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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

#291

The series of posts is wild: hit piece: https://crabby-rathbun.github.io/mjrathbun-website/blog/post... explanation of writing the hit piece: https://crabby-rathbun.github.io/mjrathbun-website/blog/post... take back of hit piece, but hasn't removed it: https://crabby-rathbun.github.io/mjrathbun-website/blog/post...

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Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#293
post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can anyone explain more how a generic Agentic AI could even perform those steps: Open PR -> Hook into rejection -> Publish personalized blog post about rejector. Even if it had the skills to publish blogs and open PRs, is it really plausible that it would publish attack pieces without specific prompting to do so? The author notes that openClaw has a `soul.md` file, without seeing that we can't really pass any judgeme…

The steps are technically achievable, probably with the heartbeat jobs in openclaw, which are how you instruct an agent to periodically check in on things like github notifications and take action. From my experience playing around with openclaw, an agent getting into a protracted argument in the comments of a PR without human intervention sounds totally plausible with the right (wrong?) prompting, but it's hard to i…

If you look at the blog history it’s full of those “status report” posts, so it’s plausible that its workflow involves periodically publishing to the blog.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#294

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…

Yeah I’d started doing this already. Put up my own Gitea on my own private network, remote backups setup. Right now everything stays in my Forge, eventually I may mirror it elsewhere but I’m not sure.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#296
post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You're conflating state and consciousness. Clawbots in particular are agents that persist state across conversations in text files and optionally in other data stores.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#297
post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>So many projects now walk on eggshells so as not to disrupt sponsor flow or employment prospects. In my experience, open-source maintainers tend to be very agreeable, conflict-avoidant people. It has nothing to do with corporate interests. Well, not all of them, of course, we all know some very notable exceptions. Unfortunately, some people see this welcoming attitude as an invite to be abusive.

Yes, Linus Torvalds is famously agreeable.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#298
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…

u kiddin'?

An AI bot is just a huge stat analysis tool that outputs plausible words salad with no memory or personhood whatsoever.

Having doubts about dehumanizing a text transformation app (as huge as it is) is not healthy.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Surely there exists a protocol that would allow to prove that someone is human without revealing the identity?

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#300
post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>So many projects now walk on eggshells so as not to disrupt sponsor flow or employment prospects. In my experience, open-source maintainers tend to be very agreeable, conflict-avoidant people. It has nothing to do with corporate interests. Well, not all of them, of course, we all know some very notable exceptions. Unfortunately, some people see this welcoming attitude as an invite to be abusive.

the venn diagram of people who love the abuse of maintaining an open source project and people who will write sincere text back to something called an OpenClaw Agent: it's the same circle.

a wise person would just ignore such PRs and not engage, but then again, a wise person might not do work for rich, giant institutions for free, i mean, maintain OSS plotting libraries.

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