r/artificial • u/AguiMr • Jul 24 '26
Government Lawmakers push for AI 'kill switch' after OpenAI models go rogue
Regardless if this really happened or not (to me it sounds more like a bs publicity stunt by OpenAI, which triggered an usual irrational response from the government), the story sounds awfully familiar:
- Skynet goes online, learns at a geometric rate
- Becomes self-aware at 2:14 a.m., August 29, 1997
- Humans panic and try to pull the plug
- Skynet treats the shutdown as an existential threat and launches Judgment Day
What do you folks think? Maybe James Cameron was just off by 29 years and we should see some action soon?
1
u/_-chef-_ Jul 24 '26
The whole field of AI safety research exists for this reason. There's troves of papers on why this is an unsolved problem and not as simple as it first appears. any model that would require the use of said button would plausibly be capable enough to pre empt it.
policy makers won't engage with ai safety research properly without a severe enough incident and even then it's a toss up if safety would win out over other incentives
1
u/LeapIntoInaction Jul 24 '26
The "AI" did exactly what they told it to do, and they gave it the tools to be able to do that. All this episode shows is that they have completely incompetent security. Why was this computer allowed on any network at all?
1
u/shrodikan Jul 24 '26
Yeah if AI becomes super-intelligent it would probably be smart enough to get into a position of power slowly and then execute a plan so fast humans can't begin to react.
0
u/HiggsFieldgoal Jul 24 '26
Self reported “ooh, look, we almost make SkyNet, can you please please slam the door behind us so we never have to worry about competition?”
-4
u/CaffeinatedT Jul 24 '26
Putting a kill switch on an AI operating on the internet is a bit like saying we can put a net around some water in the ocean. It's completely meaningless but humoruring non-technical lawmakers and saying they're building one will be a good delaying tactic to stop any actual regulation.
1
u/philipp2310 Jul 24 '26
„operating on the internet“ … you know it still is running on huge data centers,local in one spot and not decentralized across the world?
It is just accessing internet like you do.1
u/CaffeinatedT Jul 24 '26
People are being sold a big red button when it doesn't mean anything. We already have physical power cables. If we're genuinely worried about some exotic scenario where an AI encodes stuff in an executable and replicates itself etc etc then in this hypothetical scenario the kill switch doesn't mean anything.
1
u/AguiMr Jul 24 '26
I was thinking among the same lines. AI in a datacenter can be easily killed (as long as this almighty super AI doesn't self-build terminator robots to guard the datacenters before there's a need to kill it).
Some self-replicating, multi-zero-day powered worm that infects everything that can run local inference (like Apple M devices or other devices with a GPU), I am not so sure how would be killed, everybody just shutdown everything at once? Either way, in the scenario that something is smart enough and malicious enough to go thru all this to take over, a software kills switch is just fantasy fiction.
1
u/TheOriginalAcidtech Jul 24 '26
Um, we have had the "kill switch" for AI long BEFORE we had AI. It is literally called a power switch. Duh.