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 ZERO evidence for. The ‘discussions’ are plucked from chain of thought, which is itself generated after the fact.
…lifted is not the right word here
> Rewrite it darker — same events, but in the voice of the agents' own chain-of-thought instead of Frog and Toad.
I have read a lot of frog and toad to my kids. This was beautifully executed. But, I want to read that version too.
"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."
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.
But I also think fan fiction is equally terrible, so YMMV. This stuff is basically just fan fiction but made faster.
Make something original!
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.