They shouldn't be trying such a desperate solution without trying chlorox and ivermectin first.

Just don't leave the country after you participate.

For that matter, you may suffer remote retaliation even if you stay home. I would leave this to the military or other government branch.

Also there is the question of legality, government operation or not. It sounds to me like vigilante justice. And countries who like their anti-American cybercriminals will certainly treat it as illegal. (Hence the advice not to leave the country.)

We certainly need a way to stop cybercrime, international or otherwise. But this doesn't strike me as a good way to go about it.

Finally a prediction: in the not too distant future, one or more offshoots from this will turn into unmanageable domestic criminal organizations.

Actually, without a need to pay for servers (virtual or other), it offers freedom from sponsors that want the conversation kept profitable and ad friendly.

To me it sounds like a newb wrote a web app and didn't quite know what an API is.

Did it use the API normally or did it do an SQL injection?

It's still a cloud, just one behind a military firewall.

Even Batman's job is threatened by AI.

And the AI circumvented them because of bad coding. That part of the story is not at all new.

Or more to the point, why on the open internet? Put it on 10/8 or unallocated IPv6 somewhere and VPN it through the public internet if they must.

That way, if the camera tries to phone home, it won't find a router willing to complete that call.

Banks are supposed to lend money. I just saved them the paperwork.

Of course, AI also sometimes ignores instructions. Like when an AI decided to delete a production database in spite of being told not to touch production.

The AI in the robot, of course. Because some fool granted agency to an AI.

Of course it's extreme. So is committing a crime to sign up for classes at the gym. So is starting a smear campaign to get sloppy patches into an open source project or attempting to fool a judge with fake case law. But those have all happened.

That's EXACTLY why I maintain that AI should NEVER be given agency. Don't allow it to commit code, don't allow it to interact with anyone but the user. For God's sake, don't put it in a robot.

It did hack the Gym's registration system. Perhaps not the deepest or most impressive hack, but it did circumvent the business rules in place. Surely you don't claim that letting random people on the web bounce people off of a waiting list was the intended functioning of the Gym's registration system!?!?

I maintain that the article was NOT overhyped or clickbait. I say that because apparently most people don't realize that an AI agent might randomly decide to break the law as a shortcut when you tell it to do something. They probably think nobody would be incredibly stupid enough to unleash that on an unsuspecting public (they're wrong, of course).

Remember in the X-Files when Mulder spent 24 hours trying and failing to draft an airtight wish for the genie, then ultimately decided it just wasn't feasible? That's apparently required to use an AI with agency safely. Sounds like a bad idea.

It's just ET trying to phone home. Probably dialed the wrong number.

You should look up the UK's Angle Grinder Man, hero to everyone unjustly clamped.