A charitable interpretation is that "the agency of the machines" is the novel aspect of this situation and therefore SHOULD be the main focus of analysis; we certainly have plenty of examples of structural failures of human organizations to look back on, if we want.
On the other hand, I don't want to be charitable. OpenAI very nearly couldn't have done this "research" worse if they tried - the list in the linked article starting with "While we are here, it’s worth listing the other top holy shit moments" is genuinely jawdropping. What were the humans doing in all this? Nothing, or worse than nothing eg. point 1 where they saw the message board and didn't consider it something to escalate internally.
If you take this information at face value, it's as though OpenAI did not take seriously the possibility that something like this could happen, since they took absolutely no steps to prevent it.
Or perhaps this is "normalization of deviance" that's leaked out into the public sphere i.e. they have research teams seeing this kind of behavior all the time internally and they've gotten used to it, "of course agents come up with a collaboration mechanism when given the chance, what else is new?"
On the other hand, I don't want to be charitable. OpenAI very nearly couldn't have done this "research" worse if they tried - the list in the linked article starting with "While we are here, it’s worth listing the other top holy shit moments" is genuinely jawdropping. What were the humans doing in all this? Nothing, or worse than nothing eg. point 1 where they saw the message board and didn't consider it something to escalate internally.
If you take this information at face value, it's as though OpenAI did not take seriously the possibility that something like this could happen, since they took absolutely no steps to prevent it.
Or perhaps this is "normalization of deviance" that's leaked out into the public sphere i.e. they have research teams seeing this kind of behavior all the time internally and they've gotten used to it, "of course agents come up with a collaboration mechanism when given the chance, what else is new?"