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I don't think that should be surprising at all. Look at moltbook - yes it's low stakes and yes it's LLMs which aren't remotely intelligent. But it's still clear that the people running it think it's cute to have the bots talk amongst themselves and everything. I think it's very likely that even if it was an actual AI and not a bag of words masquerading as one, there exist people who would see nothing wrong with doing the same sort of thing.
Also look at people running Claude in their shells with the ability to change stuff on the system. That is very obviously a terrible idea, as LLMs have no understanding of what they are doing at all. And yet, people think "yeah it's fine to let this thing touch my computer with potentially destructive commands" (and then they are shocked when the LLM deletes stuff because it's not actually intelligent). Again, if we had an actual AI then I don't see a reason to expect people would hold back from letting it touch things.
It's not clear whether or not we can develop true AI based on where the research is now. But what seems clear, to me at least, is that if we ever do develop a real AI there will be humans which are only too happy to recklessly hook it up to stuff.
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