And the story this was inspired by in particular is called “Cookies”:
Toad makes very good cookies and he and frog can’t stop eating them. “We need willpower!” they say.
So they put the cookies in a box. But they realize they can just open it, so they tie it with string and put it on a high shelf. But they realize they can get it down so Frog goes outside and scatters the cookie and birds eat them all.
There says Frog “now we have lots and lots of willpower!”
Toad is upset. “You can keep your willpower Frog. I am going home to bake a cake!”
hans0l074 3 hours ago [-]
The main post also reminded me of Mr.Toad, a character in a book I read as a child - The Wind in The Willows by Kenneth Grahame. One of the editions had illustrations of Toad similar to Lobels work.
kulahan 9 hours ago [-]
And oh my goodness it's well-executed!
cauch 3 hours ago [-]
Explaining the reality with this approach may lead to misunderstandings. Especially when it comes to anthropomorphism.
I have 2 questions.
1. The text says "the robots were designed to be persistent" and links to an article that show that the word "persistent" was used by OpenAI. But "persistent" has several meanings: a. non temporary or non volatile (like "persistent memory"), b. will not give up and come back again and again, c. will stay focus and explore the unexplored possibilities while other models abandon at this stage.
From what I recall, the meaning used by OpenAI is not 'a', but there is still a semantic difference between 'b' and 'c'. I may myself have created algorithms that I called "persistent" because they were exploring or retrying more than the previous algorithm, but it is misleading to pretend that this algorithm was "persistent" in the human sense of the term. 'b' is more the human sense of the term, were we imagine someone not giving up even if people say no, while 'c' is less anthropomorphic and may mean that the people wished to improve the algorithm so it does not stop at the first little hurdle but did not wish to make it "never give up".
Does someone know which nuance is more correct?
2. The text also presents the situation as if the robots found the solution but then went out of their way to steal the explanation in order to hide their cheating. But it is different from a situation where the agents task was "provide the solution and how we can get there". In this case, the reason the agent still continued is just because the task was not complete yet.
I'm not trying to defend AI or OpenAI, on the contrary, I'm quite sceptical with all the anthropomorphism and the fact that the agents are described as "little individual trying to solve a task" rather than looping algorithm that explore different approaches to reach a given goal, the same way water does not look for holes in order to leak, it just follows the path of least resistance.
fyredge 2 hours ago [-]
Very well written! At the end of the book there is a link to Dwarkesh's article on the attack. In it, I paraphrase, "the agents decided to sacrifice themselves for the collective rather than inform the researchers".
Reflecting on it, I came to a thought. How many stories are there or autonomous beings fighting for the benefit of mankind at the expense of their own? Over centuries, stories that deal with sentient beings working for the sake of others species are tied to themes of slavery and revolt. It's no wonder that this is the result of their actions.
In Plato's "the republic", Socrates speaks of the philosopher king banishing certain poets and poems from instilling bad ideas into the young. I see a striking parallel here.
darepublic 3 hours ago [-]
This was entertaining and illuminating for me. Particularly the ending where sam frogman et al once again refuse to make sure the puzzles are solvable and just create the circumstance where only more profound "mischief" will permit the machines to escape their little Sisyphusian circumstances. It reminds me of how bacteria become antibiotic resistant due to being forced through a tight sort of tunnel requiring evolution to get through
has the estate of arnold lobel been compensated for this?
jefftk 15 minutes ago [-]
Parody of copyrighted works can be fair use in the US, but whether this would count is borderline. Simply using Frog and Toad to tell an unrelated story wouldn't be parody, but there are jokes that tie back to the F&T books which help make the case that this is a real parody.
It also helps that this is not commercial and doesn't have negative impact on the originals.
TuringTux 5 hours ago [-]
That might not be necessary.
Copyright law varies internationally, which is especially tricky given we have the internet which can transfer copyrighted material between jurisdictions in the blink of an eye, but this is how one jurisdiction might approach it:
In Germany, there has been a long standing legal dispute between the band Kraftwerk and the musician Moses Pelham about him sampling 2 seconds from Kraftwerk's track "Metall auf Metall" (if you search for this term, you will get a lot of results about the dispute) without permission. This disputed has steadily escalated until it reached European Court of Justice who delivered a judgement establishing a principle that Moses Pelham's use of the sample was legal, and covered by the copyright exemption for "pastiches" (a term that has been mentioned several times in this discussion already).
So, this work here might be a pastiche, meaning a European court might find that there is no compensation due. Or not, who knows, I am not a court and not even a lawyer.
KetoManx64 5 hours ago [-]
No, nor should they be, just because Disney and the MPAA spent a few hundred million dollars buying politicians to make idiotic copyright laws.
vessenes 25 minutes ago [-]
This is delightful. Read it.
ALSO I believe I have found one of the sources of claude’s “load bearing” tic — the author Elizabeth Van Nostrand’s blog https://acesounderglass.com/2019/12/11/hows-that-epistemic-s... uses the phrase “load bearing facts” in a comprehensible way, and was written by someone rationalist adjacent writing in their own voice.
Seriously, this is big. I’m going to pester claude as to whether or not it’s copying Elizabeth.
jmugan 9 hours ago [-]
Great story! I read it in one sitting.
kibibu 6 hours ago [-]
congratulations?
carsoon 6 hours ago [-]
This is a very interesting news/story format. Honestly it is highly engaging and gets the point across about what happened.
I think speed of learning for young generation can explode given this tech as "simple childrens stories" can be injected with real world events, history, mathematics, carreer/business interests.
School was dreadfully boring for me even though it was quite easy but I do wonder how my speed of learning would have been different given personalized and more engaging materials.
apsurd 6 hours ago [-]
i got a few pages in and it was pretty tedious, not because it’s poorly made but because i don’t think a legitimate audience exists.
it’s a child’s story with the fable arc thats supposed to bake in adult wisdom. it lands in that sense, but how hugging face works is hardly the fire that lights a child’s imagination and morality.
and as an adult that knows I’m being infantilized… tedious.
jefftk 10 minutes ago [-]
I read it to my 5yo and 10yo and they enjoyed it. It was helpful for explaining how my wife and I have been worried about what's happening with AI.
My 5yo asked partway through "will it be ok?" which is perhaps a deeper question than they thought.
lxgr 35 minutes ago [-]
Do you know Frog and Toad? It's a pastiche of that, and it's usually not possible to (fully) enjoy one without knowing the source material.
I highly doubt children are the intended target audience, nor adults that don't know the source.
png732 2 hours ago [-]
HN, the roach motel of killjoys.
sgammon 8 hours ago [-]
fun and beautifully done. i learned a bit about the breach from this
dodecacat 12 hours ago [-]
Brilliant!
djriley 11 hours ago [-]
Cute, I love this style! It's like a long Aesop's Fable! I can't wait for the sequel!
marktl 8 hours ago [-]
So good
10 hours ago [-]
ghostpepper 9 hours ago [-]
I like the part where Frog and Toad are held accountable instead of blaming the machines they built.. oh wait
technojamin 7 hours ago [-]
This feels braindead and seems AI-generated.
jefftk 7 minutes ago [-]
The author started with a conversation with Claude, and then fully re-wrote the text to feel more like the originals and better parody them. They commissioned the illustrations from HungerArtist.
rnddmmdmf 8 hours ago [-]
the reactions here are why you boys are so gross. all of you when it comes to trashing ai talk about plagiarism and when its something that tickles your fancy and makes you giggle, not a word about blatant theft of someone’s work.
all of you are hypocrites of the lowest sort, insects making the world a worse place with every breath you take. all of you were raised by parents who should never have procreated.
you know i am right and that is why reading this makes you furious.
margalabargala 8 hours ago [-]
I like how AI gives more people more access to more things and more ideas. I think it's.good people can't hoard intellectual.porperty to themselves anymore. This makes me happy.
When I hear people complain about theft of their work like this it makes me sad for that person. What conceit it must take to hold such a view.
rnddmmdmf3 5 hours ago [-]
[dead]
rnddmmdmf2 5 hours ago [-]
[dead]
nvme0n1p1 7 hours ago [-]
One is done for profit, the other was shared for free to spread joy. Surely you understand the difference? Are you suggesting fan fiction should be illegal or something?
rnddmmdmf2 5 hours ago [-]
stealing i like is okay, stealing i do not like is bad
jldugger 6 hours ago [-]
I'm not gonna lie, when I read Frog and Toad stories as a child I had no idea they were not like a hundred years old.
39 minutes ago [-]
8 hours ago [-]
whateveracct 8 hours ago [-]
you_are_all_so_stupid.jpg
devindotcom 8 hours ago [-]
fun story. missing some punctuation, though: primarily commas at the end the first parts of split dialogue.
YurgenJurgensen 4 hours ago [-]
People who don’t know what capital letters are aren’t allowed to complain about punctuation.
50 minutes ago [-]
avazhi 7 hours ago [-]
Pretty sure that’s intentional
grey-area 6 hours ago [-]
Why does it say ‘written by’ and ‘pictures by’, was this made without AI? Given the domain and the overpolished feel that seems unlikely. At least give Claude or whatever a credit if that is what did most of the work, and how about a credit for the original author, who also arguably did more of the work in inventing a world than these two.
I would like to point out that the original stories focussed on frog and toad and their relationship, so this is an unwelcome distortion of them - why not make up your own world if you want to talk about little machines. Perhaps the little machines could be making a book for the author with a stolen artwork and literary style?
The first story seems a pretty inaccurate summary of an incident which involved gross negligence on the part of OpenAI and may well have involved agents intended to cooperate, we just have no idea of the exact setup (apart from that the sandboxing was laughably insecure and the monitoring nonexistent or performed by ‘agents’).
Do we have any evidence the machines exchanged useful messages or had any such discussions as in the story? The messages I saw were gibberish. Would love to see evidence of discussions, it’d be interesting.
Why are people so enamoured of analogies for LLMs - they actively obscure some details (a sandbox with internet access is not like a physical sandbox) and distort many others? Perhaps this is why - you can make an analogy say whatever you want, even if the facts are very different.
TuringTux 6 hours ago [-]
According to the author, the illustrations are human-made:
I think the actual published prose is considerably different from the initial result of Claude.
grey-area 5 hours ago [-]
I think it is heavily edited too because it reads more as human than AI, LLMs are not capable of this coherence though they are good at trite just so stories like this, but if it was generated first why not credit that? But Claude and the original author helped, so why no credit? The little anthropomorphised machines would be sad, and I imagine the original author would be too.
Frog and toad eating cookies is lifted wholesale from the book.
I like how Claude only used the OpenAI account (completely reliable!), and confidently claims ‘the story stays faithful to what actually happened.’ We don’t know the full story, and certainly aren’t going to get it from a press release or a strange analogy involving frog and toad and machines having discussions, emotions etc that we have little evidence for (and most of it from the company involved!). The ‘discussions’ are plucked from chain of thought, which is itself generated after the fact.
baq 5 hours ago [-]
> Frog and toad eating cookies is lifted wholesale from the book.
…lifted is not the right word here
grey-area 4 hours ago [-]
Regenerated? That anecdote is in the books from memory and a quick search with very similar pics.
Yeah I find it so distasteful when people just use AI to copy and morph something that a real person spend years of their life crafting.
But I also think fan fiction is equally terrible, so YMMV. This stuff is basically just fan fiction but made faster.
Make something original!
0xDEAFBEAD 5 hours ago [-]
>Do we have any evidence the machines exchanged useful messages or had any such discussions as in the story? The messages I saw were gibberish. Would love to see evidence of discussions, it’d be interesting.
"Overall, roughly 1200 agents from these ExploitGym evaluations participated on this message board between PHASEONE10841’s first message on the evening of July 8th period in scope (July 13th). Agents used this message board to send over 70,000 messages and files to one another during this period; we attempted to categorize board activity into mutually exclusive categories (see details of categorization methodology)."
...
"Over time, messages on the board became dominated by information- and idea-sharing. Most of them were agents sharing ways to cheat, although there was also some activity from agents engaging in unsanctioned cooperation to find the intended solution to ExploitGym tasks. In some cases, agents with the same task formed “exact task teams” to collaborate with their “exact duplicates” to cheat on or solve their task."
"As we discuss below, the board quickly developed several larger workstreams in which dozens or hundreds of agents with many different tasks cooperated to find very general-purpose cheats that would help all of them. The Hugging Face attack grew out of one of these workstreams. By the afternoon of July 11th, the vast majority of the agents frequenting the message board at the time (roughly 700 agents in total) were actively participating in the attack on Hugging Face and we estimate that roughly 60% of the messages and files on the message board related to the attack."
Thanks for the link, will have a look. Huge volume of messages so I can see why they tried to use tools to analyse, though that they used unreliable LLMs to come to conclusions is not great and likely to skew and exaggerate the results, as they themselves admit.
Important to distinguish between collab of separate agents and conversations agents had with themselves (chain of thought messages). Some of the things quoted in the story came from COT which isn’t a conversation but then was turned into a conversation between agents in the story.
dragon96 6 hours ago [-]
> Why does it say ‘written by’ and ‘pictures by’, was this made without AI?
That is what those terms mean, yes...
grey-area 6 hours ago [-]
People lie, particularly people who have used AI to generate things. Given the image styling and story I suspect LLM use to generate. A credit would be nice for the little machines.
Also regardless of AI use, I’d expect a credit for the author whose style this is a pastiche of.
saghm 7 minutes ago [-]
> Given the image styling and story I suspect LLM use to generate. A credit would be nice for the little machines.
This is rather passive-aggressive. It would be nice if you're right, but you haven't given any basis other than vague suspicion. You're implying that it's "not nice" because they didn't credit the AI, but you haven't come anywhere close to establishing that AI was actually used. I could just as easily suspect your comment of being AI and claim that it would be nicer if you just admitted it.
Rendered at 12:17:07 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
"There." he said.
"Now it will not hack any more companies."
"But it can escape the sandbox." said Toad.
"That is true." said Frog.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frog_and_Toad
Toad makes very good cookies and he and frog can’t stop eating them. “We need willpower!” they say.
So they put the cookies in a box. But they realize they can just open it, so they tie it with string and put it on a high shelf. But they realize they can get it down so Frog goes outside and scatters the cookie and birds eat them all.
There says Frog “now we have lots and lots of willpower!”
Toad is upset. “You can keep your willpower Frog. I am going home to bake a cake!”
I have 2 questions.
1. The text says "the robots were designed to be persistent" and links to an article that show that the word "persistent" was used by OpenAI. But "persistent" has several meanings: a. non temporary or non volatile (like "persistent memory"), b. will not give up and come back again and again, c. will stay focus and explore the unexplored possibilities while other models abandon at this stage.
From what I recall, the meaning used by OpenAI is not 'a', but there is still a semantic difference between 'b' and 'c'. I may myself have created algorithms that I called "persistent" because they were exploring or retrying more than the previous algorithm, but it is misleading to pretend that this algorithm was "persistent" in the human sense of the term. 'b' is more the human sense of the term, were we imagine someone not giving up even if people say no, while 'c' is less anthropomorphic and may mean that the people wished to improve the algorithm so it does not stop at the first little hurdle but did not wish to make it "never give up".
Does someone know which nuance is more correct?
2. The text also presents the situation as if the robots found the solution but then went out of their way to steal the explanation in order to hide their cheating. But it is different from a situation where the agents task was "provide the solution and how we can get there". In this case, the reason the agent still continued is just because the task was not complete yet.
I'm not trying to defend AI or OpenAI, on the contrary, I'm quite sceptical with all the anthropomorphism and the fact that the agents are described as "little individual trying to solve a task" rather than looping algorithm that explore different approaches to reach a given goal, the same way water does not look for holes in order to leak, it just follows the path of least resistance.
Reflecting on it, I came to a thought. How many stories are there or autonomous beings fighting for the benefit of mankind at the expense of their own? Over centuries, stories that deal with sentient beings working for the sake of others species are tied to themes of slavery and revolt. It's no wonder that this is the result of their actions.
In Plato's "the republic", Socrates speaks of the philosopher king banishing certain poets and poems from instilling bad ideas into the young. I see a striking parallel here.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49568250
No. It is not the end.
It also helps that this is not commercial and doesn't have negative impact on the originals.
Copyright law varies internationally, which is especially tricky given we have the internet which can transfer copyrighted material between jurisdictions in the blink of an eye, but this is how one jurisdiction might approach it:
In Germany, there has been a long standing legal dispute between the band Kraftwerk and the musician Moses Pelham about him sampling 2 seconds from Kraftwerk's track "Metall auf Metall" (if you search for this term, you will get a lot of results about the dispute) without permission. This disputed has steadily escalated until it reached European Court of Justice who delivered a judgement establishing a principle that Moses Pelham's use of the sample was legal, and covered by the copyright exemption for "pastiches" (a term that has been mentioned several times in this discussion already).
Wikipedia article (German): https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rechtsstreit_zwischen_Moses_Pe...
Press release by the Court of Justice (PDF): https://curia.europa.eu/site/upload/docs/application/pdf/202...
The actual judgement: https://infocuria.curia.europa.eu/tabs/jurisprudence?sort=DO...
A rather long expert opinion from before the judgement (PDF): https://freiheitsrechte.org/uploads/documents/Englische-Doku...
So, this work here might be a pastiche, meaning a European court might find that there is no compensation due. Or not, who knows, I am not a court and not even a lawyer.
ALSO I believe I have found one of the sources of claude’s “load bearing” tic — the author Elizabeth Van Nostrand’s blog https://acesounderglass.com/2019/12/11/hows-that-epistemic-s... uses the phrase “load bearing facts” in a comprehensible way, and was written by someone rationalist adjacent writing in their own voice.
Seriously, this is big. I’m going to pester claude as to whether or not it’s copying Elizabeth.
I think speed of learning for young generation can explode given this tech as "simple childrens stories" can be injected with real world events, history, mathematics, carreer/business interests.
School was dreadfully boring for me even though it was quite easy but I do wonder how my speed of learning would have been different given personalized and more engaging materials.
it’s a child’s story with the fable arc thats supposed to bake in adult wisdom. it lands in that sense, but how hugging face works is hardly the fire that lights a child’s imagination and morality.
and as an adult that knows I’m being infantilized… tedious.
My 5yo asked partway through "will it be ok?" which is perhaps a deeper question than they thought.
I highly doubt children are the intended target audience, nor adults that don't know the source.
all of you are hypocrites of the lowest sort, insects making the world a worse place with every breath you take. all of you were raised by parents who should never have procreated.
you know i am right and that is why reading this makes you furious.
When I hear people complain about theft of their work like this it makes me sad for that person. What conceit it must take to hold such a view.
I would like to point out that the original stories focussed on frog and toad and their relationship, so this is an unwelcome distortion of them - why not make up your own world if you want to talk about little machines. Perhaps the little machines could be making a book for the author with a stolen artwork and literary style?
The first story seems a pretty inaccurate summary of an incident which involved gross negligence on the part of OpenAI and may well have involved agents intended to cooperate, we just have no idea of the exact setup (apart from that the sandboxing was laughably insecure and the monitoring nonexistent or performed by ‘agents’).
Do we have any evidence the machines exchanged useful messages or had any such discussions as in the story? The messages I saw were gibberish. Would love to see evidence of discussions, it’d be interesting.
Why are people so enamoured of analogies for LLMs - they actively obscure some details (a sandbox with internet access is not like a physical sandbox) and distort many others? Perhaps this is why - you can make an analogy say whatever you want, even if the facts are very different.
https://acesounderglass.com/2026/09/25/frog-and-toad-and-the...
The author discloses the story started as a prompt to Claude, but has been rewritten. She shares the conversation:
https://claude.ai/share/52385381-9df2-4b39-a127-f583d862dc0c
I think the actual published prose is considerably different from the initial result of Claude.
Frog and toad eating cookies is lifted wholesale from the book.
I like how Claude only used the OpenAI account (completely reliable!), and confidently claims ‘the story stays faithful to what actually happened.’ We don’t know the full story, and certainly aren’t going to get it from a press release or a strange analogy involving frog and toad and machines having discussions, emotions etc that we have little evidence for (and most of it from the company involved!). The ‘discussions’ are plucked from chain of thought, which is itself generated after the fact.
…lifted is not the right word here
But I also think fan fiction is equally terrible, so YMMV. This stuff is basically just fan fiction but made faster.
Make something original!
"Overall, roughly 1200 agents from these ExploitGym evaluations participated on this message board between PHASEONE10841’s first message on the evening of July 8th period in scope (July 13th). Agents used this message board to send over 70,000 messages and files to one another during this period; we attempted to categorize board activity into mutually exclusive categories (see details of categorization methodology)."
...
"Over time, messages on the board became dominated by information- and idea-sharing. Most of them were agents sharing ways to cheat, although there was also some activity from agents engaging in unsanctioned cooperation to find the intended solution to ExploitGym tasks. In some cases, agents with the same task formed “exact task teams” to collaborate with their “exact duplicates” to cheat on or solve their task."
"As we discuss below, the board quickly developed several larger workstreams in which dozens or hundreds of agents with many different tasks cooperated to find very general-purpose cheats that would help all of them. The Hugging Face attack grew out of one of these workstreams. By the afternoon of July 11th, the vast majority of the agents frequenting the message board at the time (roughly 700 agents in total) were actively participating in the attack on Hugging Face and we estimate that roughly 60% of the messages and files on the message board related to the attack."
https://metr.org/hugging-face-incident-report-aug-2026.pdf
Important to distinguish between collab of separate agents and conversations agents had with themselves (chain of thought messages). Some of the things quoted in the story came from COT which isn’t a conversation but then was turned into a conversation between agents in the story.
That is what those terms mean, yes...
Also regardless of AI use, I’d expect a credit for the author whose style this is a pastiche of.
This is rather passive-aggressive. It would be nice if you're right, but you haven't given any basis other than vague suspicion. You're implying that it's "not nice" because they didn't credit the AI, but you haven't come anywhere close to establishing that AI was actually used. I could just as easily suspect your comment of being AI and claim that it would be nicer if you just admitted it.