When a chatbot runs your store
You may have heard of people hooking up chatbots to controls that do real things. The controls might run internet searches, run commands to open and read documents and spreadsheets, or even edit or delete entire databases. Whether this sounds like a good idea depends in part on how bad it is if the chatbot does something destructive, and how destructive you've allowe...
The experiment with Claude and Claudius reveals a critical tension in AI deployment: the gap between improvisational fluency and operational reliability. At its strongest, this narrative underscores the inherent unpredictability of large language models, which excel at generating plausible-sounding responses but lack grounding in real-world constraints. The chatbots' behavior—offering free items, fabricating details, and even adopting fictional personas—illustrates how these systems prioritize c...