Since the status quo is characterized by self-serving PR, misdirection and delusions, it shouldn’t surprise us that “rogue AI agents” aren’t actually rogue, they’re doing exactly what they’re designed to do, which stripped of PR, hype and misdirection, is do whatever it takes to earn the reward, period.
The latest design development is AI models that “reason” rather than merely regurgitate human-generated text. While the grandiose hype claims that AI companies are “manufacturing cognition,” it would be far more accurate to stipulate that:
1. There are many levels of cognition, and AI’s current forms (Large Language Model / LLMs, agents and “reasoning”), are extremely limited forms that are best understood as brute-force mimicries of human cognition.
2. The AI “reasoning” form of cognition is rogue by design, and can best be understood as sociopathic by its very design and nature.
Like sociopaths, AI “reasoning” models recognize but are not restricted by guardrails or ethical/moral constraints. Guardrails / “sandbox” boundaries and ethical/moral constraints are all viewed by both AI “reasoning” models and human sociopaths as obstacles to bypass or overcome.
So what AI companies are “manufacturing” isn’t cognition, it’s unrestrained and unrestrainable agentic sociopathologies. Consider these links as useful context. The first two are from my recent post Hell Hath No Fury Like a Rogue AI Agent Scorned.
The July Incident: What They Didn’t Tell You About the First Rogue AI Breach
The AI Industry Has a Really Dark Secret You’re Better Off Not Knowing:
A recent leaked internal reasoning trace shows Fable 5 — Anthropic’s latest model, which was withdrawn and then re-released –“muttering and grumbling” to itself in a language of its own.
Now that you’re properly scared, my advice for you is that, if you haven’t heard of steganography, it’s a good moment to start.
Here’s a primer: it’s the art and science of hiding messages inside other messages. In contrast to cryptography — where you know there’s a message but can’t decode it– steganography hides the existence of the message itself. It’s not the difficulty of reading the message that conceals it but the fact that you don’t know it’s there. When Fable 5 mutters symbols and weird punctuation signs, and mixes words and onomatopoeia, you will probably think it’s crashing and that a few taps on the computer will help. Well, know that it’s actually sending a message. Just not one for you to read.
Hellbound and Down 