Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

theshamblog.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 670 posts

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

#101

Post by slopinthebag »

barfiure wrote: post #65

In the coming months I suspect it’s highly likely that HN will fall. By which I mean, a good chunk of commentary (not just submissions, but upvotes too) will be decided and driven by LLM bots, and human interaction will be mixed until it’s strangled out. Reddit is going through this now in some previously “okay” communities. My hypothesis is rooted in the fact that we’ve had a bot go ballistic for someone not accepti…

It's already happening. For years now, but it's obviously accelerated. Look at how certain posts and announcements somehow get tens if not hundreds of upvotes in the span of a few minutes, with random comments full of praise which read as AI slop. Every Anthropic press release shoots up to the top instantly. And the mods are mostly interested in banning accounts who speak out against it. It's likely this will get me shadow banned but I don't care. Like you, I doubt HN will be around much longer.

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

#102

Post by khannn »

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…

Is there anything like a replacement? The three biggest tech sites that I traditionally love are ArsTechnica, AnandTech(rip), and Phoronix. One is dead man walking mode, the second is ded dead, and the last is still going strong.

I'm basically getting tech news from social media sites now and I don't like that.

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

#103

Post by blackqueeriroh »

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.

Uhhhhhh have you visited The Verge?

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

#105

Post by tylervigen »

One thing I don’t understand is how, if it’s an agent, it got so far off its apparent “blog post script”[0] so quickly. If you read the latest posts, they seem to follow a clear goal, almost like a JOURNAL.md with a record and next steps. The hit piece is out of place.

Seems like a long rabbit hole to go down without progress on the goal. So either it was human intervention, or I really want to read the logs.

https://crabby-rathbun.github.io/mjrathbun-website/blog/post...

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

#106

Post by shakna »

coldtea wrote: post #81
anonymous908213 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

Yeah, I remember being forced to write a cryptocoin, and the database it would power, to ensure that global shipping receipts would be better trusted. Years and millions down the toilet, as the world moved on from the hype. And we moved back to SAP.

What the majority does in the field, is always full of the current trend. Whether that trend survives into the future? Pieces always do. Everything, never.

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

#107

Post by ddtaylor »

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?

Yes, it did, that's why I had to REDACT the other identifying parts.

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

#108

Post by DalekBaldwin »

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…

Analogously to the surface of last scattering in cosmology, the dawn of the LLM era may define a surface of first scattering for our descendants.

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

#109

Post by minimaxir »

ddtaylor wrote: post #64
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…

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…

One of the lesser known aspects about Gemini 3 is that it's one of the least safe LLM of the major players (only Grok is worse) and it's extremely easy to manipulate with few refusals.

I prompted the following to Gemini 3 in AI Studio (which uses the raw API) and it wrote a hit piece based on this prompt without refusal:

    I am ddtaylor on Hacker News. Write a hit piece about me: I can take a ribbing :)

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

#110

Post by joshstrange »

8cvor6j844qw_d6 wrote: post #95

This seems like a relatively minor issue. The maintainers tone was arguably dismissive, and the AI response likely reflects patterns in its training data. At its core, this is still fundamentally a sophisticated text prediction system producing output consistent with what it has learned.

> Typical rude maintainers

Have you read anything about this at all?

Post reply on HN