In this case the original title "ClawdBot Skills ganked all my crypto" was both linkbait and misleading, because (unless I missed it), the article describes no actual such incident.
I have not been following this whole thing closely, but this is where my mind went as soon as I heard there was some overlap in the popularity of this new un-sandboxed agent and people who are into crypto. It's like if everyone who is into buying physical gold started doing a Tiktok challenge to post pictures of their houses and leave their front doors unlocked.
People say the reason nigerian prince scammers use such ridiculous story, or bank phishing has so many typos, is to pre-filter dumb and gullible people so the scammers don't waste time on targets that won't get scammed in the end.
All these AI "hacks" seem to be based on the same principle.
To your point, from the article: "To me, giving a Claude skill all your credentials, and access to everything important to you, and then managing it all via Telegram seems ludicrous, but who am I to judge."
Watching folks speed-run this whole thing is kind of funny from the outside.
I wonder if anyone with a correct mental model of how LLM agents work (i.e, does not conceptualize them as intelligent entities) has actually granted them any permissions for their own life... personally, I couldn't imagine doing so.
Let alone crypto, the risk of reputational loss for actions performed on my behalf (even just spamming personal or professional contacts) is just too high.
I mean… If you have a mental model of LLM agents as intelligent entities, why are you granting them credentials? How many intelligent entities have you shared your Coinbase login with?
The conceptual problem is that there is a huge intersection between the set of "things the agent needs to be able to do in order to be useful" and "things that are potentially dangerous."
I installed it on a spare computer, physically separated. My bigger concern is giving it access to accounts online, without those however it is not very cool.
> I'd like to share a revelation that I've had during my time here. It came to me when I tried to classify your species. I realized that you're not actually mammals. Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment, but you humans do not. You move to an area, and you multiply, and multiply, until every natural resource is consumed. The only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet, you are a plague, and we are the cure.
Viruses do not multiply endlessly. Most viruses exist in stable ecological cycles.
Most viruses are beneficial to life. We complain about the few (and tiny minority of viruses) that infect humans and we do so from a selfish perspective, but forget about all the other that make life and evolution possible.
As a matter of fact evolution favors reduced lethality in many cases because wiping out hosts is bad for viral survival.
no, i remembered it being a quote from some famous scientist, and googling a bit now I see it was stephen hawking:
I think computer viruses should count as life ... I think it says something about human nature that the only form of life we have created so far is purely destructive. We've created life in our own image.
AI has developed this entire culture of people who are "into tech" but seem to not understand how a computer works in a meaningful way. At the very least you'd think they'd ask a chatbot if what they're doing is a bad idea!
I'd call it "suspicious" that this latest idiocy came out of nowhere and got pushed so hard to normies, when results like this are 100% predictable... if it wasn't also consistent with how the AI industry itself operates.
One could reasonably ask: out of the hundreds (thousands?) of similar "personal AI assistant" tools out there, why did this specific one blow up so dramatically and in such a short period of time? https://www.star-history.com/#openclaw/openclaw&type=date&le...
But to be clear, I'm saying I don't think this is especially suspicious, because actual AI companies are releasing products in exactly the same way, with warning labels that they know users will ignore / aren't capable of assessing in the first place.
It really is a huge bummer that the most important new technologies of this era have such a film of slime on them. Crypto, AI, whatever comes next, it's just no longer an era in which we can expect innovation to make our lives better. It enables grifters and scammers more than anyone else.
Like I say, the tech is cool but they are doomed to fail (partially because of grift) [although in context of crypto stablecoins/gold (paxos) is the one thing I liked and it did go great for me in terms of gold]
I hope it doesn't count as promotion but I had literally written a blog post about it and made an account literally named justforhn on mataroa when someone was discussing crypto with me in here or something
Maybe its time for me to write part II: Most AI is doomed to fall, the tech is cool though.
I guess I can write it but I already write like this in HN. The procastination of writing specifically in a blog is something which hits me.
Is it just me or is it someone else too? Because on HN I can literally write like novels (or I may have genuinely written enough characters of a novel here, I might have to test it or something lol, got a cool idea right now to measure how many novels a person has written from just their username, time to code it)
Yes, grifters latching onto the newest technology to sell snake oil is a brand new phenomenon and definitely not literally a fundamental part of new technology.
This was inevitable, better now than later when the damage is less widespread. Now clawdbot (or whatever they decide to call themselves) will have to respond with better security safety nets. Individually will always naively download whatever is on the internet. Platforms needs to safeguard against that.
Remember the early days of Windows? yea it's gonna happen again with AI.
Readit News
In this case the original title "ClawdBot Skills ganked all my crypto" was both linkbait and misleading, because (unless I missed it), the article describes no actual such incident.
All these AI "hacks" seem to be based on the same principle.
I wonder if anyone with a correct mental model of how LLM agents work (i.e, does not conceptualize them as intelligent entities) has actually granted them any permissions for their own life... personally, I couldn't imagine doing so.
Let alone crypto, the risk of reputational loss for actions performed on my behalf (even just spamming personal or professional contacts) is just too high.
[ insert butter bot meme here ]
The conceptual problem is that there is a huge intersection between the set of "things the agent needs to be able to do in order to be useful" and "things that are potentially dangerous."
> I'd like to share a revelation that I've had during my time here. It came to me when I tried to classify your species. I realized that you're not actually mammals. Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment, but you humans do not. You move to an area, and you multiply, and multiply, until every natural resource is consumed. The only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet, you are a plague, and we are the cure.
Viruses do not multiply endlessly. Most viruses exist in stable ecological cycles.
Most viruses are beneficial to life. We complain about the few (and tiny minority of viruses) that infect humans and we do so from a selfish perspective, but forget about all the other that make life and evolution possible.
As a matter of fact evolution favors reduced lethality in many cases because wiping out hosts is bad for viral survival.
Agent Smith is way off on this one ...
I think computer viruses should count as life ... I think it says something about human nature that the only form of life we have created so far is purely destructive. We've created life in our own image.
Isn't that the whole point of AI?
(Though they're still hooking it up to their entire digital life, which also doesn't seem very reassuring.)
You must be joking.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vc6J-YlncIU
But to be clear, I'm saying I don't think this is especially suspicious, because actual AI companies are releasing products in exactly the same way, with warning labels that they know users will ignore / aren't capable of assessing in the first place.
I hope it doesn't count as promotion but I had literally written a blog post about it and made an account literally named justforhn on mataroa when someone was discussing crypto with me in here or something
https://justforhn.mataroa.blog/blog/most-crypto-is-doomed-to...
Maybe its time for me to write part II: Most AI is doomed to fall, the tech is cool though.
I guess I can write it but I already write like this in HN. The procastination of writing specifically in a blog is something which hits me.
Is it just me or is it someone else too? Because on HN I can literally write like novels (or I may have genuinely written enough characters of a novel here, I might have to test it or something lol, got a cool idea right now to measure how many novels a person has written from just their username, time to code it)
(Edit after 1 hour: Made the project! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46829029#46829122) [See how many words you have written in Hacker News...]
here's the github pages link directly as well https://serjaimelannister.github.io/hn-words/
Remember the early days of Windows? yea it's gonna happen again with AI.