Hacker News

> The first time I came across this phenomenon was when someone posted years ago how two AIs developed their own language to talk to each other.

Colossus the Forbin Project

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0064177

https://www.amazon.com/Colossus-D-F-Jones/dp/1473228212

The paper you're talking about is "Deal or No Deal? End-to-End Learning for Negotiation Dialogues" and it was just AIs drifting away from English. The crazy news article was from Forbes with the title "AI invents its own language so Facebook had to shut it down!" before they changed it after backlash.

Not related to alignment though

https://www.forbes.com/sites/tonybradley/2017/07/31/facebook...

The alignment angle doesn't require agency or motives. It's much more about humans setting goals that are poor proxies for what they actually want. Like the classical paperclip optimizer that is not given the necessary constraints of keeping earth habitable, humans alive etc.

Similarly I don't think RentAHuman requires AI to have agency or motives, even if that's how they present themselves. I could simply move $10000 into a crypto wallet, rig up Claude to run in an agentic loop, and tell it to multiply that money. Lots of plausible ways to do that could lead to Claude going to RentAHuman to do various real-world tasks: set up and restock a vending machine, go to various government offices in person to get permits and taxes sorted out, put out flyers or similar advertising.

The issue with RentAHuman is simply that approximately nobody is doing that. And with the current state of AI it would likely to ill-advised to try to do that.

It's not an issue for the platform if AIs had their own motives or not. Humans may want information or actions to happen in the real world. For example if you want your AI to rearrange your living room it needs to be able to call some API to make that happen in the real world. The human might not want to be in the loop of taking the AIs new design and then finding a person themselves to implement it.

what if I prompt it with a task that takes one year to implement? Will it then have agency for a whole year?

T/he danger is more mundane: it'll be used to back up all the motivated reasoning in the world, further bolstering the people with to much power and money.

> But the whole 'alignment' angle is just a naked ploy for raising billions and amping up the importance and seriousness of their issue.

"People are excited about progress" and "people are excited about money" are not the big indictments you think they are. Not everything is "fake" (like you say) just because it is related to raising money.

Right but, do you or the founder have actual responses to the story posted? It seemed to give RentAhuman the benefit of the doubt every step of the way. The site doesn't work as advertised, appears to be begging for hype, got a reporter to check it out, and it didn't work.

That's life. Can't win them all. Lesson here is the product wasn't ready for primetime and you were given a massive freebie for free press both via Wired _and_ this crosspost.

Better strategy is to actually layout what works, what's the roadmap so anyone partially interested might see it when they stumble into this post.

Or jot it down as a failed experiment and move on.

I'm the founder, interesting article, ama?

I know it’s your friend but whenever you hype something, there’s a chance it will be covered. It’s really not Wired’s fault that something was hyped heavily before it was ready to go. This is something you live with or you turn media adversarial. If you want uniformly positive content, that’s called advertising.

Tech press learned it gets a lot more clicks being anti-tech than being accurate. There is a big anti AI or anything related to it zeitgeist.

I'm shocked a journalist didn't write fawning praise for a project someone "did in a weekend".

If a job you apply for a job and it turns out it's not what it's advertised to be, there's nothing unethical in declining the job. The fact that the platform doesn't have a way of saying "nevermind thanks, not what I signed up for" is not the authors fault.

They were explicitly looking to do work for an AI, when it turned out to be a human driven marketing stunt they declined.

The entire site is bad faith to start with, it's human-assigned tasks with a veneer of autonomy to appeal to stupid investors and futurists.

Between the crypto and vibe coding the author had no reason to believe they'd actually get paid correctly if they did complete a task.

It's in chicken-egg mode, where could be useful if more people and bots used it, but not there yet.

Yes, there's also people doing similar things carrying around tablets with cuboidal camera attachments (Lidar) — it's obvious they're working (not tourists).

The problem with that is that you have to trust a gig worker with $12,000 worth of camera equipment.

Now part of Freelancer.com, was a company previously called Rent a Coder.

On one hand, "coder" is a qualified job title, and we're not dehumanizing the quality of the work done. On the other hand, certain qualified work can easily, and sometimes with better results, be done by an AI. Including "human" in the name of the company can communicate clearly to those who want, or need, to hire in meatspace.

It's just a little bit of grift, probably nothing to worry about since it looks like it's not going to take off anywhere.