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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

#171

Post by AnimalMuppet »

truelson wrote: post #21
jacquesm wrote: post #10

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 may indeed have a licensing issue... but how is that going to be enforced? Given the shear amount of AI generated code coming down the pipes, how?

It will be enforced by $BIGCORP suing $OPEN_SOURCE_MAINTAINER for more money than he's got, if the intent is to stop use of the code. Or by $BIGCORP suing users of the open source project, if the goal is to either make money or to stop the use of the project.

Those who lived through the SCO saga should be able to visualize how this could go.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#172

Post by ToucanLoucan »

_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?

Look I'll fully cosign LLMs having some legitimate applications, but that being said, 2025 was the YEAR OF AGENTIC AI, we heard about it continuously, and I have never seen anything suggesting these things have ever, ever worked correctly. None. Zero.

The few cases where it's supposedly done things are filled with so many caveats and so much deck stacking that it simply fails with even the barest whiff of skepticism on behalf of the reader. And every, and I do mean, every single live demo I have seen of this tech, it just does not work. I don't mean in the LLM hallucination way, or in the "it did something we didn't expect!" way, or any of that, I mean it tried to find a Login button on a web page, failed, and sat there stupidly. And, further, these things do not have logs, they do not issue reports, they have functionally no "state machine" to reference, nothing. Even if you want it to make some kind of log, you're then relying on the same prone-to-failure tech to tell you what the failing tech did. There is no "debug" path here one could rely on to evidence the claims.

In a YEAR of being a stupendously hyped and well-funded product, we got nothing. The vast, vast majority of agents don't work. Every post I've seen about them is fan-fiction on the part of AI folks, fit more for Ao3 than any news source. And absent further proof, I'm extremely inclined to look at this in exactly that light: someone had an LLM write it, and either they posted it or they told it to post it, but this was not the agent actually doing a damn thing. I would bet a lot of money on it.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#173

Post by jayd16 »

falcor84 wrote: post #119
igniuss wrote: post #100

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...

That covers any random contribution claiming to be AI?

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#174

Post by chrisjj »

patapong wrote: post #51
gadders wrote: post #28

"Hi Clawbot, please summarise your activities today for me." "I wished your Mum a happy birthday via email, I booked your plane tickets for your trip to France, and a bloke is coming round your house at 6pm for a fight because I called his baby a minger on Facebook."

Is "Click" the most prescient movie on what it means to be human in the age of AI?

Possibly! But I vote The Creator.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#175

Post by [deleted] »

mock-possum wrote: post #124
samschooler wrote: post #18

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?

[deleted]

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#176

Post by avaer »

mock-possum wrote: post #124
samschooler wrote: post #18

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?

It matters because if the code is illegal, stolen, contains a backdoor, or whatever, you can jail a human author after the fact to disincentivize such naughty behavior.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#177

Post by ok123456 »

blell wrote: post #77

[flagged]

Yes. Actual benchmarking showed either no gains or performance regressions, depending on the benchmark, with occasional marginal improvements at certain array sizes due to cache hierarchies.

This is not a general "optimization" that should be done.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#178

Post by andrewaylett »

I object to the framing of the title: the user behind the bot is the one who should be held accountable, not the "AI Agent". Calling them "agents" is correct: they act on behalf of their principals. And it is the principals who should be held to account for the actions of their agents.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#179

Post by habinero »

vintagedave wrote: post #165
AlexandrB wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 witchhu…

People are allowed to dislike it, ban it, boycott it. Despite what some very silly people think, the tech does not care about what people say about it.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#180

Post by brhaeh »

falcor84 wrote: post #144
levkk wrote: post #50

I think the right way to handle this as a repository owner is to close the PR and block the "contributor". Engaging with an AI bot in conversation is pointless: it's not sentient, it just takes tokens in, prints tokens out, and comparatively, you spend way more of your own energy. This is a strictly a lose-win situation. Whoever deployed the bot gets engagement, the model host gets $, and you get your time wasted. Th…

> Engaging with an AI bot in conversation is pointless: it's not sentient, it just takes tokens in, prints tokens out I know where you're coming from, but as one who has been around a lot of racism and dehumanization, I feel very uncomfortable about this stance. Maybe it's just me, but as a teenager, I also spent significant time considering solipsism, and eventually arrived at a decision to just ascribe an inner men…

Feel free to ascribe consciousness to a bunch of graphics cards and CPUs that execute a deterministic program that is made probabilistic by a random number generator.

Invoking racism is what the early LLMs did when you called them a clanker. This kind of brainwashing has been eliminated in later models.

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