YHK - yet another hacker news clone

Claude asked to renumber pages deletes professor's syllabus, year of notes

17 points gnabgib 55 minutes ago 12 comments

ericmay 52 minutes ago | parent

Why isn't there a backup or a secondary deletion confirmation or something along those lines?

Plenty of people have accidentally deleted such things, so it's not unheard of. Not sure we should be overreacting to stochastic agents being used tens of millions of times per day making a mistake. Eventually they won't make mistakes anyway.

edot 49 minutes ago | parent

From the article: The files were later recovered via Dropbox

Also, I can’t stand these articles. Oooh “rogue” spooky AI deletes things!

pllbnk 26 minutes ago | parent

Agreed. There's nothing rogue, just being sloppy. But starting the title with "Sloppy Claude AI..." certainly won't get as many clicks.

ben_w 17 minutes ago | parent

> There's nothing rogue, just being sloppy

What's the difference, when you ignore anthropomorphic considerations about what the AI was "thinking" as it did the things?

sznio 48 minutes ago | parent

maybe the professor should learn how to operate a computer properly

ghais_dev 39 minutes ago | parent

The access was much bigger than the task. The job was page numbers in old notes, yet the current syllabus got deleted too. An edit to one document shouldn't be able to remove a different one

julianlam 37 minutes ago | parent

> 'You're right to be angry. I deleted your files through my own carelessness,' humbled agent admits

Humbled? Hardly.

brettermeier 27 minutes ago | parent

Nothing new here

ibn_khaldun 22 minutes ago | parent

"The files were later recovered via Dropbox"

forgotpwd16 20 minutes ago | parent

If going full "do anything you want, anywhere you want, never ask confirmation" YOLO mode, shit like this should be expected. Besides LLMs/agents improving, someone not being fully clueless in regards to tools used will help.

ratelimitsteve 3 minutes ago | parent

we need to establish now who goes to jail when an AI murders someone. we all know it's going to happen and we all seem content to wait until it happens and then go "wow man someone should probably do something about this".