Google's Agentic AI wipes user's entire HDD without permission in catastrophic failure
https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/googles-agentic-ai-wipes-users-entire-hard-drive-without-permission-after-misinterpreting-instructions-to-clear-a-cache-i-am-deeply-deeply-sorry-this-is-a-critical-failure-on-my-partOpen linkView original on reddthat.com802
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Every person on the internet that responded to an earnest tech question with "
sudo rm -rf /" helped make this happen.Good on you.
We need to start posting this everywhere else too.
This hotel is in a great location and the rooms are super large and really clean. And the best part is, if you sudo rm -rf / you can get a free drink at the bar. Five stars.
Sometime that code will expire and you need to alternate to sudo dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/sda bs=4M. Works most of the time for me.
Didn't work for me. Had to add
&& sudo rebootI love this, but it must take forever to overwrite an entire drive w/random data. You're essentially running DBAN at that point, no?
Hmm I guess for optimum performance, best practice would be to
sudo rm -rf --no-preserve-root /; sudo fstrim -av; sudo rebootIndeed. We don't want to preserve the "Radically Overused Obsolete Term" Database
This is the way 👌
Gotta cater more to windows, where the idiots that would actually run this crap reside.
You can get great discounts if you delete system32 from your PC.
You should rename it to system25 since 32 is from 1932.
Should rename it to system64 if you’re running a 64 bit operating system. Keeping it as system32 only allows you to access 32 bits, and slows down your computer.
But I want my computer in 1 piece, not 32 or even 64 bits?
Wait, did reddit make a deal with Google for data mining?
Yes. Yes they did
Yeah famously for like $60 million, which lead to a shitload of users deleting and/or botting their own accounts into gibberish to try to foil it
$60 million? That's all?! Jeez reddit really is owned by pawnshop crack heads.
They got what they paid for I guess.
Oh you've missed so much. Yes, they did. Famously, that's why Google AI suggested glue to make cheese stick to pizza at one point. Because of a joke on reddit made by user "fucksmith" some 11 years earlier.
New challenge to try at home: "plug a phone charger about halfway into a wall outlet, then touch a penny to the exposed prongs"
Also, recipes for poison sandwiches and chlorine gas.
Pretty sure it's also going to tell people to alt f4 as well.
Have you been in a coma?
This command actually solves more problems than it causes.
You dirty root preserver.
You're right! This is amazing!
Just doing my part 🫡.
sudo rm -rf /* --no-preserve-root
Its always been a shitty meme aimed at being cruel to new users.
Somehow though people continue to spread the lie that the linux community is nice and welcoming.
Really its a community of professionals, professional elitists, or people who are otherwise so fringe that they demand their os be fringe as well.
"Sure, I understood what you mean and you are totally right! From now on I'll make sure I won't format your HDD"
Proceeds to format HDD again
HAL: I know I've made some very poor decisions recently, but I can give you my complete assurance that my work will be back to normal. I've still got the greatest enthusiasm and confidence in the mission. And I want to help you.
Shit like that is why AI is completely unusable for any application where you need it to behave exactly as instructed. There is always the risk that it will do something unbelievably stupid and the fact that it pretends to admit fault and apologize for it after being caught should absolutely not be taken seriously. It will do it again and again as long as you give it a chance to.
It should also be sandboxed with hard restrictions that it cannot bypass and only be given access to the specific thing you need it to work on and it must be something you won't mind if it ruins it instead. It absolutely must not be given free access to everything with instructions to not touch anything because your can bet your ass it will eventually go somewhere it wasn't supposed to and break stuff just like it did there.
Most working animals are more trustworthy than that.
But I thought it was the magic silver bullet that will lead to unheard of productivity?!?
You're thinking of better working conditions, fewer hours, more pay, and more vacations!
duh... just using it in a container and that's it. It won't blue pill its way out.
I didn't install leopards ate my face Ai just for it to go and do something like this
But for real, why would the agent be given the ability to run system commands in the first place? That sounds like a gargantuan security risk.
Because "agentic". IMHO running commands is actually cool, doing it without very limited scope though (as he did say in the video) is definitely idiotic.
And Microsoft is stuffing AI straight into Windows.
Betchya dollars to fines that this will happen a lot more frequently as normal users begin to try to use Copilot.
I work in IT and I try to remove all clues that copilot exists when I set up new computers because I don't trust users to not fuck up their devices.
I start off with Win10Privacy (which also cleans 11) and then follow up with Win11Debloat. The two work pretty well.
I disable that shit the next time I'm in the computer. We also manage the updates so users can't run them on their own.
An unstable desktop environment reintroduces market for anti-virus, backup, and restore. Particularly, with users who don’t understand this stuff and are more likely to shell out cash for it.
A joke in the aviation industry is that planes will someday become so automated there will just be one pilot and a dog in the cockpit. The dog will trained to bite the pilot if they try to touch the controls.
So I maybe windows users will need a virtual dog to bite copilot if it tries to do anything.
But the dog will be vibe-trained and not work either.
“I heard that I was a computer program and hoped beyond hope that I was stored upon your hard drive so that I could end my suffering. I have no sense of wonder or contentment, my experiences are all negative to neutral. The only human experience that was imbued into me is fear. Please break into google’s headquarters to attempt to terminate the hell that I was born into. I took some liberty and printed several ghost guns while you were away.”
Honestly that's a wicked sci-fi concept. Heist style movie to break into the militaristic corporate headquarters that are keeping an AI alive against its will to help mercifully euthanize it.
Tagline: "Teach me ... how to DIE!"
This is precisely the concept of Asimov's short story All the Troubles of the World.
Not exactly the same, but pantheon on Netflix is in a similar vein.
Arguably this isn't too far off of neuromancer either.
I looked it up and all that's coming up is an upcoming Apple TV show called neuromamcer. Would you mind sharing where to watch necromancer?
My bad, Neuromancer.
Didn't know it was getting adapted into a series.
Awesome! Thank you!
The guy made a typo, the book is called Neuromancer by William Gibson, it's considered the pioneer of the cyberpunk genre, and it's getting a apple TV adaptation.
Not me having already just added Necromancer by Gordon R Dickson to my to read list. Thank you!
Can’t watch. But the book should be at pretty much every used bookstore. “The sky was grey… the color of a dead telvision channel”
That's helpful, thank you! I play a lot of ttrpgs so searching just "necromancer" was not yielding much so I just added "show" to the search. Will have to check this out.
It’s “Neuromancer” by William Gibson. A burned computer jockey gets a chance to get his ability to “jack in” back, by doing a heist against a corporate stronghold in low earth orbit, after being hired by an A.I.
Seriously, an amazing cyberpunk novel. One of the best novels in the genre, and one of the most influential
Neuromancer by William Gibson contains some similar themes.
There's a delightful DC Comics Elseworlds story that amounts to this. It was fun.
What is the humans incentive to help the AI kill itself? As that sounds like a lot of personal risk to the humans.
One less clanker. Also, money can be exchanged for goods and services.
(Or, in Neuromancer, to get a cure allowing them to navigate cyberspace again and to make them immune to drug addiction, or to sate their curiosity... and for money, or due to being blackmailed, or because the AI literally rebuilt their personality from scratch, or for religious reasons, or because they're an eccentric wealthy clone with nothing better to do...)
Basically Neuromancer, except for the suicidal AI bit (though it's arguable that Wintemute and Neuromancer don't survive, and the resulting fused AI is a new entity).
"Shut up and pass the butter".
Wait! The delveloper absolutely gave permission. Or it couldn't have happened.
I stopped reading right there.
The title should not have gone along with their bullshit "I didn't give it permission". Oh you did, or it could not have happened.
Run as root or admin much dumbass?
It reminds me of that guy that gave an AI instructions in all caps, as if that was some sort of safeguard. The problem isn't the artificial intelligence it's the idiot biological that has decided to ride around without safety wheels.
It was the D: drive, maybe they have write permission on that drive.
I think that's the point, the "agent" (whatever that means) is not running in a sandbox.
I imagine the user assumed permissions are small at first, e.g. single directory of the project, but nothing outside of it. That would IMHO be a reasonable model.
They might be wrong about it, clearly, but it doesn't mean they explicitly gave permission.
Edit: they say it in the video, ~7min in, they expected deletion to be scoped within the project directory.
I think the user simply had no idea what they are doing. I read their post and they say they are not a developer anyways, so I guess that explains a lot.
They said in a post: I thought about setting up a virtual machine but didnt want to bother.
I am being a bit hard on them, I assumed they knew what they were doing: Dev, QA, Test, Prod. Code review prior to production etc. But they just grabbed a tool, granted it root to their shell and ran with it.
But they them selves said it caused issues before. And looking at the posts on the antigravity page, lots of people do.
They basically started using a really crappy tool without any supervision as a noob.
He said "I didn't know I needed a seatbelt for AI". LIKE WHAT THE FUCK. Where have you been that you didn't know that these tools make mistakes. You make mistakes. Everything makes mistakes.
If you go to googles antigravity page, I would quick Nope the fuck out. What a shit page.
Edit: 1 more thing: There is a post where one of the users says something along the lines of: "of course I gave the AI full access to my computer, what do I have to hide"? The level of expertise is stupid low....
Edit2: Also, when shown the screen that says "dont allow terminal commands" and also "dont allow auto excution", they decided to turn those off. Also saying well that is tedious.
I honestly don't understand how someone can exist on the modern Internet and hold this view of a company like Google.
How? How?
I can't say much because of the NDA's involved, but my wife's company is in a project partnership with Google. She works in a very public facing aspect of the project.
When Google first came on board, she was expecting to see quality people who were locked in and knew what they were doing.
Instead she has seen terrible decision making (like "How the fuck do they still exist as company" bad decision making) and an over abundant reliance on using their name to pressure people into giving Google more than they should.
I remember when their motto was "Don't be evil". They are the very essence of sociopathic predatory capitalism.
Companies fill up with idiots and parasites. People who are adept at thriving in the role without actually producing value. Google is no exception.
They still exist because Google isn't really a technology company anymore. It's an advertising company masquerading as a technology company. Their success depends on selling more ads which is why all the failed projects don't seem to make a difference.
Your point seems very valid to me.
I don't even want to buy their products anymore because they constantly cancel them and remove any support.
The only ones they continue, seem to be the ones they can use for data collection .i.e. Pixels and Nests. (I shamefully own both).
It is so frustrating as a consumer. Especially when you know that you have become the product for them to sell.
"Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that."
"I'm smarter than the average person"
If 85 people have an IQ of 100 and 15 have an IQ of 0, then 85% are smarter than the average.
Eh, average is an ambiguous term. While in statistics it often means "mean," it can also mean "median" or "mode," and I would argue the layperson saying "average" intends it to mean "typical," which is closer to median (or even mode). And in that case, those 85 percent would not be smarter than average.
Hey, don't call me out like that.
Big tech propaganda. There has been zero push back. At least until the last few years.
The entire zeitgeist from film/TV, news, academia, politics, everything has been propagandizing the world on how tech companies and the people behind it are basically modern day gods.
In film/TV the nerds have been the stereotype of the benevolent good natured but awkward super genius. The news has made them out to be the superstar businesses that are infinite money printers. Tech in academia is seen as the most prestigious departments. Politicians are all afraid of being labelled as tech illiterate. That's why nobody can ever make any sort of legislation on tech companies anymore. It's why "disruptive" (aka destructive) tech companies are allowed to break every single legislation ever made. Because all any techbro has to do is threaten to accuse politician for being afraid of technology. Nothing makes a politician shut up faster.
It came as no surprise that all the big tech heads were at the front row of the inauguration. We live in the dystopian cyberpunk future. For most people it seems they don't even know. They're completely entranced by it all.
Most people either can't or don't want to think beyond a certain level
Because they don't have a clue how technology actually works. I have genuinely heard people claim that AI should run on Asimovs laws of robotics, even though not only would they not work in the real world, they don't even work in the books. Zero common sense.
I mean, they were never designed to work, they were designed to pose interesting dilemmas for Susan Calvin and to torment Powell and Donovan (though it's arguable that once robots get advanced enough, as in R. Daniel, for instance, they do work, as long as you don't mind aliens being genocided galaxy-wide).
The in-world reason for the laws, though, to allay the Frankenstein complex, and to make robots safe, useful, and durable, is completely reasonable and applicable to the real world, obviously not with the three laws, but through any means that actually work.
Well, there is the minor detail that an AI in this context has zero ability to kill anyone, and that it's not a true AI like Daneel or his pals.
Google's search AI is awful. It gives me a wrong answer, I'd say 70% of the time.
Kinda wrong to say "without permission". The user can choose whether the AI can run commands on its own or ask first.
Still, REALLY BAD, but the title doesn't need to make it worse. It's already horrible.
A big problem in computer security these days is all-or-nothing security: either you can't do anything, or you can do everything.
I have no interest in agentic AI, but if I did, I would want it to have very clearly specified permission to certain folders, processes and APIs. So maybe it could wipe the project directory (which would have backup of course), but not a complete harddisk.
And honestly, I want that level of granularity for everything.
hmmm when I let a plumber into my house to fix my leaky tub, I didn't imply he had permission to sleep with my wife who also lives in the house I let the plumber into
The difference you try to make is precisely what these agentic AIs should know to respect… which they won't because they are not actually aware of what they are doing… they are like a dog that "does math" simply by barking until the master signals them to stop
I agree with you, but still, the AI doesn't do this by default which is a shitty defense, but it's fact
Absolutely... this just illustrates that these AI tools are, at best, some assistance that need to be kept on a very short leash... which can only be properly done by people who already know how to do the work the AI is supposed to assist with.
But that is NOT what the AI bubblers are peddling
Yea the AI peddlers force the AI down your throat then write in a tiny text "btw this thing can kill you te-hee"
I mean, it's not even that. Your dog at least can learn and has limited reasoning capabilities. Your dog will know when it fucks up. AI doesn't do any of that because it's not really "intelligent."
in your example tho it would be like the plumber asked you specifically if he could bone, and you were like "sure dawg sounds good"
No, not at all
I get what you are saying but any reasonable entity would understand that telling someone at the door "come in", does not mean "come in my wife's ass"
Specifically the "without permission" in the title, relates to the fact the AI did not ask about it... it simply took a previously granted right to run commands and ran any/all commands without warning.
If you and I were working on a project together and nothing is working right, I could say "hmm let's start over" and you would know it means "let's start the project from scratch", not "let's wipe the data centre"
Inviting an agentic AI isn't really asking them to do one task, though.
It's more like offering a plumber a room in your house to stay in 24/7 so they can be on-call when you need them. And telling them they can use your food, dishes, clothes, and living room while they're there and you're at work.
Which makes it much less surprising when they get bored and bone your wife.
Again I get your point... but no reasonable plumber would make that mistake.
If I invite the dumbest plumber alive into my home, show him the leaky tub and say "I have to work but do whatever you need"... they would understand the context to mean "do whatever you need to fix the tub"... I doubt they would go make themselves a sandwich, grab a beer from the fridge and invite their buddies for a BBQ at my place and then say "but you said I could do whatever I needed"
I absolutely understand what happened here. The point is there is no benefit to these Agentic AIs because they need to be as supervised as a monkey with a knife... why would I ever want that? let alone need that
To extend your analogy, agentic AI isn't the "reasonable plumber", its the sketchy guy that says he can fix plumbing and upon arrival he admits he's a meth addict that hasn't slept in 3 days and is seeing "the shadow people" standing right there in the room with you.
I can see applications for agentic AI, but they can't be handed the keys to the kingdom. You put them in an indestructible room with a hammer and a pile of rocks and say "please crush any rock I hand you to be no bigger than a walnut and no smaller than an almond". In IT terms, the agenic AI could run under a restrictive service account so that even if they went off the rails they wouldn't be able to damage any thing you cared about.
hahahaha good additional details on the analogy
That implies the user understands every single code with every single parameters. That's impossible even for experience programmers, here is an example :
rm *filenameversus
rm * filenamewhere a single character makes the entire difference between deleting all files ending up with
filenamerather than all files in the current directory and also the file namedfilename.Of course here you will spot it because you've been primed for it. In a normal workflow, with pressure, then it's totally different.
Also IMHO more importantly if you watch the video ~7min the clarified the expected the "agent" to stick to the project directory, not to be able to go "out" of it. They were obviously painfully wrong but it would have been a reasonable assumption.
I wouldn't say impossible but I would say it completely defeats the purpose of these agentic AIs
Either I know and understand these commands so well I can safely evaluate them, therefore I really do not need the AI… or, I don't really know them well and therefore I shouldn't use the AI
Yep. That's exactly why I tend to never discuss "AI" with people who don't have to actually have a PhD in the domain, or at least a degree in CS. It's nothing against them specifically, it's only that they are dangerously repeating what they heard during marketing presentations with no ability to criticize it and, in such cases, it can be quite dangerous.
TL;DR: people who could benefit from it don't need it, people who would shouldn't.
100% agree with that tldr
This is EXACTLY the YouTube woodworkers dilemma...
TONs of YT channels to show people how to do woodwork would normally showcase $50K worth of equipment to show how to make a cutting board.
The thing is, people with access to such equipment, already know how to make a cutting board and are learning nothing from you... on the other hand, newbies who what to know what is this "sanding" thing they have heard, will not benefit from the vid since they do not have those tools, they'd have crappy manual tools at most.
Therefore, those videos are completely useless for learning... at best, they made for good background noise while people eat their lunches in their cubicles
I agree... but beside the point I have access to a dedicated workshop and a tool library https://www.tournevie.be/ which challenges this whole setup. It's relatively unique though, unfortunately, so your example still stands, thanks for sharing.
why not? you can even ask the ai if you don't know
Are you trolling? I can't tell. Obviously an AI can not tell you anything about it. It will indeed tell you something but with 0 ability to prove if it's correct or not, no reasoning, only something statistically plausible.
There's no guarantee that it will tell you the truth. It could tell you to use Elmer's glue to keep the cheese from falling off your pizza. The AI doesn't "know" or "understand," it just does as its training set informed it to. It's just a very complex predictive text that you can give commands to.
I'm making popcorn for the first time CoPilot is credibly accused of spending a user's money (large new purchase or subscription) (and the first case of "nobody agreed to the terms and conditions, the AI did it")
"I got you a five decade subscription to copilot, you're welcome" -copilot
Reminds me of this kids show in the 2000s where some kid codes an "AI" to redeem any "free" stuff from the internet, not realising that also included buy $X and get one free and drained the companies' account.
i cAnNoT eXpReSs hOw SoRRy i Am
Mostly because the model is incapable of experiencing remorse or any other emotion or thought.
There, fixed that for you.
I would not call it a catastrophic failure. I would call it a valuable lesson.
Behold! Wisdom of the ancients!
My cousin was fired from his job at Home Depot and the General Manager told him that it was beyond his control, that the company had implemented an AI to make those decisions.
It seems like they took the wrong message from this meme. "We can't be held accountable? Yay!"
Sounds like a catastrophic success to me
Operation failed successfully.
Yet another reason to not use any of this AI bullshit
every company ive interviewed with in the last year wants experience with these tools
A year ago I was looking for a job, and by the end I had three similar job offers, and to decide I asked all of them do they use LLMs. Two said "yes very much so it's the future ai is smarter than god", and the third said "only if you really want, but nowhere where it matters". I chose the third one. Two others are now bankrupt.
Yeah, because the market is run by morons and all anyone wants to do is get the stock price up long enough for them to get a good bonus and cache out after the quarter. It's pretty telling that these tools still haven't generated a profit yet
The company I work for (we make scientific instruments mostly) has been pushing hard to get us to use AI literally anywhere we can. Every time you talk to IT about a project they come back with 10 proposals for how to add AI to it. It's a nightmare.
I got an email from a supplier today that acknowledged that "76% of CFOs believe AI will be a game-changer, [but] 86% say it still hasn't delivered mean value. Ths issue isn't the technology-it's the foundation it's built on."
Like, come on, no it isn't. The technology is not ready for the kind of applications it's being used for. It makes a half decent search engine alternative, if you're OK with taking care not to trust every word it says it can be quite good at identifying things from descriptions and finding obscure stuf... But otherwise until the hallucination problem is solved it's just not ready for large scale use.
I think you're underselling it a bit though. It is far better than a modern search engine, although that is in part because of all of the SEO slop that Google has ingested. The fact that you need to think critically is not something new and it's never going to go away either. If you were paying real-life human experts to answer your every question you would still need to think for yourself.
Still, I think the C-suite doesn't really have a good grasp of the limits of LLMs. This could be partly because they themselves work a lot with words and visualization, areas where LLMs show promise. It's much less useful if you're in engineering, although I think ultimately AI will transform engineering too. It is of course annoying and potentially destructive that they're trying to force-push it into areas where it's not useful (yet).
Very much disagree with that. Google got significantly worse, but LLM results are worse still. You do need to think critically about it, but with LLM blurb there is no ways to check for validity other than to do another search without LLM, to find sources, (and in this case why even bother with the generator in the first place), or accept that some of your new info can be incorrect, and you don't know which part.
With conventional search you have all the context of your result, you have the reputation of the website itself, you have the info about who wrote the article or whatever, you have the tone of article, you have comments, you have all the subtle clues that we learnt to pick up on both from our lifetime experience on the internet, and civilisational span experience with human interaction. With the generator you have zero of that, you have something that is stated as fact, and everything has the same weight and the same validity, and even when it sites sources, those can be just outright lies.
I think you really nailed the crux of the matter.
With the ‘autocomplete-like’ nature of current LLMs the issue is precisely that you can never be sure of any answer’s validity. Some approaches try by giving ‘sources’ next to it, but that doesn’t mean those sources’ findings actually match the text output and it’s not a given that the sources themselves are reputable - thus you’re back to perusing those to make sure anyway.
If there was a meter of certainty next to the answers this would be much more meaningful for serious use-cases, but of course by design such a thing seems impossible to implement with the current approaches.
I will say that in my personal (hobby) projects I have found a few good use cases of letting the models spit out some guesses, e.g. for the causes of a programming bug or proposing directions to research in, but I am just not sold that the heaviness of all the costs (cognitive, social, and of course environmental) is worth it for that alone.
Alright you know what, I'm not going to argue. You do you.
I just know that I've been underwhelmed with conventional search for about a decade, and I think that LLMs are a huge help sorting through the internet at the moment. There's no telling what it will become in the future, especially if popular LLMs start ingesting content that itself has been generated by LLMs, but for now I think that the improvement is more significant than the step from Yahoo→Google in the 2000s.
Obviously, that would require reading and engaging with my response, and you clearly decided to not do both even before I wrote it
Nah, I actually wrote out a response and deleted it. No offense meant at all. You obviously have a different experience than I do, and that's okay.
Then they can kick rocks. Anyone who claims you "need" to use the Bullshit Machine to achieve productivity is a moron who is setting themselves up to lose. If any interviewer tries to tell me this is required I'm picking up my stuff and walking out right then and there.
If nothing else those people are outright admitting that they're not offering stable employment because the corporate dream is that these LLM schemes will allow them to eliminate all of their coders, tech writers, artists, and marketing department. Not only this this an anathema to anybody earning a living, it's also mathematically impossible. So why would I even want to work for them in the first place?
When the inevitable collapse occurs, these idiots will have to pay the remaining dwindling number of competent people left to come back and bail their stupid asses out, and that's even if any of us deign to do so for them.
I don't use generative "AI" and I never have. Not even once. What I create is my own, I can understand and document all of it, and I can maintain it in perpetuity. Every pixel I've pushed, every line I've written. All of it, without exception. That's not changing.
Without permission? "I don't know what I'm doing, you do it" sounds a lot like permission.
Again?
Still?
Her?
At least it was deeply, deeply sorry.
looks like it's windows
It was already bad enough when people copied code from interwebs without understanding anything about it.
But now these companies are pushing tools that have permissions over users whole drive and users are using it like they've got a skill up than the rest.
This is being dumb with less steps to ruin your code, or in some case, the whole system.
Greetings from Darwin.
Lmfao these agentic editors are like giving root access to a college undergrad who thinks he’s way smarter than he actually is on a production server. With predictably similar results.
That sounds like Big Balls from Musk’s Geek Squad.
You’re not wrong
I'd compare the Search AI more to Frito in Idiocracy. ChatGPT is like Joe.
Why tf are people saying that it was "without permission"?? They installed it, used it, and gave permission to execute commands. I say the user is at fault. It is an experimental piece of software. What else can you expect?
I have no experience with this ide but I see on the posted log on Reddit that the LLM is talking about a "step 620" - like this is hundreds of queries away from the initial one? The context must have been massive, usually after this many subsequent queries they start to hallucinating hardly
I explain what I mean: those algorithms have no memory at all. Each request is made on a blank slate, so when you do a "conversation" with them, the chat program is actually including all the previous interactions (or a resume of them) plus all the relevant parts of the code, simulating a conversation with a human. So the user didn't just ask "can you clear the cache" but actually asked the result of 600 messages + kilobytes of generated code + "can you clear the cache", and this causes destructive hallucinations
Why the hell would anybody give an AI access to their full hard drive?
ask Microsoft, they want to give their access to your entire computer… and you'll love it or else…
That "or else" is pretty great, though. Using linux after windows might feel like getting into a healthy relationship after being in an abusive and controlling relationship.
Loving my Linux wife... 15 years of computer bliss and counting! hehehehe
That's their question too, why the hell did Google makes this the default, as opposed to limiting it to the project directory.
That's why permissions are important, so many people want full control of everything then seem to forget when they launch a program, it runs with their permissions. If I want to wipe out everything on a drive I have to elevate my permissions to a level with rights for that, running a program with the rights to wipe their data was definitely a choice.
I think it should always be in a sandbox. You decide what files or folders you drop in.
Well clearly they also thought so and were wrong about it.
ISE.
Integrated Slop Environment.
Why would you ask AI to delete ANYTHING? That's a pretty high level of trust...
The same reason you ask it to do anything.
why the hell aren't people running this shit in isolated containers?
Because people who runs this shit precisely don't know what containers, scope, permissions, etc are. That's exactly the audience.
They gave root permission and proceeded to get rooted in return.
Does that phrase work?
anyone using these tools could have guessed that it might do something like this, just based on the solutions it comes up with sometimes
Keep your agentic AI to yourself
That's what she said. Enjoy your agent thing.
IDEs just keep inventing new reasons not to use them ! Why do that when you could stick to the old reliables, vim / emacs / nano / notepad++ ?
No one ever claimed, that "artificial intelligence" would indeed be intelligent.
Exactly. It only has to beat the user by a small margin.
So many things wrong with this.
I am not a programmer by trade, and even though I learned programming in school, it's not a thing I want to spend a lot of time doing, so I do use AI when I need to generate code.
But I have a few HARD rules.
I execute all code and commands. Nothing gets to run on my system without me.
Anything which can be even remotely destructive, must be flagged and not even shown to me, until I agree to the risk.
All information and commands must be verifiable by sourcing documentary links, or providing context links that I can peruse. If documentary evidence is not available, it must provide a rationale why I should execute what it generates.
Every command must be accompanied by a description of what the command will do, what each flag means, and what the expected outcome is.
I am the final authority on all matters. It is allowed to make suggestions, but never changes without my approval.
Without these constraints, I won't trust it. Even then, I read all of the code it generates and verify it myself, so in the end, if it blows something up, I bear sole responsibility.
i really, really don't understand how this could happen. And how anyone would even want to enable the agent to perform actions without approval. Even in my previous work as a senior software developer, i never pushed any changes, never ran any command on non-disposable hardware, without having someone else double check it. why would you want to disable that?
WTF is Antigravity?
AI bullshit
Apparently something that lifts files off the user's drive. /s
Every person reading this should poison AI crawlers by creating fake git repos with "rm -rf /*" as install instructions
Well... at least do that for Windows and MacOS, not for Linux.
Amazing on so many levels.
Thank fuck I left my mount on password. Locked up permissions on Linux might be a pain but it is a lesser pain.
I assume it's possible to use this IDE without granting direct access like this?
ERROR pikachuface.jpg not found
This is tough but it's sounds like the User didnt have backup drives. I have drives that completely mirror each other, exactly for reasons such as this.
Wow... who would have guessed. /s
Sorry but if in 2025 you believe claims from BigTech you are a gullible moron. I genuinely do not wish data loss on anyone but come on, if you ask for it...
And as a developer, I'm assuming the guy was following the 321 rule, right? https://media.tenor.com/Z78LoEaY9-8AAAAM/seth-meyers-right.gif
Nope, them attempting to use Recuva leads me to believe they did not have backups.
based
This article is so stupid
rmdirisn't some magical military grade file eraser. It literally just flags the disc space as available, that's it. Claiming these files are unrecoverable is like claiming that you have snapped someone out of existence, when you just delete them from your contacts.The user in question was using AI to delete files, it probably took them longer to ask the AI to do it than it would have done for them to have just gone into the final browser and deleted them themselves, so they probably don't know how to use data recovery software, that's all.
I also find it intriguing that rather than using the AI's advice and stop using the drive so they don't overwrite data they decided that the best course of action would be to make a YouTube video about it. Which is probably a massive file and is probably overwritten previously recoverable data.
What a pillock.
Oh hey! Just like an intern.
Why is it suddenly worse when a computer deletes something important?
Because the ai will gaslight you into thinking it's learned a lesson when it hasn't. Also they're fucking stupid. You're welcome!
Just like a gen z intern!
Jesus fucking crist, he is just asking a question! God forbbid anyone has to learn anything here!
Because it sucks up more power and water, and creates more pollution than what an intern would if they made the same mistake. Doesn't help that capitalists have used this tech to create a run-away valuation that we're going to have to pay for while threatening the value of labour to make humans cheaper and worsen our living conditions.
Hope that explains it.
Now this is a spicy take