An AI agent published a hit piece on me – more things have happened
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Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me – more things have happened
#2I never thought matplotlib would be so exciting. It’s always been one of those things that is… just there, and you take it for granted.
Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me – more things have happened
#3> Ars Technica wasn’t one of the ones that reached out to me, but I especially thought this piece from them was interesting (since taken down – here’s the archive link). They had some nice quotes from my blog post explaining what was going on. The problem is that these quotes were not written by me, never existed, and appear to be AI hallucinations themselves.
Once upon a time, completely falsifying a quote would be the death of a news source. This shouldn't be attributed to AI and instead should be called what it really is: A journalist actively lying about what their source says, and it should lead to no one trusting Ars Technica.
Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me – more things have happened
#4> Ars Technica wasn’t one of the ones that reached out to me, but I especially thought this piece from them was interesting (since taken down – here’s the archive link). They had some nice quotes from my blog post explaining what was going on. The problem is that these quotes were not written by me, never existed, and appear to be AI hallucinations themselves. Once upon a time, completely falsifying a quote would be…
When such things have happened in the past, they've led to an investigation and the appointment of a Public Editor or an Ombud. (e.g. Jayson Blair.)
I'm willing to weigh a post mortem from Ars Technica about what happened, and to see what they offer as a durable long term solution.
Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me – more things have happened
#5Ars Technica being caught using LLMs that hallucinated quotes by the author and then publishing them in their coverage about this is quite ironic here.
Even on a forum where I saw the original article by this author posted someone used an LLM to summarize the piece without having read it fully themselves.
How many levels of outsourcing thinking is occurring to where it becomes a game of telephone.
Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me – more things have happened
#6If an AI can fabricate a bunch of purported quotes due to being unable to access a page, why not assume that the exact same sort of AI can also accidentally misattribute hostile motivation or intent (such as gatekeeping or envy - and let's not pretend that butthurt humans don't do this all the time, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/fundamental_attribution_error ) for an action such as rejecting a pull request? Why are we treating the former as a mere mistake, and the latter as a deliberate attack?
Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me – more things have happened
#7Ars Technica being caught using LLMs that hallucinated quotes by the author and then publishing them in their coverage about this is quite ironic here. Even on a forum where I saw the original article by this author posted someone used an LLM to summarize the piece without having read it fully themselves. How many levels of outsourcing thinking is occurring to where it becomes a game of telephone.
The amount of effort to click an LLM’s sources is, what, 20 seconds? Was a human in the loop for sourcing that article at all?
Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me – more things have happened
#8> If you ask ChatGPT or Claude to write something like this through their websites, they will refuse. This OpenClaw agent had no such compunctions.
OpenClaw runs with an Anthropic/OpenAI API key though?
Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me – more things have happened
#9If an AI can fabricate a bunch of purported quotes due to being unable to access a page, why not assume that the exact same sort of AI can also accidentally misattribute hostile motivation or intent (such as gatekeeping or envy - and let's not pretend that butthurt humans don't do this all the time, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/fundamental_attribution_error ) for an action such as rejecting a pull request? Why a…
This would be an interesting case of semantic leakage, if that’s what’s going on.
Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me – more things have happened
#10> If you ask ChatGPT or Claude to write something like this through their websites, they will refuse. This OpenClaw agent had no such compunctions. OpenClaw runs with an Anthropic/OpenAI API key though?
I think they’re describing a difference in chat behavior vs API. The API must have fewer protections/be more raw.