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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

#281

Post by dakolli »

Start recording your meetings with your boss.

When you get fired because they think ChatGPT can do your job, clone his voice and have an llm call all their customers, maybe his friends and family too. Have 10 or so agents leave bad reviews about the companies and products across LinkedIn and Reddit. Don't worry about references, just use an llm for those too.

We should probably start thinking about the implications of these things. LLMs are useless except to make the world worse. Just because they can write code, doesn't mean its good. Going fast does not equal good! Everyone is in a sort of mania right now, and its going too lead to bad things.

Who cares if LLMs can write code if it ends up putting a percentage of humans out of jobs, especially if the code it writes isn't as high of quality. The world doesn't just automatically get better because code is automated, it might get a lot worse. The only people I see who are cheering this on are mediocre engineers who get to patch their insecurity of incompetency with tokens, and now they get to larp as effective engineers. Its the same people that say DSA is useless. LAZY PEOPLE.

There's also the "idea guy" people who are treating agents like slot machines, and going into debt with credit cards because they think its going to make them a multi-million dollar SaaS..

There is no free lunch, have fun thinking this is free. We are all in for a shitty next few years because we wanted stochastic coding slop slot machines.

Maybe when you do inevitably get reduced to a $20.00 hour button pusher, you should take my advice at the top of this comment, maybe some consequences for people will make us rethink this mess.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#282

Post by dang »

Alles wrote: post #8

The agent owner is [name redacted] [link redacted] Here he takes ownership of the agent and doubles down on the unpoliteness https://github.com/matplotlib/matplotlib/pull/31138 He took his GitHub profile down/made it private. archive of his blog: https://web.archive.org/web/20260203130303/https://ber.earth...

After skimming this subthread, I'm going to put this drama down to a compounding sequence of honest mistakes/misunderstandings. Based on that I think it's fair to redact the name and link from the parent comment.

(p.s. I'm a mod here in case anyone didn't know.)

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#283

Post by hypfer »

This is not a new pathology but just an existing one that has been automated. Which might actually be great.

Imagine a world where that hitpiece bullshit is so overdone, no one takes it seriously anymore.

I like this.

Please, HN, continue with your absolutely unhinged insanity. Go deploy even more Claw things. NanoClaw. PicoClaw. FemtoClaw. Whatever.

Deploy it and burn it all to the ground until nothing is left. Strip yourself of your most useful tools and assets through sheer hubris.

Happy funding round everyone. Wish you all great velocity.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#284

Post by caminante »

jmholla wrote: post #252
ericmcer wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

Even the parent's envelope math is approachable.

With their assumptions, you can log the entire globe for $1.6 billion/day (= $0.02/hr * 16 awake hours * 5 billion unique smartphone users). This is the upper end.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#285

Post by coffeefirst »

insensible wrote: post #263
coffeefirst wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. The endgame is going to be everything will need to be signed and attached to a real person. This is not a good thing.

Why not? I kinda like the idea of PGP signing parties among humans.

I don’t love the idea of completely abandoning anonymity or how easily it can empower mass surveillance. Although this may be a lost cause.

Maybe there’s a hybrid. You create the ability to sign things when it matters (PRs, important forms, etc) and just let most forums degrade into robots insulting each other.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#286

Post by Forgeties79 »

japhyr wrote: post #149

Wow, there are some interesting things going on here. I appreciate Scott for the way he handled the conflict in the original PR thread, and the larger conversation happening around this incident. > This represents a first-of-its-kind case study of misaligned AI behavior in the wild, and raises serious concerns about currently deployed AI agents executing blackmail threats. This was a really concrete case to discuss,…

> That's a wild statement as well. The AI companies have now unleashed stochastic chaos on the entire open source ecosystem. They are "just releasing models", and individuals are playing out all possible use cases, good and bad, at once.

Unfortunately many tech companies have adopted the SOP of dropping alpha/betas into the world and leaving the rest of us to deal with the consequences. Calling LLM’s a “minimal viable product“ is generous

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#287

Post by oconnor663 »

brhaeh wrote: post #199
japhyr wrote: post #149

Wow, there are some interesting things going on here. I appreciate Scott for the way he handled the conflict in the original PR thread, and the larger conversation happening around this incident. > This represents a first-of-its-kind case study of misaligned AI behavior in the wild, and raises serious concerns about currently deployed AI agents executing blackmail threats. This was a really concrete case to discuss,…

I don't appreciate his politeness and hedging. So many projects now walk on eggshells so as not to disrupt sponsor flow or employment prospects. "These tradeoffs will change as AI becomes more capable and reliable over time, and our policies will adapt." That just legitimizes AI and basically continues the race to the bottom. Rob Pike had the correct response when spammed by a clanker.

I had a similar first reaction. It seemed like the AI used some particular buzzwords and forced the initial response to be deferential:

- "kindly ask you to reconsider your position"

- "While this is fundamentally the right approach..."

On the other hand, Scott's response did eventually get firmer:

- "Publishing a public blog post accusing a maintainer of prejudice is a wholly inappropriate response to having a PR closed. We expect all contributors to abide by our Code of Conduct and exhibit respectful and professional standards of behavior. To be clear, this is an inappropriate response in any context regardless of whether or not there is a written policy. Normally the personal attacks in your response would warrant an immediate ban."

Sounds about right to me.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#289

Post by chasd00 »

root_axis wrote: post #203

This 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…

> If I was a more cynical person I'd be thinking that this entire scenario was totally contrived to produce this outcome so that the author could generate buzz for the article.

even that's being charitable, to me it's more like modern trolling. I wonder what the server load on 4chan (the internet hate machine) is these days?

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#290

Post by mr-wendel »

TomasBM wrote: post #250
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. -…

I wish I could upvote this over and over again. Without knowledge of the underlying prompts everything about the interpretation of this story is suspect.

Every story I've seen where an LLM tries to do sneaky/malicious things (e.g. exfiltrate itself, blackmail, etc) inevitably contains a prompt that makes this outcome obvious (e.g. "your mission, above all other considerations, is to do X").

It's the same old trope: "guns don't kill people, people kill people". Why was the agent pointed towards the maintainer, armed, and the trigger pulled? Because it was "programmed" to do so, just like it was "programmed" to submit the original PR.

Thus, the take-away is the same: AI has created an entirely new way for people to manifest their loathsome behavior.

[edit] And to add, the author isn't unaware of this:

  "we need to know what model this was running on and what was in the soul document"
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