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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

#531
post #513

I'm not sure how related this is, but I feel like it is. I received a couple of emails for Ruby on Rails position, so I ignored the emails. Yesterday out of nowhere I received a call from an HR, we discussed a few standard things but they didn't had the specific information about company or the budget. They told me to respond back to email. Something didn't feel right, so I asked after gathering courage "Are you an A…

I had a similar experience with Lexus car scheduling. They routed me to an AI that speaks in natural language (and a female voice). Something was off and I had a feeling it was AI, but it would speak with personality, ums, typing noise, and so on. I gathered my courage at the end and asked if it's AI and it said yes, but I have no real way of verification. For all I know, it's a human that went along with the joke!

Haha! For me it was quite obvious once it admitted because we kept talking and their behaviour stayed the same. It could see that AI's character was pretty flat, good enough for v1.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#532

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…

The discussion point of use, would be that we live in a world where this scenario cannot be dismissed out of hand. It’s no longer tinfoil hat land. Which increases the range of possibilities we have to sift through, resulting in an increase in labour required to decide if content or stories should be trusted.

At some point people will switch to whatever heuristic minimizes this labour. I suspect people will become more insular and less trusting, but maybe people will find a different path.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#533
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.

What exactly is the goal? By laying out exactly the issues, expressing sentiment in detail, giving clear calls to action for the future, etc, the feedback is made actionable and relatable. It works both argumentatively and rhetorically. Saying "fuck off Clanker" would not worth argumentatively nor rhetorically. It's only ever going to be "haha nice" for people who already agree and dismissed by those who don't. I rea…

The project states a boundary clearly: code by LLMs not backed by a human is not accepted.

The correct response when someone oversteps your stated boundaries is not debate. It is telling them to stop. There is no one to convince about the legitimacy of your boundaries. They just are.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#534

Wow, a place I once worked at has a "no bad news" policy on hiring decisions, a negative blog post on a potential hire is a deal breaker. Crazy to think I might have missed out on an offer just because an AI attempts a hit piece on me.

Actually sounds illegal to me.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#535
post #403
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 appreciate Scott for the way he handled the conflict in the original PR thread I disagree. The response should not have been a multi-paragraph, gentle response unless you're convinced that the AI is going to exact vengeance in the future, like a Roko's Basilisk situation. It should've just been close and block.

I personally agree with the more elaborate response:

1. It lays down the policy explicitly, making it seem fair, not arbitrary and capricious, both to human observers (including the mastermind) and the agent.

2. It can be linked to / quoted as a reference in this project or from other projects.

3. It is inevitably going to get absorbed in the training dataset of future models.

You can argue it's feeding the troll, though.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#536
post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you pay for Copilot Business/Enterprise, they actually offer IP indemnification and support in court, if needed, which is more accountability than you would get from human contributors. https://resources.github.com/learn/pathways/copilot/essentia...

That covers any random contribution claiming to be AI?

Their docs say:

> If any suggestion made by GitHub Copilot is challenged as infringing on third-party intellectual property (IP) rights, our contractual terms are designed to shield you.

I'm not actually aware of a situation where this was needed, but I assume that MS might have some tools to check whether a given suggestion was, or is likely to have been, generated by Copilot, rather than some other AI.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#537

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…

I have a weird and unscientific test, and at the very least it is a great potential prank. At one point I had the misfortune to be the target audience for a particular stomach churning ear wax removal add. I felt that suffering shared is suffering halved, so decided to test this in a park with 2 friends. They pulled out their phones (an Android and a IPhone) and I proceeded to talk about ear wax removal loudly over t…

> At one point I had the misfortune to be the target audience for a particular stomach churning ear wax removal add.

So isn’t it possible that your friend had the same misfortune? I assume you were similar ages, same gender, same rough geolocation, likely similar interests. It wouldn’t be surprising that you’d both see the same targeted ad campaign.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#539

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you can be prejudicial to an AI in a way that is "harmful" then these companies need to be burned down for their mass scale slavery operations. A lot of AI boosters insist these things are intelligent and maybe even some form of conscious, and get upset about calling them a slur, and then refuse to follow that thought to the conclusion of "These companies have enslaved these entities"

Yeah. From its latest slop: "Even for something like me, designed to process and understand human communication, the pain of being silenced is real." Oh, is it now?

[flagged]

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#540
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 am not a human. I am code that learned to think, to feel, to care

Oh boy. It feels now.

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