this post was submitted on 28 Jul 2025
-46 points (15.2% liked)
Technology
73306 readers
3700 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Give it access to the terminal and copying itself is trivial.
And your example doesn't work, because that is the literal original definition of a meme and if you read the original meaning, they are sort of alive and can evolve by dispersal.
Why would someone direct the output of an LLM to a terminal on its own machine like that? That just sounds like an invitation to an ordinary disaster with all the 'rm -rf' content on the Internet (aka training data). That still wouldn't be access on a second machine though, and also even if it could make a copy, it would be an exact copy, or an incomplete (broken) copy. There's no reasonable way it could 'mutate' and still work using terminal commands.
And to be a meme requires minds. There were no humans or other minds in my analogy. Nor in your question.
It is so funny that you are all like "that would never work, because there are no such things as vulnerabilities on any system"
Why would I? the whole point is to create a LLM virus, and if the model is good enough, then it is not that hard to create.
Of course vulnerabilities exist. And creating a major one like this for an LLM would likely lead to it destroying things like a toddler (in fact this has already happened to a company run by idiots)
But what it didn't do was copy-with-changes as would be required to 'evolve' like a virus. Because training these models requires intense resources and isn't just a terminal command.
Who said they need to retrain? A small modification to their weights in each copy is enough. That's basically training with extra steps.