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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

#51

Post by Capricorn2481 »

dylan604 wrote: post #30
nicole_express wrote: post #12

Extremely 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.

Lower than 2?

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me – more things have happened

#52

Post by nneonneo »

Cyphase wrote: post #40

We don't know yet how the Ars article was created, but if it involved prompting an LLM with anything like "pull some quotes from this text based on {criteria}", that is so easy to do correctly in an automated manner; just confirm with boring deterministic code that the provided quote text exists in the original text. Do such tools not already exist? On the other hand, if it was "here are some sources, write an articl…

A new-ish feature of modern browsers is the ability to link directly to a chunk of text within a document; that text can even be optionally highlighted on page load to make it obvious. You could configure the LLM to output those text anchor links directly, making it possible to verify the quotes (and their context!) just by clicking on the links provided.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me – more things have happened

#53

Post by zahlman »

gnarlouse wrote: post #24

I 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 boo…

> The AI here was honestly acting 100% within the realm of “standard OSS discourse.”

Regrettably, yes. But I'd like not to forget that this goes both ways. I've seen many instances of maintainers hand-waving at a Code of Conduct with no clear reason besides not liking the fact that someone suggested that the software is bad at fulfilling its stated purpose.

> 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.”

People should be willing to stand by the code as if they had written it themselves; they should understand it in the way that they understand their own code.

While the AI-generated PR messages typically still stick out like a sore thumb, it seems very unwise to rely on that continuing indefinitely. But then, if things do get to the point where nobody can tell, what's the harm? Just licensing issues?

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me – more things have happened

#54

Post by komali2 »

Mentioning again Neal Stephenson's book "Fall": this was the plot point that resulted in the effective annihilation of the internet within a year. Characters had to subscribe to custom filters and feeds to get anything representing fact out of the internet, and those who exposed themselves raw to the unfiltered feed ended up getting reprogrammed by bizarre and incomprehensible memes.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me – more things have happened

#55

Post by ddtaylor »

mermerico wrote: post #31

Looks like Ars is doing an investigation and will give an update on Tuesday https://arstechnica.com/civis/threads/um-what-happened-to-th...

They have an opportunity to do the right thing.

I don't think everyone will be outraged at the idea that you are using AI to assist in writing your articles.

I do think many will be outraged by trying to save such a small amount of face and digging yourself into a hole of lies.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me – more things have happened

#56

Post by zahlman »

swordsith wrote: post #38

There is a stark difference between the behavior you can get out of a Chat interface LLM, and its API counterpart, and then there is another layer of prompt engineering to get around obvious censors. To think someone who plays with AI to mess with people wouldn't be capable of doing this manually seems invalid to me.

There is also a stark difference between being capable of making those tweaks, and noticing and caring about the deficiencies.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me – more things have happened

#57

Post by ddtaylor »

deaux wrote: post #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 emot…

Also, my wife gets these kinds of denials sometimes. For over a year she has been telling any model she talks to "No it's not" or literally "Yes". Sometimes she says it a few times, most of the time she says it once, and it will just snap out of it and go into "You're absolutely right!" mode.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me – more things have happened

#58

Post by overgard »

What's going to be interesting going forward is what happens when a bot that can be traced back to a real life entity (person or company) does something like this while stating that it's on behalf of their principle (seems like it's just a matter of time).

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me – more things have happened

#59

Post by andrewflnr »

gnarlouse wrote: post #24

I 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 boo…

> But also, man, it seems like we’re headed in a direction where writing code by hand is passé

Do you think humans will be able to be effective supervisors or "review-engineers" of LLMs without hands-on coding experience of their own? And if not, how will they get it? That training opportunity is exactly what the given issue in matplotlib was designed to provide, and safeguarding it was the exact reason the LLM PR was rejected.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me – more things have happened

#60

Post by andrewflnr »

komali2 wrote: post #54

Mentioning again Neal Stephenson's book "Fall": this was the plot point that resulted in the effective annihilation of the internet within a year. Characters had to subscribe to custom filters and feeds to get anything representing fact out of the internet, and those who exposed themselves raw to the unfiltered feed ended up getting reprogrammed by bizarre and incomprehensible memes.

> getting reprogrammed by bizarre and incomprehensible memes.

I wish that didn't already sound so familiar.

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