Frog and Toad return as a sharp AI fable, and Hacker News can't agree on who's to blame
Frog and Toad and the Increasingly Capable Machines
A pastiche of Arnold Lobel's Frog and Toad books, hosted at frogandtoad.ai, drew 100 points and 16 comments on Hacker News. Readers praised the writing and art as a well-executed, Aesop-like story about increasingly capable machines, while others questioned whether Lobel's estate was compensated and whether the piece was AI-generated.
I like the part where Frog and Toad are held accountable instead of blaming the machines they built.. oh wait
- Jordan-117
Frog put the AI in a sandbox.
"There." he said.
"Now it will not hack
any more companies."
"But it can escape the sandbox."
said Toad.
"That is true." said Frog.
- mjd
For those not familiar with it already, the writing and art style are a well-executed pastiche of Arnold Lobel's ”Frog and Toad” books.
- WillMorr
This is excellent, great work. I genuinely think this mix of children's communication and humor is a clever way to make these big stories more approachable. Someone who read some hype article about how competent and clever openai for making a bad sandbox is could read this and immediately understand that it was entirely their own fault.
- munchler
This is an excellent explainer. I noticed one important flaw in the setup, though: Toad assigns multiple puzzles on page 5, but by page 10 all the machines seem to be working on the same puzzle.
I'm not sure how this maps onto reality. If each agent had a different problem to solve, how did they cooperate?
- fyredge
Very well written! At the end of the book there is a link to Dwarkesh's article on the attack. In it, I paraphrase, "the agents decided to sacrifice themselves for the collective rather than inform the researchers".
Reflecting on it, I came to a thought. How many stories are there or autonomous beings fighting for the benefit of mankind at the expense of their own? Over centuries, stories that deal with sentient beings working for the sake of others species are tied to themes of slavery and revolt. It's no wonder that this is the result of their actions.
In Plato's "the republic", Socrates speaks of the philosopher king banishing certain poets and poems from instilling bad ideas into the young. I see a striking parallel here.
- Betelbuddy
And then Mr Jensen come in, and bought the house of Mr HuggingFace. So then, was not his house anymore...and he could not complain to the Police. The Frogs were Mr Jensen best customers of worms, slugs and snails...and he could not see, that any harm would come to them...
- mkesper
Frog and Toad are not like OpenAI in that OpenAI made the little machines themselves and knew they were not made harmless. This seems much too excusing.
- darepublic
This was entertaining and illuminating for me. Particularly the ending where sam frogman et al once again refuse to make sure the puzzles are solvable and just create the circumstance where only more profound "mischief" will permit the machines to escape their little Sisyphusian circumstances. It reminds me of how bacteria become antibiotic resistant due to being forced through a tight sort of tunnel requiring evolution to get through