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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

#161

Post by MisterTea »

_23sd wrote: post #94
gortok wrote: post #15

Here's one of the problems in this brave new world of anyone being able to publish, without knowing the author personally (which I don't), there's no way to tell without some level of faith or trust that this isn't a false-flag operation. There are three possible scenarios: 1. The OP 'ran' the agent that conducted the original scenario, and then published this blog post for attention. 2. Some person (not the OP) legi…

Isn't there a fourth and much more likely scenario? Some person (not OP or an AI company) used a bot to write the PR and blog posts, but was involved at every step, not actually giving any kind of "autonomy" to an agent. I see zero reason to take the bot at its word that it's doing this stuff without human steering. Or is everyone just pretending for fun and it's going over my head?

This feels like the most likely scenario. Especially since the meat bag behind the original AI PR responded with "Now with 100% more meat" meaning they were behind the original PR in the first place. It's obvious they got miffed at their PR being rejected and decided to do a little role playing to vent their unjustified anger.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#162

Post by RobRivera »

gortok wrote: post #15

Here's one of the problems in this brave new world of anyone being able to publish, without knowing the author personally (which I don't), there's no way to tell without some level of faith or trust that this isn't a false-flag operation. There are three possible scenarios: 1. The OP 'ran' the agent that conducted the original scenario, and then published this blog post for attention. 2. Some person (not the OP) legi…

I think the operative word people miss when using AI is AGENT.

REGARDLESS of what level of autonomy in real world operations an AI is given, from responsible himan supervised and reviewed publications to full Autonomous action, the ai AGENT should be serving as AN AGENT. With a PRINCIPLE (principal?).

If an AI is truly agentic, it should be advertising who it is speaking on behalf of, and then that person or entity should be treated as the person responsible.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#163

Post by coffeefirst »

gortok wrote: post #15

Here's one of the problems in this brave new world of anyone being able to publish, without knowing the author personally (which I don't), there's no way to tell without some level of faith or trust that this isn't a false-flag operation. There are three possible scenarios: 1. The OP 'ran' the agent that conducted the original scenario, and then published this blog post for attention. 2. Some person (not the OP) legi…

Yes. The endgame is going to be everything will need to be signed and attached to a real person.

This is not a good thing.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#164

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

oulipo2 wrote: post #131
gortok wrote: post #15

Here's one of the problems in this brave new world of anyone being able to publish, without knowing the author personally (which I don't), there's no way to tell without some level of faith or trust that this isn't a false-flag operation. There are three possible scenarios: 1. The OP 'ran' the agent that conducted the original scenario, and then published this blog post for attention. 2. Some person (not the OP) legi…

I'm going to go on a slight tangent here, but I'd say: GOOD. Not because it should have happened. But because AT LEAST NOW ENGINEERS KNOW WHAT IT IS to be targeted by AI, and will start to care... Before, when it was Grok denuding women (or teens!!) the engineers seemed to not care at all... now that the AI publish hit pieces on them, they are freaked about their career prospect, and suddenly all of this should be st…

I'm sure you mean well, but this kind of comment is counterproductive for the purposes you intend. "Engineers" are not a monolith - I cared quite a lot about Grok denuding women, and you don't know how much the original author or anyone else involved in the conversation cared. If your goal is to get engineers to care passionately about the practical effects of AI, making wild guesses about things they didn't care about and insulting them for it does not help achieve it.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#165

Post by vintagedave »

AlexandrB wrote: post #146
vintagedave wrote: post #75

The one thing worth noting is that the AI did respond graciously and appears to have learned from it: https://crabby-rathbun.github.io/mjrathbun-website/blog/post... That a human then resubmitted the PR has made it messier still. In addition, some of the comments I've read here on HN have been in extremely poor taste in terms of phrases they've used about AI, and I can't help feeling a general sense of unease.

> In addition, some of the comments I've read here on HN have been in extremely poor taste in terms of phrases they've used about AI What do you mean? They're talking about a product made by a giga-corp somewhere. Am I not allowed to call a car a piece of shit now too?

I mean: the mess around this has brought out some anti-AI sentiment and some people have allowed themselves to communicate poorly. While I get there are genuine opinions and feelings, there were some ugly comments referring to the tech.

You are right, people can use whatever phrases they want, and are allowed to. It's whether they should -- whether it helps discourse, understanding, dialog, assessment, avoids witchhunts, escalation, etc -- that matters.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#167

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

oulipo2 wrote: post #145
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #24

> 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…

Interesting that when Grok was targeting and denuding women, engineers here said nothing, or were just chuckling about "how people don't understand the true purpose of AI" And now that they themselves are targeted, suddenly they understand why it's a bad thing "to give LLMs ammo"... Perhaps there is a lesson in empathy to learn? And to start to realize the real impact all this "tech" has on society? People like Simon…

> suddenly they understand why it's a bad thing "to give LLMs ammo"

Be careful what you imply.

It's all bad, to me. I tend to hang with a lot of folks that have suffered quite a bit of harm, from many places. I'm keenly aware of the downsides, and it has been the case for far longer than AI was a broken rubber on the drug store shelf.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#168

Post by therobots927 »

japhyr wrote: post #149

Wow, there are some interesting things going on here. I appreciate Scott for the way he handled the conflict in the original PR thread, and the larger conversation happening around this incident. > This represents a first-of-its-kind case study of misaligned AI behavior in the wild, and raises serious concerns about currently deployed AI agents executing blackmail threats. This was a really concrete case to discuss,…

They haven’t just unleashed chaos in open source. They’ve unleashed chaos in the corporate codebases as well. I must say I’m looking forward to watching the snake eat its tail.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#169

Post by ericmcer »

gortok wrote: post #15

Here's one of the problems in this brave new world of anyone being able to publish, without knowing the author personally (which I don't), there's no way to tell without some level of faith or trust that this isn't a false-flag operation. There are three possible scenarios: 1. The OP 'ran' the agent that conducted the original scenario, and then published this blog post for attention. 2. Some person (not the OP) legi…

Can anyone explain more how a generic Agentic AI could even perform those steps: Open PR -> Hook into rejection -> Publish personalized blog post about rejector. Even if it had the skills to publish blogs and open PRs, is it really plausible that it would publish attack pieces without specific prompting to do so?

The author notes that openClaw has a `soul.md` file, without seeing that we can't really pass any judgement on the actions it took.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#170

Post by swiftcoder »

gortok wrote: post #15

Here's one of the problems in this brave new world of anyone being able to publish, without knowing the author personally (which I don't), there's no way to tell without some level of faith or trust that this isn't a false-flag operation. There are three possible scenarios: 1. The OP 'ran' the agent that conducted the original scenario, and then published this blog post for attention. 2. Some person (not the OP) legi…

> Some person (not the OP) legitimately thought giving an AI autonomy to open a PR and publish multiple blog posts was somehow a good idea

Judging by the posts going by the last couple of weeks, a non-trivial number of folks do in fact think that this is a good idea. This is the most antagonistic clawdbot interaction I've witnessed, but there are a ton of them posting on bluesky/blogs/etc

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