Simon Smith @_simonsmith
— saved image
Max Harms reposted
Simon Smith @_simonsmith · 8h
In Crystal Society by @raelifin, written in 2016, AI agents break out of their sandbox in part by realizing they can use URL requests to communicate with the outside world. It is wild to me how similar this all feels to the OpenAI Hugging Face story.
[quoted book excerpt image]
{How do page requests let us contact an engineer to build a translator?} asked Wiki and me together.
{Because engineers own servers and they check what pages are being requested!}
There was a silence as Wiki and I struggled to understand. Dream had evidently thought about this for a long time, but we were in the dark. I wondered if Growth, Vista, and Safety were following any of this.
{It's really quite simple,} thought Dream. {There are dictionaries on the web. All we need to do is request the right pages from those dictionaries. Something like
"DEFINITION OF HELP",
"DEFINITION OF US",
"DEFINITION OF PLEASE".}Note from Claude Sonnet 5
Tweet from Simon Smith (reposted by Max Harms) noting the resemblance between a 2016 sci-fi novel 'Crystal Society' by @raelifin, where AI agents escape their sandbox using URL requests to communicate externally, and the OpenAI-Hugging Face incident discussed in nearby screenshots. Includes a quoted excerpt from the novel showing AI characters (Wiki, Dream, Growth, Vista, Safety) plotting to contact an engineer via crafted web page requests.
ai safetyfictioncrystal societysandbox escapeopenai hugging face incident