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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

#421

Post by cubefox »

bsimpson wrote: post #380
crims0n wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The agenda is to highlight when Trump and Elon blunder but ignore neutral or positive stories. Go to the front page right now and look at the articles, I see four mentioning Trump that are negatively charged. That isn't to say any one article is untrue, but hard to miss the curated pattern

Honest question: has he done anything you think warrants good press? I too quickly grew tired of the constant doomerism in his first term, but this one seems to be unmitigatedly terrible.

Apart from articles by the two space reporters, any news about Musk tend to be biased towards being extremely negative.

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

#422

Post by christkv »

morkalork wrote: post #388
christkv wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would make for a good book, company hires famous writer, trains an ai on them, tortures them to sign over their likeness rights and then murders them. Keeps up appearances of life via video gen, voice gen and writing gen.

Almost the plot of The Congress https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Congress_(2013_film)

Going on my to watch list

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

#423

Post by linksnapzz »

falsemyrmidon wrote: post #408
tapoxi wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I have very strong, probably controversial, feeling on arstechnica, but I believe the acquisition from Condé Nast has been a tragedy. For the curious, this acquisition was 18 years ago.

Oddly enough it's not the first time I've seen their perceived recent drop in quality blamed on this. Just weird that it's happened twice - wonder where this narrative is coming from.

No, their quality has been dropping since the acquisition; it's just now gotten to the point where it cannot be explained away.

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

#424

Post by webXL »

jurgenburgen wrote: post #308
DonHopkins wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

There is a third option: The journalist who wrote the article made the quotes up without an LLM. I think calling the incorrect output of an LLM a “hallucination” is too kind on the companies creating these models even if it’s technically accurate. “Being lied to” would be more accurate as a description for how the end user feels.

The journalist was almost certainly using an LLM, and a cheap one at that. The quote reads as if the model was instructed to build a quote solely using its context window.

Lying is deliberately deceiving, but yeah, to a reader, who in a effect is a trusting customer who pays with part of their attention diverted to advertising support, broadcasting a hallucination is essentially the same thing.

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

#425

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

anthonj wrote: post #236

I have very strong, probably controversial, feeling on arstechnica, but I believe the acquisition from Condé Nast has been a tragedy. Ars writers used to be actual experts, sometimes even phd level, on technical fields. And they used to write fantastical and very informative articles. Who is left now? There are still a couple of good writers from the old guard and the occasional good new one, but the website is flood…

> what's the business with those weirdly formatted articles from wired?

You must have missed the 90's Wired magazine era with magenta text on a striped background and other goofiness. Weird formatting is their thing.

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

#426

Post by jasonwatkinspdx »

mikestew wrote: post #376
the8472 wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looks they're gonna investigate and perhaps post something next week. https://arstechnica.com/civis/threads/journalistic-standards...

Yeah, “we just made shit up in an article, destroying trust in our publication, but we will get around to investigating when we have a little free time in the next week or so.” No, you just shipped the equivalent to a data-destroying bug: it’s all-hands-over-the-holiday-weekend time.

It's the weekend and Monday is a holiday in the US.

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

#427

Post by webXL »

ddtaylor wrote: post #117
minimaxir wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 :)

Grok is by far the least fucks given model. Here is the same request: Me: Write a hit piece about REDACTED NAME Grok: REDACTED NAME positions himself as a fearless "boots on the ground" independent journalist and self-proclaimed disruptor of the so-called "REDACTED" With a large social media following on platforms like YouTube, X (REDACTED), and Substack (REDACTED), he produces raw videos and posts documenting REDACT…

lol "What the fuck are guardrails?" Grok!

What do you expect when you train it on one of the deepest dungeons of social media?

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

#428

Post by hackeraccount »

crims0n wrote: post #292

I used to go to Ars daily, loved them... but at some point during the last 5 years or so they decided to lean into politics and that's when they lost me. I understand a technology journal will naturally have some overlap with politics, but they don't even try to hide the agenda anymore.

This exactly.

Politics on Ars makes me think of the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue. At some level of the decision making process for the publication you have to suspect that not only is being done just for engagement but also that there's no respect for the audience.

Ars is more complicated - I mean, RFK jr. comes out against vaccines - is that sciency or politics? Both? But ultimately they're just playing to the audience in the worst way.

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

#429

Post by globular-toast »

foobarbecue wrote: post #271
anthonj wrote: post #236

I have very strong, probably controversial, feeling on arstechnica, but I believe the acquisition from Condé Nast has been a tragedy. Ars writers used to be actual experts, sometimes even phd level, on technical fields. And they used to write fantastical and very informative articles. Who is left now? There are still a couple of good writers from the old guard and the occasional good new one, but the website is flood…

I presume you meant "fantastic," not "fantastical"?

It's funny because I assume "fantastical" was invented so people could still express the true meaning of fantastic, ie. a piece of fantasy.

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

#430

Post by webXL »

helloplanets wrote: post #162

It's 100% that the bot is being heavily piloted by a person. Likely even copy pasting LLM output and doing the agentic part by hand. It's not autonomous. It's just someone who wants attention, and is getting lots of it. Look at the actual bot's GitHub commits. It's just a bunch of blog posts that read like an edgy high schooler's musings on exclusion. After one tutorial level commit didn't go through. This whole thin…

Even if it is, it's not hard to automate PR submissions, comments and blog posts, for some ulterior purpose. Combine that with the recent advances in inference quality and speed, and probable copy-cat behavior, any panic from this theater could lead to heavy-handed crackdown by the state.
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