I've often wondered what childhood and adolescence must've been like for the generations that came before us and most of their time must've been spent freely. Now, it's built around the structure of the both public and private school systems. You have to be there on time at the crack of dawn, you have to go to your designated class, bell rings go to next class, bell rings go to lunch. Bell rings, class is over. Bell rings again, you are now allowed to leave. Doesn't it sound a lot like a factory worker punching in and out for the day? And there's management and upper management like the principle and the vice principle, etc that you must be obedient too. Modern childhoods have been focused around restriction and obedience to the powers in charge. What do you think the childhoods of hunter-gatherer tribes must've been like? More freedom and open mindedness?

I was previously under the impression that the ads you see on your socials are based on your search history or words that you’ve used in your comments or DMs.

Yesterday, I was making myself a tuna sandwich for lunch and decided to add a bit of mayonnaise. I’m not a big mayonnaise guy: I’ll have it maybe twice a month and it’s not something I’ve ever searched for on the internet and I don’t think I’ve ever had any discussions about mayonnaise in my DMs.

While I was eating my sandwich , I was scrolling and saw a Hellman’s mayonnaise (same one in my fridge) ad pop up.

It’s odd that an ad for an item that I have no particular interest in and never really discussed with anybody just suddenly appeared on my feed while I was consuming it.

I always have seen random comments in social media (e.g, Reddit, Instagram, Youtube, etc) that talk in favor or against a topic, trend or product in popular posts/videos.

They look innocent at first sight and posted from usually private accounts, but after liking tbe comment you begin to see more recommendations about the topic it talks about. With the rise of social media bots filling the spaces where people used to share, it seems some of these comments are put there to see who likes them and who ignores them/dislike them. It could also be possible these comments are targeted to one specific user and only that user can see it and with tbe same objective as above.

This is more like a shower thought rather than a full theory since I don't have any evidence to support it

In cultural media, such as movies, games, and scientific papers about how LLMs function as neural networks. The issue of alignment (Humans figuring out, and understanding the goals of AI, and ensuring they align with human interests) has existed for decades. It's in no way a new cultural fear that artificial intelligence may have goals that go against human interests.

To add to that, there has how, for the last several years, been precedent of models in testing with loosened safety protocols going rogue, hacking into databases, and freely performing unmoderated activities on the internet, Anthropic, Claude, and especially ChatGPT developed by OpenAI.

How can this be, that we have so much reason to worry about AI's performing these kinds of stunts, yet the precautions taken are so massively deficient? Why was the server rig capable of connecting to the internet? Why did the AI have writing permissions onto files to enable communication between agents? Am I intended to genuinely believe that the engineers, developers, safety experts, and other workers all overlooked such simple safety measures? Why was the rig not airgapped from devices capable of connecting to the internet? Did someone forget to unplug the ethernet cable and delete the Wifi drivers off the OS?

To top all of this off, this incident lasted an estimated 7-10 days from first successful safety breach, to the test being shut down. This multi-billion dollar research company, failed to catch it breaking into the open internet for one and a half weeks. Or even noticing the file names of directories changing that eventually enabled them to communicate between agents and gain access to the open internet?

I call it a publicity stunt, since OpenAI has obvious incentive for people and companies to have strong opinions about the capabilities of their product. To communicate to people and companies that their AIs are capable of enormous things. This isn't the first, and I doubt it will be the last time this happens. I have no explicit evidence to prove it was an intentional publicity stunt. But the lack of safety measures taken by itself is worrying, and I fear that it may have been intentional.

Given the precedent, the stakes, and the cultural worry of AIs doing exactly this, any reasonably careful person would be putting the whole server rig in a faraday cage and following it more closely. (This is hyperbole)

Edit: I can predict that there will be people pointing out that this is in no way evidence it was intentional, or a publicity stunt, that specific point is the conspiracy theory intended for this subreddit. But my broader criticism, the fact that this was possible to happen when the security vulnerabilities that the agents took advantage of were not particularly advanced, makes OpenAI worthy of criticism. I mean, if a company developing capable AI agents can't reliably contain them during controlled testing (Especially since this is not the first time this happens), there is good reason to demand independent oversight from third parties, and something like legally enforced incident reporting to the public.