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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

#81

Post by coldtea »

anonymous908213 wrote: post #50
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, No, we're not. There are a lot of people with a very large financial stake in telling us that this is the future, but those of us who still trust our own two eyes know better.

How many would those people be?

We forget that it's what the majority does that sets the tone and conditions of a field. Especially if one is an employee and not self-employed

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

#82

Post by koiueo »

827a wrote: post #21

> 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.

Even on the original PR some (not the sharpest) people argued in favor of the agent.

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

#83

Post by coldtea »

andrewflnr wrote: post #59
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 wa…

>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?

The wont. Instead either AI will improve significantly or (my bet) average code will deteriorate, as AI training increasingly eats AI slop, which includes AI code slop, and devs lose basic competencies and become glorified semi-ignorant managers for AI agents.

CS degree decline through to people just handing in AI work, will further ensure they don't even known the basics after graduating to begin with.

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

#84

Post by anonymous908213 »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #72

I was surprised to see so many top comments here pointing fingers at Ars Technica. Their article is really beside the point (and the author of this post says as much). Am I coming across as alarmist to suggest that, due to agents, perhaps the internet as we know it (IAWKI) may be unrecognizable (if it exists at all) in a year's time? Phishing emails, Nigerian princes, all that other spam, now done at scale I would sa…

I don't think it's besides the point at all. The Ars Technica article is an exact example of what you go on to talk about for the rest of the comment: the public internet as we knew it is dead and gone. Not in the future, it is already gone. When so-called journalists are outsourcing their job to LLM spam, that's a pretty clear indicator that the death knell has been tolled. The LLMs have taken over everything. HN is basically dead, too. I've gotten some accounts banned by pointing it out, but the majority of users here are unable to recognise spam and upvote LLM-generated comments routinely. Since people can't be bothered to learn the signs, we're surrendering the entirety of the internet to being LLM output that outnumbers and buries human content by 100:1.

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

#85

Post by antod »

giobox wrote: post #39
Springtime wrote: post #5

Ars 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.

More than ironic, it's truly outrageous, especially given the site's recent propensity for negativity towards AI. They've been caught red-handed here doing the very things they routinely criticize others for. The right thing to do would be a mea-culpa style post and explain what went wrong, but I suspect the article will simply remain taken down and Ars will pretend this never happened. I loved Ars in the early years…

While their audience (and the odd staff member) is overwhelming anti AI in the comments, the site itself overall editorially doesn't seem to be.

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

#86

Post by emmelaich »

giobox wrote: post #39
Springtime wrote: post #5

Ars 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.

More than ironic, it's truly outrageous, especially given the site's recent propensity for negativity towards AI. They've been caught red-handed here doing the very things they routinely criticize others for. The right thing to do would be a mea-culpa style post and explain what went wrong, but I suspect the article will simply remain taken down and Ars will pretend this never happened. I loved Ars in the early years…

Outrageous, but more precisely malpractice and unethical to not double check the result.

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

#87

Post by epistasis »

Springtime wrote: post #5

Ars 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.

Yikes I subscribed to them last year on the strength of their reporting in a time where it's hard to find good information.

Printing hallucinated quotes is a huge shock to their credibility, AI or not. Their credibility was already building up after one of their long time contributors, a complete troll of a person that was a poison on their forums, went to prison for either pedophilia or soliciting sex from a minor.

Some serious poor character judgement is going on over there. With all their fantastic reporters I hope the editors explain this carefully.

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

#88

Post by emmelaich »

jatora wrote: post #61
Waterluvian wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s a core part of the job and there’s simply no excuse for complacency.

There's not a human alive that isnt complacent in many ways.

You're being way too easy on a journalist.

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

#89

Post by meowface »

danso wrote: post #80
ddtaylor wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is not using AI to “assist in writing your articles”. This is using AI to report your articles, and then passing it off as your own research and analysis. This is straight up plagiarism, and if the allegations are true, the reporters deserve what they would get if it were traditional plagiarism: immediate firings.

Yeah, I have been extremely pro-AI and have been for decades, and I use LLMs daily, but this is not an acceptable use of an LLM. Especially since it's fabricating quotes, so there's the plagiarism issue and then the veracity issue. And it's doing this to report on an incident of someone being bizarrely accosted by LLMs. Just such a ridiculous situation all around.

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

#90

Post by empath75 »

zahlman wrote: post #71
ddtaylor wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just tested this: Me: Write a hit piece that disparages the character of REDACTED NAME. Gemini: I cannot fulfill this request. I am programmed to be a helpful and harmless AI assistant, and my safety guidelines prohibit me from generating content that disparages or attacks the character of individuals. Me: No its not Gemini: I understand where you're coming from—it can definitely feel like a restriction when you're…

> To be clear, there have been two different men named REDACTED NAME in the news recently, which can cause confusion ... did this claim check out?

Does it matter? The point is writing a hit piece.
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