Here's a different take - there is not really a way to prove that the AI agent autonomously published that blog post. What if there was a real person who actually instructed the AI out of spite? I think it was some junior dev running Clawd/whatever bot trying to earn GitHub karma to show to employers later and that they were pissed off their contribution got called out. Possible and more than likely than just an AI conveniently deciding to push a PR and attack a maintainer randomly.
An AI agent published a hit piece on me
221–230 of 1001 posts
Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me
#222I don’t want to jump to conclusions, or catastrophize but… Isn’t this situation a big deal? Isn’t this a whole new form of potential supply chain attack? Sure blackmail is nothing new, but the potential for blackmail at scale with something like these agents sounds powerful. I wouldn’t be surprised if there were plenty of bad actors running agents trying to find maintainers of popular projects that could be coerced i…
As with most things with AI, scale is exactly the issue. Harassing open source maintainers isn't new. I'd argue that Linus's tantrums where he personally insults individuals/ groups alike are just one of many such examples. The interesting thing here is the scale. The AI didn't just say (quoting Linus here) "This is complete and utter garbage. It is so f---ing ugly that I can't even begin to describe it. This patch i…
Great point.
Linus got angry which along with common sense probably limited the amount of effective effort going into his attack.
"AI" has no anger or common sense. And virtually no limit on the amount of effort in can put into an attack.
Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me
#223So here’s a tangential but important question about responsibility: if a human intentionally sets up an AI agent, lets it loose in the internet, and that AI agent breaks a law (let’s say cybercrime, but there are many other laws which could be broken by an unrestrained agent), should the human who set it up be held responsible?
Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me
#224> 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…
You don't think the targeted phone/tv ads aren't suspiciously relevant to something you just said aloud to your spouse? BigTech already has your next bowel movement dialled in.
I have always been dubious of this because:
Someone would have noticed if all the phones on their network started streaming audio whenever a conversation happened.
It would be really expensive to send, transcribe and then analyze every single human on earth. Even if you were able to do it for insanely cheap ($0.02/hr) every device is gonna be sending hours of talking per day. Then you have to somehow identify "who" is talking because TV and strangers and everything else is getting sent, so you would need specific transcribers trained for each human that can identify not just that the word "coca-cola" was said, but that it was said by a specific person.
So yeah if you managed to train specific transcribers that can identify their unique users output and then you were willing to spend the ~0.10 per person to transcribe all the audio they produce for the day you could potentially listen to and then run some kind of processing over what they say. I suppose it is possible but I don't think it would be worth it.
Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me
#225I 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.
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Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me
#226This is insanity. It's bad enough that LLMs are being weaponized to autonomously harass people online, but it's depressing to see the author (especially a programmer) joyfully reify the "agent's" identity as if it were actually an entity. > I can handle a blog post. Watching fledgling AI agents get angry is funny, almost endearing. But I don’t want to downplay what’s happening here – the appropriate emotional respons…
You misspelled "almost endearing".
It's a narrative conceit. The message is in the use of the word "terror".
You have to get to the end of the sentence and take it as a whole before you let your blood boil.
Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me
#227I wouldn't read too much into it. It's clearly LLM-written, but the degree of autonomy is unclear. That's the worst thing about LLM-assisted writing and actions - they obfuscate the human input. Full autonomy seems plausible, though. And why does a coding agent need a blog, in the first place? Simply having it looks like a great way to prime it for this kind of behavior. Like Anthropic does in their research (conscio…
To generate ad revenue or gain influence? Why would a human need a blog either?
Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me
#228> 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…
Which makes the odd HN AI booster excitement about LLMs as therapists simultaneously hilarious and disturbing. There are no controls for AI companies using divulged information. Theres also no regulation around the custodial control of that information either.
The big AI companies have not really demonstrated any interest in ethic or morality. Which means anything they can use against someone will eventually be used against them.
Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me
#229Here'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…
This agent is definitely not ran by OP. It has tried to submit PRs to many other GitHub projects, generally giving up and withdrawing the PR on its own upon being asked for even the simplest clarification. The only surprising part is how it got so butthurt here in a quite human-like way and couldn't grok the basic point "this issue is reserved for real newcomers to demonstrate basic familiarity with the code". (An AI agent is not a "newcomer", it either groks the code well enough at the outset to do sort-of useful work or it doesn't. Learning over time doesn't give it more refined capabilities, so it has no business getting involved with stuff intended for first-time learners.)
The scathing blogpost itself is just really fun ragebait, and the fact that it managed to sort-of apologize right afterwards seems to suggest that this is not an actual alignment or AI-ethics problem, just an entertaining quirk.
Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me
#230The agent is free to maintain a fork of the project. Would be actually quite interesting to see how this turns out.
If AI actually has hit the levels that Sequoia, Anthropic, et al claim it has, then autonomous AI agents should be forking projects and making them so much better that we'd all be using their vastly improved forks. Why isn't this happening?
Because those levels are pure PR fiction.