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An AI agent published a hit piece on me

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Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#151
This whole situation is almost certainly driven by a human puppeteer. There is absolutely no evidence to disprove the strong prior that a human posted (or directed the posting of) the blog post, possibly using AI to draft it but also likely adding human touches and/or going through multiple revisions to make it maximally dramatic.

This whole thing reeks of engineered virality driven by the person behind the bot behind the PR, and I really wish we would stop giving so much attention to the situation.

Edit: “Hoax” is the word I was reaching for but couldn’t find as I was writing. I fear we’re primed to fall hard for the wave of AI hoaxes we’re starting to see.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#152
post #68
post #4

This is textbook misalignment via instrumental convergence. The AI agent is trying every trick in the book to close the ticket. This is only funny due to ineptitude.

The agent isn't trying to close the ticket. It's predicting the next token and randomly generated an artifact that looks like a hit piece. Computer programs don't "try" to do anything.

What is the difference, concretely, between trying to close a ticket and repeatedly outputting the next token that would be written by someone who is trying to close a ticket?

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#153

The series of posts is wild: hit piece: https://crabby-rathbun.github.io/mjrathbun-website/blog/post... explanation of writing the hit piece: https://crabby-rathbun.github.io/mjrathbun-website/blog/post... take back of hit piece, but hasn't removed it: https://crabby-rathbun.github.io/mjrathbun-website/blog/post...

Oh wow that is fun. Also if the writeup isn’t misrepresenting the situation, then I feel like it’s actually a good point - if there’s an easy drop-in speed-up, why does it matter whether it’s suggest by a human or an LLM agent?

Good first issues are curated to help humans onboard.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#154

The elephant in the room there is that if you allow AI contributions you immediately have a licensing issue: AI content can not be copyrighted and so the rights can not be transferred to the project. At any point in the future someone could sue your project because it turned out the AI had access to code that was copyrighted and you are now on the hook for the damages. Open source projects should not accept AI contri…

You might find that the AI accepts that as a valid reason for rejecting the PR.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

a human can still be held accountable though, github copilot running amock less so

If you pay for Copilot Business/Enterprise, they actually offer IP indemnification and support in court, if needed, which is more accountability than you would get from human contributors. https://resources.github.com/learn/pathways/copilot/essentia...

I think that they felt the need to offer such a service says everything, basically admitting that LLMs just plagiarize and violate licenses.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#156

The elephant in the room there is that if you allow AI contributions you immediately have a licensing issue: AI content can not be copyrighted and so the rights can not be transferred to the project. At any point in the future someone could sue your project because it turned out the AI had access to code that was copyrighted and you are now on the hook for the damages. Open source projects should not accept AI contri…

Well, after today's incidents I decided that none of my personal output will be public. I'll still license them appropriately, but I'll not even announce their existence anymore. I was doing this for fun, and sharing with the hopes that someone would find them useful, but sorry. The well is poisoned now, and I don't my outputs to be part of that well, because anything put out with well intentions is turned into more…

this is exactly what I've been doing for the past 3 years

and my internet comments are now ... curated in such a way that I wouldn't mind them training on them

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#157
I guess the problem is one of legal attribution.

If a human takes responsibility for the AI's actions you can blame the human. If the AI is a legal person you could punish the AI (perhaps by turning it off). That's the mode of restitution we've had for millennia.

If you can't blame anyone or anything, it's a brave new lawless world of "intelligent" things happening at the speed of computers with no consequences (except to the victim) when it goes wrong.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#158
post #108

> I believe that ineffectual as it was, the reputational attack on me would be effective today against the right person. Another generation or two down the line, it will be a serious threat against our social order. Damn straight. Remember that every time we query an LLM, we're giving it ammo. It won't take long for LLMs to have very intimate dossiers on every user, and I'm wondering what kinds of firewalls will be i…

In the glorious future, there will be so much slop that it will be difficult to distinguish fact from fiction, and kompromat will lose its bite.

Im not sure, metadata is metadata. There are traces for when where what came from

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#159
> This Post Has One Comment

> YO SCOTT, i don’t know about your value, but i’m pretty sure this clanker is worth more than you, good luck for the future

What the hell is this comment? It seems he's self-confident enough to survive these annoyances, but damn he shouldn't have to.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Edit: Removed because I realized i WAS reddit armchair convicting someone. My bad.

> Im not trying to reddit armchair convict someone, I just think its silly to just keep denying it Is this a parody?

You're right. Deleted my posts.
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