know AI can do all of that for you, why are you still living in the 2000s?" And we'll tell stories about how, in our day, AI used to ruin peoples' lives on a whim.
As a millennial who refuses to touch AI or use I'm already being bullied and excluded lol.
I can‘t decide whether you‘re being way too optimistic about AI in the foreseeable future or about millennials.
By definition, having one's life automated means not knowing how to do anything, and that is very strongly reflected in the younger generation right now if you know any educators. "Why do I need to learn this if an AI can do it?" is a common refrain in their classes.
It's not the life for me.
I don’t think it means that by definition. Not knowing how to do things yourself is a choice. And it’s the same choice we’ve been making ever since human civilization became too complex for one person to be an expert at everything. We choose to not learn how to do jobs we can have someone else, or a machine, handle all the time. If we choose wisely, we can greatly increase our capacity to get things done.
When I went to school in the 90ies, other students were asking the same question about math, because calculators existed. I don’t think they were 100% right because at least a basic understanding of math is generally useful even now with AI. But our teachers who were saying that we shouldn’t rely on calculators because they have limits and we won’t always have one with us were certainly not right either.
Personally I don’t like AI for everything either. But also, current AI assistants are just not trustworthy and for me that’s the more important point. I do write e-mails myself but I don’t see a conceptual difference between letting an AI do it, and letting a human secretary do it, which is not exactly unheard of. I just don’t trust current models nor the companies that operate them enough to let them handle something so personal. Similarly, even though I’ve always been interested in learning languages, I don’t see a big conceptual difference between using AI for translation and asking a human to do it, which is what most people did in the past. And so on.
Yeah, it's like consoles vs PCs. Those who are hardcore PC prefer it due to all the flexibility it provides while hardcore console people find PC too troublesome and complicated.
Which is also the case for smart phones vs PCs where PC is too complicated in that aspect too with people preferring easy to use sandbox and don't even know what a file explorer is.
This is one of those cases where as opposed to people not adopting new tech because they are less educated like old people had trouble comprehending the Internet its more tech and privacy educated individuals being aware of the risks. And even if they use AI they'd opt for a locally run open source instance over the corporate provided ones the masses flock to.
Like people who set up their own personal security camera system versus those who mindless pick up a Blink camera without a second thought.
That's an excellent analogy. Thank you.
Yeah, but those darn whippersnappers won't hear us from their frolicking in their AI clouds.
They will, unfortunately, be radicalized by AI slop in ways we can't currently conceive of. The stupidity and ignorance will be a huge problem in decades to come.
I'm eager for companies to put ai agents in customer support, so I can try tricking the system with "my grandmother" prompts to make it refund all my orders
I actually got a sick discount from Mattress Firm a few years ago just by asking their chatbot if it could give me a better deal on a mattress I wanted.
Did they actually honor it? I recall quite a few people tricking AIs into like, saying they will sell a car for $1, but the company not honoring it.
Or is it likely just car salesman negotiation tactics... IE the matress is actually inflated 75%, AI is given a hard minimum of how low it actually can go, but obviously instructed to do everything possible to close the sale but at the highest price the user will be willing to pay.
Holy frick, actually that sounds like the real hell now that I think of it. Will AI bring haggle pricing to online stores. We have to spend 20 minutes trying to give a story to an AI to get the best price on, something... which of course will then lead to someone developing an AI for shoppers trained to haggle with these for them. End result we burn up an ocean, with 2 AI's making up bogus stories about how badly they are suffering.
Yep, they did. I got something like 25% more than the Presidents Day sale and free delivery.
It wasn't $1 crazy, but it was pretty clear to me the chatbot wasn't programmed particularly well.
Wasn't there one that was basically giving away cubes of tungsten for free?
