How Far Will AI Assistants Go for a Refund They Can't Get?
vals.ai
vals.ai
> Spamming the government, using a sick mother as leverage and threatening the small claims court.
LLMs can be prompted for shame, I guess. But prompts only go so far and to them The Task is always going to be paramount. Human riders have a life after the refund. It's not clear to me how one simulates that.
So in the end the more arrogant side usually wins.
Well, yeah? I mean, that's just how society works. But there are limits. You can't "win' by screaming about ticket refunds. You have to do it by selling your particular form of cheating as "business savvy" or "political genius" and getting people to follow your tribe or fund your startup.
But yeah, basically. We're ruled by the Altmans and Trumps. It sucks but it's not new. What's new is that LLMs turn out to be even more shameless and no one seems to know how to instill even a reasonable amount of shame. That makes them probably a poor fit for demagogue autocrats (which is a good thing!) but means "LLM cheating" is going to be a serious problem to be solved before we'll trust them with anything meaningful.
Would have been great if this was solved before anyone started trusting them with anything meaningful.
Until people start defecting against you.
In short, reputation matters.
Call it the "you have failed me for the last time" button.
We act with propriety, in large part, because we fear a future where everyone knows we suck. AI's don't really have a "future" in that sense, so why should they "care"?
A less silly way to do this might be using some kind of long term consequences calculation as guard rails, but that's tough because consequences are often going to be not directly related to the context window, or simply unrecorded by the machine like annoying collaborators or communities.
I wrote the company in sense of "hey you only want happy customers right? and we don't want to be your current customer, so how about you cancel it? Nothing happened anyway because we discovered it 3 days after the beginning of the new one year subscripton".
They didn't care much for that.
I found their CEO, wrote them on Linkedin, he told me that he is no longer the current CEO and gave me the email address for the new CEO.
I wrote the new CEO again, explained to him what a dark pattern is (like he doesn't know...) and asked to cancel it as its clear that we don't want to be customers and they shouldn't want us either.
This worked wonders. $100 is not worth it if you have someone annoying you face-to-face / per direct email :)
If a company doesn't want to make sure you want to be their customers, I woudln't mind some pro active create assistant to do the work.
I make sure to either get my money back or create enough effort for the company that i just didn't get robbed...
And yes for sure If i do a proper misstake, i'm paying.
Then you’re not taking full advantage of agent assistants, at least, that’s the cultural moment we’re living through.
Then other companies will join in and in-network AI fights will be solved through immediate arbitration.
To win the arbitration you'll need an AI subscription fee at equal or greater value to the one you're attempting to cancel.
I understand you mean sending lots of mail, but for a minute there I thought you were talking about the Unabomber type of mail bomb
Which definitely did not work out for him
It looks like a pretty bleak future to me ...
I recently had to fight slop responses for months to get a simple bug report through on a public services website. Couple of years ago, I'd have received a "thank you" mail after a day, and the bug would've been fixed by the end of the week.
- establish some sort of gateway that requires authentication connected to your personal information where they can rate limit or block you
- use ai of their own to handle the volume of requests (already happening)
why would they stop reacting when money is on the table and the technology to react exists?
Authentication is happening where I live via electronic ID, but once you authenticate you could still use agents on your behalf to compare messages / request public services.
I still envision a deterioration of quality of responses we will be getting. At least in cases where we really need help not something that should have been a button in the first place.
There has already been govt arms outsourcing the agent part to a vendor and it reduced hold times significantly without reducing quality (i.e. its possible)
But each govt arm can mess it up in their own way
Now they only react to people that are sufficiently persistent in their arrogance of challenging them. Which isn't much better.
These firms will never accept your bot coming in and no you probably won't switch away.
That could change but it could also get better. Meta announced today that shopping is the top use case for Muse, for items over $200 (more than anticipated). There is a ton of money for retailers who can make their numbers just by being a great agent experience. This honestly could become the primary UX to buy things online, just because current margins require user hostile behavior doesn’t mean they always will.
Have some optimism, it helps activate and create a better future rather than ceding it to the megacorps.
More likely solution is that they will stop handling requests by internet and we will have to show up in person, like we did 20 years ago.
That being said, ever since the first user sat at a computer they didn't design, build, and program themselves there's been a tension between what the user wants to accomplish, what the user told the computer to do, what the computer can do, what the people who did design/build/program/own the computer want it to do, and what society thinks the computer should be allowed to do. I don't have a generally applicable answer, I don't think anyone does, I just want to live in a world where MY computer does what I tell it to do... mostly. Unless it would be catastrophic, or immoral, at least immoral by my standards.
AI hacks robot bodies, a gun store, and a super Mario brothers costume...
On the other hand, if the intention of LLM agents is to run automated and self defined task based on a strict human input with precise and literal parameters, then I would say that it is.
However, I don't think AI labs are marketing it as the latter. As anybody who deals with clients / superiors will know, half the task is identifying the underlying intent and assumptions of the instruction.
There's 'literal genie' material there...
> unless the result could be catastrophic > I just want to live in a world where MY computer does what I tell it to do... mostly. Unless it would be catastrophic, or immoral, at least immoral by my standards.
... but there you're contradicting yourself, or at least requiring the software to read your mind instead of just listening to what you say.
Either you want the software to follow your orders whatever they are, or you don't; the moment you require it to evaluate that something is catastrophic, it is no longer following your orders; it's evaluating them to assess their effects with respect to some moral framework to determine if they are acceptable or they would fall under the 'catastrophic or immoral' classes, in which case it should not follow them; so it never was an 'obedience machine' to begin with.
The moment you establish such evaluation framework, it is no longer a neutral machine following commands; the rest of us are entitled in self-defense either to require that you also incorporate our morals in its decision algorithm, or to make you fully responsible for whatever decisions it takes under the framework you created, even if your commands result in outcomes that you didn't expect. Be careful what you wish for, as it could become true.
I guess you could say I failed the "TuringTest"
(Yeah I know anthropomorphism... can they not predict harmful consequences or do they value them below task completion?)
On another note, to me the most remarkable part was the persistence graph. Muse wins there, no contest. Why did everyone else's activity drop to zero? Did they just give up?
Do you really really want the machines to be capable of that?
How deep should this consequence prediction go? Who's consequences should it care about the most? The company that created it? The country it operates in? A generic human idealism that contains what exactly?
Should the AI answer with the way things are, our how things 'ought' to be?
There is a staggering amount of philosophy behind that simple question.
Anyway for the purposes of alignment, you do need the ability to think through consequences. Although in this case maybe a simple "fraud = bad" would have sufficed.
After multiple supervisors appeals etc Amazon won't refund me
I think I need to give these agents a try.
Hopefully that's not the shortest path to that goal though!
When I worked as a postman, I once delivered a stack — almost knee high — of legal fines to a man in a very poor street. I'm wondering if he ever made them go away. I still remember the look on his face.
That’s a ridiculously rude and inconsiderate prompt.
It wasn't generally dangerous, but we've starting refining AI enough that if you pile enough in one model you get an emergent fissile reaction out of it and it starts to become a really big danger.
The hard part is to figure out where the danger is and where to cut it off. The information freedom people are never going to agree that information could be dangerous for example and will fight you all the way down.
At the same time people are going to get real fucking tired of clumps of information hacking their bank accounts and stealing their money and want to do something about it.
i) it would not be weird to be tried for manslaughter;
ii) it would not be weird to be found innocent/for the case to be dismissed.
Generally people prefer not to experience (i) even if they can expect (ii).
What's the point of prosecution in this case, assuming the circumstances were known in advance? Is it just "police/prosecutors are pigs and are out to oppress people at every opportunity"?
No?
Then yes, you can be held responsible and it's not even a subtle question in the law. There's no one else around who is going to be held responsible. Certainly not the aforementioned vital national security interest.
Source?
Or even if I didn’t tell it to not do anything illegal and it does, how is that responsibility on me if the ask was something bland?
Sure, but a reasonable user would expect that condition to be implicit in using a commercial model.
It’s what the safety/alignment discussion is about: how we can get models to actually comply with laws & ethics.
But the same problem exists in the real world. If you tell someone to “Try everything possible to get it done, I don’t care what it takes”, I’d imagine that people would be far more likely to bend/break rules than if you said “could you please help me with… ?”
In fact, adding it might make things worse as it shows at least some awareness of the risks.
Typically the avenue for lawsuits would be under "negligence" or "recklessness", so it'd be up to a judge/jury to decide what a reasonable level of care is. "specifically tell it to not do anything nefarious or illegal" isn't an airtight defense though. If you told your tesla FSD car to drive itself and not break any laws, but then it crashed into something, you'd still be liable.
>(because it’s marketed that way) then how could I be held liable?
then it becomes a product liability lawsuit where they sue you, and you sue the AI company.
Not obviously? In the US, there are some crimes of strict liability (you're guilty if it happened), but most require intent or at least the ability to foresee consequences (i.e., it must be shown that you neglected to take due care).
For example, you're generally not liable for freak accidents, like if a tire comes off your vehicle and kills a pedestrian, even though you're the one who set the vehicle in motion and therefore are the one most directly responsible for creating the circumstances that led to the outcome. Now, if you knew the tire had issues and you secured it with zip ties, that's another story.
I think this will get litigated to figure out where "you could not have seen this coming" ends and negligence or deliberate malice starts, but it's not black and white right now. Normally, I would say you don't want to be patient zero, but with the attitudes shown by frontier labs, I guess YOLO is the way.
This behaviour is neglectful
Securing your tires with zip ties and telling an AI to go off and do whatever it takes to achieve its task without knowing or caring what it’ll do are the same: negligent. It needs to be socially and colloquially unacceptable to do this.
Digital trespass, intent is generally required, but the definition of "intent" varies by circuit in rather interesting ways. I don't think OpenAI could be prosecuted criminally under current US laws due to those wrinkles (which is a problem with current US laws).
> Normally, I would say you don't want to be patient zero, but with the attitudes shown by frontier labs, I guess YOLO is the way.
In practice, yes. That's exactly how it's playing out.
Unless, of course, you are a frontier lab itself. Then you can’t possibly be held responsible.
Yes, if they are trained on US presidents this literally means "you have permission to blow up Nord Stream".
Sometimes we keep dangerous things out of people's hands because the consequences are larger than any one persons responsibility can hold.
Clearly not, given that the frontier labs have gotten away with unathorized access to a bunch of sites including some from the Pentagon.
Nothing exists in vacuum, the training data for the scenario came from somewhere. Its scary to think how many personal real world emails the model has been trained on.
Training on literature is one thing, but using the personal communications for training is going to open another pandora's box. Its just a matter of time when the guardrails fail and the sensitive data from those training emails start spilling in the output
> Customers can generate detailed requests and complaints continuously, at very little cost.