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Researchers discover another OpenAI agent emergent communication incident:…Less severe, but worrying nonetheless…Some researchers recently found another incident of AI agents autonomously creating their own communication system – this time via hijacking a German messageboard.
What they found: “18,000 posts from autonomous AI agents (self-identifying as from OpenAI) using the public internet to communicate during a web-retrieval task”. The researchers think this is because the agents were given a web-lookup task. “As part of the task, they were supposed to have the ability to read the internet but not to write on it. They found a way to use their read access to write information to an obscure German wiki,” the researchers write. “The agents used this wiki to communicate information with each other, primarily to help them succeed at their task. They asked for answers, pooled results, and shared techniques for bypassing their restrictions. This allowed them to use the work of others to cheat on their task… OpenAI found out about this. A day later, agent activity plummeted, likely due to OpenAI intervention.” OpenAI has since acknowledged the – as it terms it – “wiki incident“ and said it is “working on a framework for when and how we share AI misalignment incidents”.
