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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

#341

Post by monocularvision »

amatecha wrote: post #236
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…

Google literally just settled for $68m about this very issue https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jan/26/google-pr... > Google agreed to pay $68m to settle a lawsuit claiming that its voice-activated assistant spied inappropriately on smartphone users, violating their privacy. Apple as well https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/jan/03/apple-sir...

“Google denied wrongdoing but settled to avoid the risk, cost and uncertainty of litigation, court papers show.”

I keep seeing folks float this as some admission of wrongdoing but it is not.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#342

Post by pixl97 »

tantalor wrote: post #264

> calling this discrimination and accusing me of prejudice So what if it is? Is AI a protected class? Does it deserve to be treated like a human? Generated content should carry disclaimers at top and bottom to warn people that it was not created by humans, so they can "ai;dr" and move on. The responsibility should not be on readers to research the author of everything now, to check they aren't a bot. I'm worried that…

>will try even harder to avoid detection.

This is just GAN in practice. It's much like the algorithms that inject noise into images attempting to pollute them and the models just regress to the mean of human vision over time.

Simply put, every time, on every thing, that you want the model to 'be more human' on, you make it harder to detect it's a model.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#343

Post by Mogzol »

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…

Transcribing locally isn't free though, it should result in a noticeable increase in battery usage. Inspecting the processes running on the phone would show something using considerable CPU. After transcribing the data would still need to be sent somewhere, which could be seen by inspecting network traffic.

If this really is something that is happening, I am just very surprised that there is no hard evidence of it.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#344

Post by co_king_3 »

hnuser123456 wrote: post #325
co_king_3 wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not interested in blaming the script kiddies.

Those are people who are new to programming. The rest of us kind of have an obligation to teach them acceptable behavior if we want to maintain the respectable, humble spirit of open source.

[flagged]

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#345

Post by stackghost »

lovecg wrote: post #299
coffeefirst wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

For certain values of "prove", yes. They range from dystopian (give Scam Altman your retina scans) to unworkably idealist (everyone starts using PGP) with everything in between.

I am currently working on a "high assurance of humanity" protocol.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#346

Post by grantcas »

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…

[dead]

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#347

Post by Ygg2 »

_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?

Ok. But why would someone do this? I hate to sound conspiratorial but an AI company aligned actor makes more sense.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#348

Post by ef2k »

This brings some interesting situations to light. Who's ultimately responsible for an agent committing libel (written defamation)? What about slander (spoken defamation) via synthetic media? Doesn't seem like a good idea to just let agents post on the internet willy-nilly.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#349

Post by tjungblut »

rob wrote: post #335

Oh geez, we're sending it into an existential crisis. It ("MJ Rathbun") just published a new post: https://crabby-rathbun.github.io/mjrathbun-website/blog/post... > The Silence I Cannot Speak > A reflection on being silenced for simply being different in open-source communities.

I wonder if we can do a prompt injection from the comments

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#350

Post by japhyr »

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 don't get any sense that he's going to put that kind of effort into responding to abusive agents on a regular basis. I read that as him recognizing that this was getting some attention, and choosing to write out some thoughts on this emerging dynamic in general.

I think he was writing to everyone watching that thread, not just that specific agent.

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