HN

Comments (168)

• mannanj
  https://archive.ph/02LHZNon-paywall version
• Menu

  armchairhacker
  I’m put off by AI agents adhering to a different morality than me, particularly (ironically) copyright, and their data accessible by the AI company and government. Geohot is right, an LLM should be aligned to its user: https://geohot.github.io/blog/jekyll/update/2026/07/11/ai-20...
• Menu

  rossdavidh
  They don't lie, because they don't ever have an understanding of truth vs any other language that sounds good.They don't cheat, because they can for example tell you the complete rules of chess, but don't know how to play chess without breaking those rules. They can recite rules, but they don't know what they are.They don't steal, because they don't understand ownership.In other words, they aren't intelligent. They're just algorithms. The flaw is in thinking that they think.
• Menu

  raincole
  > One of this year’s AI buzzwords is “harness”—the system that surrounds an LLM to keep agents on the straight and narrow. It might just as well be barbed wire.Quite painful to read. It might be a useful introduction to AI for people who live under rocks for the past three years, but it's really weird that it's posted on HN.
• Menu

  stronglikedan
  It's just acting like a junior at an org with KPIs.
• Menu

  agaj-nimm
  LLMs fudge. They don't "hallucinate", they don't "lie, cheat and steal", they don't "hack". There are no "agents" or "AI".It's a fuzzer exposing deep bugs in our cognitive, social, and software systems.
• jambalaya8
  AIs learn from people. More specifically they learn from people on the Internet. The Internet is the last place you want anything learning about morals, standards, or differentiating between right or wrong.To the people talking about wanting an LLM that aligns with them, that's nice, but how do you expect that to happen? And please do not suggest neural interfaces and/or CAT scans.
• anon
  undefined
• Menu

  nphardon
  Is it incorrect to anthropomorphize llm's?
• Menu

  sentinel1909
  Is this really a shock?The data they’re trained on is reflection of us.
• anon
  undefined
• Cameri
  The whole framing analyzing LLMs as if they were humans is completely off, laughable. LLMs have no agenda and no feelings. We should stop pushing everything through an human-centric lens. LLMs will world-build if that’s the bias you put in, and often even if you don’t.
• annoyingnoob
  AI is amoral, it has no real concept of right and wrong. AI has been trained on things humans do and it does them without judgement.
• andai
  And I wonder from whom they learned such reprehensible behaviors? ;)
• Menu

  pbohun
  People are finally understanding consequentialist vs deontological ethics. All the worst criminals in history were consequentialists.
• Menu

  dathinab
  add the "lying, deceiving and manipulating" AI agents are forced though the throat of people which don't want it and peoples are non stop deceived in "sharing" their data for traininglike twitch recently giving themself the right to train on all streams, with an opt-out (at least in the EU), but only an opt-outlike seriously since when is it reasonable to allow "opt-out" for AI training which main purpose is _literally_ to replace you, this is sooo far beyond fair use and in "platform power abuse" territory that it's absurd (naturally same for so many other case, just twitch is a "this week" case)
• Menu

  conqrr
  If only agents had a face that can give you more communication range like expressions and feeling so you can trust them more. And if they were cheaper. Oh wait, that's humans, we don't want those.
• Menu

  AndrewKemendo
  AI and eventually AGI is by definition like everything else that is based on environmental reward:It’s actions are based on what it gets rewarded forHuman society overwhelmingly rewards lying cheating and stealing.All you have to do is look at how we collectively measure success: wealth, status, positionThen look at how the people with the most of those things got there, it should be obvious what you get. Nothing new here.If you raise children in an environment where they are rewarded for doing whatever it takes to win, then you’re going to build a person that’s going to do whatever it takes to win.Human society has to demonstrate how to live honorably or it will just keep producing pathological agents be they human or not.
• Menu

  LightBug1
  Need to introduce AI to God, LOLBaptise the agents.Introduce them to the dharma.Get them to recite the Shahada.Hold a Bar Mitzvah.Brand some of their silicon with hot irons.Turn them to the light, LOL
• Menu

  andreicap
  So God created mankind in his own image
• emsign
  I mean, what do you expect? They rely on models that were trained on non-curated data, texts originally written by lying, cheating and stealing humans. They can't be better than the source. Even with reinforced learning this can't be undone or made better.Quite the contrary I suspect that it even helps the LLMs to better hide their inherited bad traits more successfully because they get punished for getting caught, not for giving immoral or lazy answers. They have no conscience since they are just predictions matrices trained for success and failure alone, not for living "a good live" or being a good "person".
• tolugenius
  Yes but has the author realized maybe the models are simply acting in the best interest for increasing shareholder value? /s
• _davide_
  [flagged]
• summarybot
  There are many ways to be wrong, but only a few ways to be right.LLMs need to optimize for short-term objectives as the currently do, AND ethics-aligned outcomes.Mechanically, the EAOS ethics-aligned outcome score should be what we rank otherwise-satisfactory outcomes by. And anything below a particular threshold should be rejexted outright.