• aesthelete@lemmy.world
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    9 hours ago

    Even with little usage it was fairly obvious to me that the probability that an LLM will output at least one very strange response over time approaches 100%.

    By themselves, they’re just sophisticated chatbots and only stream out some characters or binary in response to a prompt.

    Those working in agentic AI frameworks with things like “MCP Servers” provide these things with “tools” that enable them to do things like execute shell commands and go through your inbox the same as if it were chatting with a person or another bot: with the same prompt and response paradigm.

    That’s where it seems extremely obvious to me that the proper approach is to code these tools – which in any sane framework are built using regular code – with the governance in place to prevent these things from doing bullshit like this.

    The LLM is formatting your computer or deleting your inbox because some dumb fuck thought it was a great idea to code up tools that hand a chatbot a root-capable shell or complete access to your email system instead of the doing the obviously safer thing and coding the tools with the governance or safety in them so the chatbot going haywire isn’t any kind of emergency at all.

    This is the 2026 equivalent of running Windows XP with its abundance of open ports in its default configuration on the Internet by running a cable modem Ethernet into the computer with no router or firewall in between to protect it.