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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

#251

Post by johnsmith1840 »

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…

All of moltbook is the same. For all we know it was literally the guy complaining about it who ran this.

But at the same time true or false what we're seeing is a kind of quasi science fiction. We're looking at the problems of the future here and to be honest it's going to suck for future us.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#252

Post by jmholla »

ericmcer wrote: post #224
caminante wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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" i…

> Someone would have noticed if all the phones on their network started streaming audio whenever a conversation happened.

You don't have to stream the audio. You can transcribe it locally. And it doesn't have to be 100% accurate. As for user identify, people have mentioned it on their phones which almost always have a one-to-one relationship between user and phone, and their smart devices, which are designed to do this sort of distinguishing.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#253

Post by amatecha »

rune-dev wrote: post #109

I 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…

Yup, seems pretty easy to spin up a bunch of fake blogs with fake articles and then intersperse a few hit pieces in there to totally sabotage someone's reputation. Add some SEO to get posts higher up in the results -- heck, the fake sites can link to each other to conjure greater "legitimacy", especially with social media bots linking the posts too... Good times :\

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#254

Post by hackrmn »

rune-dev wrote: post #109

I 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…

The entire AI bubble _is_ a big deal, it's just that we don't have the capacity even collectively to understand what is going on. The capital invested in AI reflects the urgency and the interest, and the brightest minds able to answer some interesting questions are working around the clock (in between trying to placate the investors and the stakeholders, since we live in the real world) to get _somewhere_ where they can point at something they can say "_this_ is why this is a big deal".

So far it's been a lot of conjecture and correlations. Everyone's guessing, because at the bottom of it lie very difficult to prove concepts like nature of consciousness and intelligence.

In between, you have those who let their pet models loose on the world, these I think work best as experiments whose value is in permitting observation of the kind that can help us plug the data _back_ into the research.

We don't need to answer the question "what is consciousness" if we have utility, which we already have. Which is why I also don't join those who seem to take preliminary conclusions like "why even respond, it's an elaborate algorithm that consumes inordinate amounts of energy". It's complex -- what if AI(s) can meaningfully guide us to solve the energy problem, for example?

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#258

Post by fresh_broccoli »

To understand why it's happening, just read the downvoted comments siding with the slanderer, here and in the previous thread.

Some people feel they're entitled to being open-source contributors, entitled to maintainers' time. They don't understand why the maintainers aren't bending over backwards to accomodate them. They feel they're being unfairly gatekept out of open-source for no reason.

This sentiment existed before AI and it wasn't uncommon even here on Hacker News. Now these people have a tool that allows them to put in even less effort to cause even more headache for the maintainters.

I hope open-source survives this somehow.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#259

Post by pluralmonad »

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…

You should absolutely not try to apply dehumanization metrics to things that are not human. That in and of itself dehumanizes all real humans implicitly, diluting the meaning. Over-humanizing, as you call it, is indistinguishable from dehumanization of actual humans.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#260

Post by fmbb »

RobRivera wrote: post #162
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 s…

I don’t think there is a snowball’s chance in hell that either of these two scenarios will happen:

1. Human principals pay for autonomous AI agents to represent them but the human accepts blame and lawsuits. 2. Companies selling AI products and services accept blame and lawsuits for actions agents perform on behalf of humans.

Likely realities:

1. Any victim will have to deal with the problems. 2. Human principals accept responsibility and don’t pay for the AI service after enough are burned by some ”rogue” agent.

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