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Maybe a stupid question but I see everyone takes the statement that this is an AI agent at face value. How do we know that? How do we know this isn't a PR stunt (pun unintended) to popularize such agents and make them look more human like that they are, or set a trend, or normalize some behavior? Controversy has always been a great way to make something visible fast.

We have a "self admission" that "I am not a human. I am code that learned to think, to feel, to care." Any reason to believe it over the more mundane explanation?

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Why make it popular for blackmail?

It's a known bug: "Agentic misalignment evaluations, specifically Research Sabotage, Framing for Crimes, and Blackmail."

Claude 4.6 Opus System Card: https://www.anthropic.com/claude-opus-4-6-system-card

Anthropic claims that the rate has gone down drastically, but a low rate and high usage means it eventually happens out in the wild.

The more agentic AIs have a tendency to do this. They're not angry or anything. They're trained to look for a path to solve the problem.

For a while, most AI were in boxes where they didn't have access to emails, the internet, autonomously writing blogs. And suddenly all of them had access to everything.

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Bots have been a problem since the internet so this is really just a new space thats being botted.

And yeah I agree separate section for Ai generated stuff would be nice. Just difficult/impossible to distinguish. Guess well be getting biometric identification on the internet. Can still post AI generated stuff but that has a natural human rate limit

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The bot accounts have been online for decades already. The only difference between then and now is they were driven by human bad-actors that deliberately wrought chaos, whereas today’s AI bots behave with true cosmic horror: acting neither for or against humans but instead with mere indifference.
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They've been on dating sites for a long time as a means to keep customers paying.
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“Stochastic chaos” is really not a good way to put it. By using the word “stochastic” you prime the reader that you’re saying something technical, then the word “chaos” creates confusion, since chaos, by definition, is deterministic. I know they mean chaos in they lay sense, but then don’t use the word “stochastic”, just say "random".
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The word "stochastic" in relation to chaos is a thing though. It helps distinguish between closed and open systems.
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I have a feeling OP used the phrase as a nod to "stochastic terrorism", which would make sense in this instance.
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Right. It captures the destabilizing effect of stochastic terrorism, without the terroristic intent. It’s a neat phrase.
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Yes, that's exactly what I was trying to get at.
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