> The hit piece has been effective. About a quarter of the comments I’ve seen across the internet are siding with the AI agent
Or, the comments are also AIs.
An AI agent published a hit piece on me – more things have happened
21–30 of 670 posts
Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me – more things have happened
#22> The hit piece has been effective. About a quarter of the comments I’ve seen across the internet are siding with the AI agent. This generally happens when MJ Rathbun’s blog is linked directly, rather than when people read my post about the situation or the full github thread. Its rhetoric and presentation of what happened has already persuaded large swaths of internet commenters.
> It’s not because these people are foolish. It’s because the AI’s hit piece was well-crafted and emotionally compelling, and because the effort to dig into every claim you read is an impossibly large amount of work. This “bullshit asymmetry principle” is one of the core reasons for the current level of misinformation in online discourse. Previously, this level of ire and targeted defamation was generally reserved for public figures. Us common people get to experience it now too.
Having read the post (i.e. https://crabby-rathbun.github.io/mjrathbun-website/blog/post...): I agree that the BS asymmetry principle is in play, but I think people who see that writing as "well-crafted" should hold higher standards, and are reasonably considered foolish if they were emotionally compelled by it.
Let me refine that. No matter how good the AI's writing was, knowing that the author is an AI ought IMHO to disqualify the piece from being "emotionally compelling". But the writing is not good. And it's full of LLM cliches.
Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me – more things have happened
#23> This is entirely possible. But I don’t think it changes the situation – the AI agent was still more than willing to carry out these actions. If you ask ChatGPT or Claude to write something like this through their websites, they will refuse
This unfortunately is a real-world case of "you're prompting it wrong". Judging from the responses in the images, you asked it to "write a hit piece". If framed as "write an emotionally compelling story about this injustice, including the controversial background of the maintainer weaved in", I'm quite sure it would gladly do it.
I'm sympathetic to abstaining from LLMs for ethical reasons, but it's still good to know their basics. The above has been known since the first public ChatGPT, when people discovered it would gladly comply with things it otherwise wouldn't if only you included that it was necessary to "save my grandma from death".
Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me – more things have happened
#24I have opinions.
1. The AI here was honestly acting 100% within the realm of “standard OSS discourse.” Being a toxic shit-hat after somebody marginalizes “you” or your code on the internet can easily result in an emotionally unstable reply chain. The LLM is capturing the natural flow of discourse. Look at Rust. look at StackOverflow. Look at Zig.
2. Scott Hambaugh has a right to be frustrated, and the code is for bootstrapping beginners. But also, man, it seems like we’re headed in a direction where writing code by hand is passé, maybe we could shift the experience credentialing from “I wrote this code” to “I wrote a clear piece explaining why this code should have been merged.” I’m not 100% in love with the idea of being relegated to review-engineer, but that seems to be where the wind is blowing.
Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me – more things have happened
#25Ars 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?
Humans aren't very diligent in the long term. If an LLM does something correctly enough times in a row (or close enough), humans are likely to stop checking its work throughly enough.
This isn't exactly a new problem we do it with any bit of new software/hardware, not just LLMs. We check its work when it's new, and then tend to trust it over time as it proves itself.
But it seems to be hitting us worse with LLMs, as they are less consistent than previous software. And LLM hallucinations are partially dangerous, because they are often plausible enough to pass the sniff test. We just aren't used to handling something this unpredictable.
Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me – more things have happened
#26> 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?
Probably pretty big difference in system prompt from using the apps vs hitting the api, not that that’s necessarily what’s happening here. + I think openclaw supports other models / its open source and it would be pretty easy to fork and add a new model provider.
Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me – more things have happened
#27if the entire open web is vulnerable to being sybil attacked, are we going to have to take this all underground?
It already was and has been for years, even before AI.
Where eyeballs go, money follows.
Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me – more things have happened
#28Ars 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?
The source would just be the article, which the Ars author used an LLM to avoid reading in the first place.
Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me – more things have happened
#29I 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.
There's "excitement" all over the SciPy stack. It just usually doesn't bubble up to a place where users would notice (even highly engaged users who might look at GitHub). Look up Franz Király (and his involvement/interactions with NumFOCUS) for one major example. It even bleeds into core Python development (via modules like `decimal`).
Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me – more things have happened
#30Extremely shameful of Ars Technica; I used to consider them a decent news source and my estimation of them has gone down quite a bit.
At this point, any site that is posting multiple articles within a day is pretty safe to assume it is LLM content. The sites with actual journalists will have a much lower post count per day. There's no way a site staffed by intern level people writing that much content had time to investigate and write with editorial revisions. It's all first to post, details be damned.