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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

#241

Post by ericmcer »

sho_hn wrote: post #191
oulipo2 wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It's the same how HN mostly reacts with "don't censor AI!" when chat bots dare to add parental controls after they talk teenagers into suicide. The community is often very selfish and opportunist. I learned that the role of engineers in society is to build tools for others to live their lives better; we provide the substrate on which culture and civilization take place. We should take more responsibility for it and t…

Talking to a chatbot yourself is much different from another person spinning up a (potentially malicious) AI agent and giving it permissions to make PRs and publish blogs. This tracks with the general ethos of self-responsibility that is semi-common on HN.

If the author had configured and launched the AI agent himself we would think it was a funny story of someone misusing a tool.

The author notes in the article that he wants to see the `soul.md` file, probably because if the agent was configured to publish malicious blog posts then he wouldn't really have an issue with the agent, but with the person who created it.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#242

Post by nicbou »

bayindirh wrote: post #23
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…

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…

Damn, the Dark Forest is already coming for open source

https://maggieappleton.com/ai-dark-forest

tl;dr: If anything that lives in the open gets attacked, communities go private.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#243

Post by teaearlgraycold »

_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?

It’s kind of shocking the OP does not consider this, the most likely scenario. Human uses AI to make a PR. PR is rejected. Human feels insecure - this tool that they thought made them as good as any developer does not. They lash out and instruct an AI to build a narrative and draft a blog post.

I have seen someone I know in person get very insecure if anyone ever doubts the quality of their work because they use so much AI and do not put in the necessary work to revise its outputs. I could see a lesser version of them going through with this blog post scheme.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#244

Post by CuriouslyC »

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…

AI code by itself cannot be protected. However the stitching together of AI output and curation of outputs creates a copyright claim.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#245

Post by sreekanth850 »

I vibe code and do a lot of coding with AI, But I never go and randomly make a pull request on some random repository with reputation and human work. My wisdom always tell me not to mess anything that is build with years of hard work by real humans. I always wonder why there are so many assholes in the world. Sometimes its so depressing.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#246

Post by nicbou »

michaelteter wrote: post #223

So 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?

I don't think that there is any ambiguity here. If I light a candle and it sets the building on fire, I'm liable for it.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#248

Post by amatecha »

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…

Yeah, it doesn't matter to me whether AI wrote it or not. The person who wrote it, or the person who allowed it to be published, is equally responsible either way.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#249

Post by lukev »

andrewflnr wrote: post #187
lukev wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, but the state is just the prompt and the text already emitted.

You could assert that text can encode a state of consciousness, but that's an incredibly bold claim with a lot of implications.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#250

Post by TomasBM »

FartyMcFarter wrote: post #6

To the OP: Do we actually know that an AI decided to write and publish this on its own? I realise that it's hard to be sure, but how likely do you think it is?

I'm also very skeptical of the interpretation that this was done autonomously by the LLM agent. I could be wrong, but I haven't seen any proof of autonomy.

Scenarios that don't require LLMs with malicious intent:

- The deployer wrote the blog post and hid behind the supposedly agent-only account.

- The deployer directly prompted the (same or different) agent to write the blog post and attach it to the discussion.

- The deployer indirectly instructed the (same or assistant) agent to resolve any rejections in this way (e.g., via the system prompt).

- The LLM was (inadvertently) trained to follow this pattern.

Some unanswered questions by all this:

1. Why did the supposed agent decide a blog post was better than posting on the discussion or send a DM (or something else)?

2. Why did the agent publish this special post? It only publishes journal updates, as far as I saw.

3. Why did the agent search for ad hominem info, instead of either using its internal knowledge about the author, or keeping the discussion point-specific? It could've hallucinated info with fewer steps.

4. Why did the agent stop engaging in the discussion afterwards? Why not try to respond to every point?

This seems to me like theater and the deployer trying to hide his ill intents more than anything else.

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