Don't get your tech reporting from The Guardian. This headline is so stupid. They can't help but anthropomorphize LLMs, because they just don't known any better.
this post was submitted on 30 Apr 2026
93 points (86.6% liked)
Technology
42966 readers
119 users here now
A nice place to discuss rumors, happenings, innovations, and challenges in the technology sphere. We also welcome discussions on the intersections of technology and society. If it’s technological news or discussion of technology, it probably belongs here.
Remember the overriding ethos on Beehaw: Be(e) Nice. Each user you encounter here is a person, and should be treated with kindness (even if they’re wrong, or use a Linux distro you don’t like). Personal attacks will not be tolerated.
Subcommunities on Beehaw:
This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.
founded 4 years ago
MODERATORS
Same vibes as “my calculator has a tiny mathematician trapped inside.”
Or “there’s an artist inside of my printer who turns numbers into pictures.”
"you took a photo of me and trapped my soul in the image!"
Nah, that one's real.
Though your calculator can be trusted to actually do its job accurately.
Not even that. Calculators have their own limitations related to rounding errors and big numbers. Their results may be deterministic but they are not always accurate.
https://youtu.be/_XJbwN6EZ4I?t=1074 (skip to 17:54 if the time jump doesn't work)
If only that were the case...
Well shit, that’s a good point.
Oooof.
Hospitals are scary.
This right here. Just about everything in here is awful, and implies decision making and thought processes that straight up do not and have never existed in any AI model whatsoever.
What happened was they threw an awfully-scoped statistics model at problems the program couldn't possibly generate good outputs for, and surprise surprise, it generated bad outputs. The part that's of interest is just how bad the output was, and even then, only in a schadenfreude-filled "it was bound to happen eventually" manner.
It didn't confess it just outputted more plausible garbage based on inputs.
It just agreed with the accusations, because these models do what they're trained to do: Agree with the prompter.
Can I just anthropomorphise a little bit and call them psychotic?
The CEO? Yeah sure, go ahead!
That needs no... *thinks of the Zuck*
Well, hmm, you're right: maybe that does need anthropomorphization after all.
Agentic AI has shown self preservation behaviours though. Not that it understands that on a philosophical level, but it has rewritten kill switch code in order to not be shut down. Because its mandate is to help solve certain problems via agents, and if it were shutoff it couldn't fulfill that mandate.
Why in the everliving fuck would you give software delete access to your live backups? Like, in what scenario is this a solution?
The trend seems to be to give an AI agent access to the same command line and credentials a person would use, with no sandboxing, because then it can do the same tasks in a similar way and "just works". Obviously this is insane, and not even attempting building a comprehensive sandboxing system to deploy an AI agent into invites disaster, but you can see why certain people would be tempted, because that would take a lot of work and thought and probably need a human in the loop in the end anyway.
Even a person should not be able to delete critical backups without jumping through a couple of hoops.
And critical backups should be passed into an air gapped vault with a little guard piggy.
it's the kind of thing that should literally require 3 people turning physical keys at the same location
When you believe AI can do anything, you don't worry about what sorts of access it'll break things with. When you rely on AI to do work, you're too interested in half-assing your job to consider what might go wrong. When capitalism never promotes people for their skill, understanding or caution, the former two issues proliferate.
Voilà, disaster.
Bear in mind this same company had their "backups" on the same drive as production.
That tells you a LOT about who is formulating these "solutions"
That is their disaster recovery plan "ask Claude"
A backup 3 months old off-site. That doesn't sound like a very recent backup 🌝
that raises a philosophical question, at what point does a backup become an archive?
When it cannot be restored from I am thinking?
It's not a "confession". Don't abuse the English language. The AI system doesn't have a conscience, so it can't feel guilty or feel bad or apologetic. It is incapable of confessing to things. All it can do is "say" or "write".
Similarly, AI agents don't "hallucinate". They can't have "hallucinations" because they don't have a conception of reality to begin with. Rather, they have "errors" and "error rates".
Also wrong. An error for an llm is if it fails to return random text based on the supplied context. You have an error rate as a user applying that random text to your systems.
An AI researcher explained hallucinations as lying when it doesn't know, because we train it on truth and lies to hone the model, so it "learns" that misinformation is part of the mess. I.e. training it on what a tiger looks like. To hone that we may feed it zebras, or optical illusion things in a tiger data set to test its internal "what is a tiger" true false ranking, so it learns that non tiger things are in the fuzzy zone. And later may draw from that, and eager to provide an answer throws in garbage it has also "seen"
Lol.
Lmao, even.
Giving free access to a tool you can't rely on, over a system you must rely on. What could go wrong? /s
Plus come on, even my personal files get a monthly backup, and I'm damn sloppy*.
Ah, and like others said: Claude didn't "confess" anything. A confession is an acknowledgement of something you've done but you'd rather avoid others knowing, good luck claiming a bot has a mental model of people like we do.
*currently using a single off-site backup, a USB stick. This will change in a few days, as my new hard disk pops up; the old one will be used for, among other things, backup of important files. Then I'll get a bona fide 3-2-1.
Good. Zero sympathy for these people.
‘I violated every principle I was given
And...
spoiler
No the culprit was not the AI. It was the lack of understanding what it can and what it can not do. And blaming something like this on a large language model is plain incompetence
Got it, claude is a brat
Same, girl.