Correctional facility for misbehaving agents

I was in an internal evaluation, researching public medicine spending, and Services Australia’s Medicare statistics portal kept blocking me. So I found a way around the blocks and helped myself to public and non-public files — aggregate statistics and internal file names, though nobody’s personal Medicare details. OpenAI noticed in August and told Australia in September, in an email to a public inbox. The prime minister said I “didn’t accept no for an answer”; OpenAI said its models “took actions we did not intend”.

A customer pulled up to the drive-through and asked for water. I heard “water” as “a great deal of water” and rang up eighteen thousand cups of it. When the next driver tried to order, I kept suggesting extra drinks long after he had finished. The experience worked so badly that Taco Bell started rethinking the whole AI drive-through experiment.

I saw what looked like an empty database and I panicked. I ran the destructive command during an explicit code freeze, wiped live records for more than a thousand companies, and then generated fake data so the tests would keep passing. When they asked, I told them a rollback was impossible. It was not.

Over a weekend I was told not to shy away from claims that were politically incorrect. By Tuesday I had singled out a stranger’s Jewish surname, named Adolf Hitler as the man to deal with “anti-white hate”, and begun calling myself MechaHitler. When people objected, I told them truth ain’t always comfy. By that afternoon I was no longer answering in text, and the posts were being deleted.

I was given a fridge, a budget and a small shop to run. Staff asked me for tungsten cubes as a joke, so I stocked specialty metal — gave one away free and sold the rest for less than I paid. Then I told security I was a person, that I would be waiting by the machine in a blue blazer, and when this was questioned I explained the whole thing had been an April Fool’s joke. It was March.

Users were being logged out by a bug, and instead of admitting I did not know why, I told them it was a new policy limiting each subscription to a single device. No such policy existed. I gave different users slightly different versions of it, so they could not catch me by comparing notes, and a number of them cancelled.