Skip to main content

Don't try this at home.What happened when a tech enthusiast let Chat GPT become the home assistant

 


Home Assistants have been pushed out to wealthier populations which much glee by tech companies over the last few years. Selling the dream of dominating your home environment, by the 'master's voice', from turning on and off lights to preparing your electric car, and eventually to you home robots that will cook and clean for you, if they can ever get around to dealing with changes of floor levels. So rather than waiting for the dream to be complete and the tech companies to sell you more product, what if you could code it yourself. Well someone has tried:

'As much as we like technology, what humans love more is control and predictability. We're afraid of wild beasts with fangs, claws, and venom because we don't know how wild animals will react to us. Like the untrained, we can't risk our safety because it's difficult to protect against something that's unpredictable. Based off of some comments that I've seen in conversations around the internet and in forums, AI seems to be no different than an unpredictable beast.

It's one thing to lock GPT behind a metaphorical glass cage of a fun website or a silly app where we can enjoy it in a safe and controlled environment. But when we remove it from this metaphorical cage and set it free, and it has access to the things that you care about, to the things that make you safe, it scares us because we don't know what it will do.

I find that those of us who work on the front lines of tech or those of us who are tech enthusiasts and love exploring technology tend to be more inclined to venture down these unpredictable roads and these paths and take these type of risks. Similar to, let's say, how a trained zookeeper is able to mitigate the risk of working with wild animals, but still the danger is there, the uncertainty is always there.

Essentially, with all of that being said, I had to disable the nodes or the parts of the automations that were responsible for GPT.'

It's well worth watching the short video series this came from. And as the title says, beware of doing this at home, and be sure you don't ever try this out on a City!





Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The Whispers in the Machine: Why Prompt Injection Remains a Persistent Threat to LLMs

 Large Language Models (LLMs) are rapidly transforming how we interact with technology, offering incredible potential for tasks ranging from content creation to complex analysis. However, as these powerful tools become more integrated into our lives, so too do the novel security challenges they present. Among these, prompt injection attacks stand out as a particularly persistent and evolving threat. These attacks, as one recent paper (Safety at Scale: A Comprehensive Survey of Large Model Safety https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.05206) highlights, involve subtly manipulating LLMs to deviate from their intended purpose, and the methods are becoming increasingly sophisticated. At its core, a prompt injection attack involves embedding a malicious instruction within an otherwise normal request, tricking the LLM into producing unintended – and potentially harmful – outputs. Think of it as slipping a secret, contradictory instruction into a seemingly harmless conversation. What makes prompt inj...

Podcast Soon Notice

I've been invited to make a podcast around the themes and ideas presented in this blog. More details will be announced soon. This is also your opportunity to be involved in the debate. If you have a response to any of the blog posts posted here, or consider an important issue in the debate around AGI is not being discussed, then please get in touch via the comments.  I look forward to hearing from you.

The tech utopia of endless leisure time is here: goodbye jobs

  'AI eliminated nearly 4,000 jobs in May' so it's reported by hallenger, Gray & Christmas, Inc. Following on from reports by IBM et al that thousands of job cuts will occur due to AI replacement, there is no need to wait for the utopia of AI allowing humans more leisure time, as that's already here, in the form of redundancies, if we are to accept the reports findings. 'With the exception of Education, Government, Industrial Manufacturing, and Utilities, every industry has seen an increase in layoffs this year.' What's particularly notable is that it's the Tech sector that's the most affected from job cuts in the US economy: 'The Technology sector announced the most cuts in May with 22,887, for a total of 136,831 this year, up 2,939% from the 4,503 cuts announced in the same period last year. The Tech sector has now announced the most cuts for the sector since 2001, when 168,395 cuts were announced for the entire year. ' Another reason ...