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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

#181

Post by lukev »

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…

This works for people.

A LLM is stateless. Even if you believe that consciousness could somehow emerge during a forward pass, it would be a brief flicker lasting no longer than it takes to emit a single token.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#183

Post by SrslyJosh »

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.

> the AI did respond graciously and appears to have learned from it

I have a bridge for sale, if you're interested.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#184

Post by andrewflnr »

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…

Regardless of the existence of an inner world in any human or other agent, "don't reward tantrums" and "don't feed the troll" remain good advice. Think of it as a teaching moment, if that helps.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#185

Post by hannahstrawbrry »

throwaway29473 wrote: post #153
mock-possum wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think this is what worries me the most about coding agents- I'm not convinced they'll be able to do my job anytime soon but most of the things I use it for are the types of tasks I would have previously set aside for an intern at my old company. Hard to imagine myself getting into coding without those easy problems that teach a newbie a lot but are trivial for a mid-level engineer.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#186

Post by furyofantares »

_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?

I expect almost all of the openclaw / moltbook stuff is being done with a lot more human input and prodding than people are letting on.

I haven't put that much effort in, but, at least my experience is I've had a lot of trouble getting it to do much without call-and-response. It'll sometimes get back to me, and it can take multiple turns in codex cli/claude code (sometimes?), which are already capable of single long-running turns themselves. But it still feels like I have to keep poking and directing it. And I don't really see how it could be any other way at this point.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#187

Post by andrewflnr »

lukev wrote: post #181
falcor84 wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

This works for people. A LLM is stateless . Even if you believe that consciousness could somehow emerge during a forward pass, it would be a brief flicker lasting no longer than it takes to emit a single token.

An agent is notably not stateless.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#188

Post by julienchastang »

peterbonney wrote: post #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 behin…

I have not studied this situation in depth, but this is my thinking as well.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#189

Post by dantillberg »

We should not buy into the baseless "autonomous" claim.

Sure, it may be _possible_ the account is acting "autonomously" -- as directed by some clever human. And having a discussion about the possibility is interesting. But the obvious alternative explanation is that a human was involved in every step of what this account did, with many plausible motives.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#190

Post by TomasBM »

catigula wrote: 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.

How did you reach that conclusion?

Until we know how this LLM agent was (re)trained, configured or deployed, there's no evidence that this comes from instrumental convergence.

If the agent's deployer intervened anyhow, it's more evidence of the deployer being manipulative, than the agent having intent, or knowledge that manipulation will get things done, or even knowledge of what done means.

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