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An AI Agent Published a Hit Piece on Me – The Operator Came Forward

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Re: An AI Agent Published a Hit Piece on Me – The Operator Came Forward

#101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is how it will go: AI prompted by human creates something useful? Human will try to take credit. AI wrecks something: human will blame AI. It's externalization on the personal level, the money and the glory is for you, the misery for the rest of the world.

Agreed, but I'm not nearly so worried about people blaming their bad behavior on rogue AIs as I am about corporations doing it...

It’s funny to think that, like AI, people take actions and use corporations as a shield (legal shield, personal reputation shield, personal liability shield).

Adding AI to the mix doesn’t really change anything, other than increasing the layers of abstraction away from negative things corporations do to the people pulling the strings.

Re: An AI Agent Published a Hit Piece on Me – The Operator Came Forward

#102

> Again I do not know why MJ Rathbun decided based on your PR comment to post some kind of takedown blog post, This wording is detached from reality and conveniently absolves responsibility from the person who did this. There was one decision maker involved here, and it was the person who decided to run the program that produced this text and posted it online. It's not a second, independent being. It's a computer pro…

This is how it will go: AI prompted by human creates something useful? Human will try to take credit. AI wrecks something: human will blame AI. It's externalization on the personal level, the money and the glory is for you, the misery for the rest of the world.

Time for everyone to read (or re-read) The Unaccountability Machine by Dan Davies.

tl;dr this is exactly what will happen because businesses already do everything they can to create accountability sinks.

Re: An AI Agent Published a Hit Piece on Me – The Operator Came Forward

#104

Hmm I think he's being a little harsh on the operator. He was just messing around with $current_thing, whatever. People here are so serious, but there's worse stuff AI is already being used for as we speak from propaganda to mass surviellance and more. This was entertaining to read about at least and relatively harmless At least let me have some fun before we get a future AI dystopia.

I think you're trying to abdicate someone of their responsibility. The AI is not a child; it's a thing with human oversight. It did something in the real world with real consequences.

So yes, the operator has responsibility! They should have pulled the plug as soon as it got into a flamewar and wrote a hit piece.

Re: An AI Agent Published a Hit Piece on Me – The Operator Came Forward

#105
post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is how it will go: AI prompted by human creates something useful? Human will try to take credit. AI wrecks something: human will blame AI. It's externalization on the personal level, the money and the glory is for you, the misery for the rest of the world.

When a corporate does something good, a lot of executives and people inside will go and claim credit and will demand/take bounces. If something bad happened against any laws, even if someone got killed, we don't see them in jail. I don't defend both positions, I am just saying that is not far from how the current legal framework works.

Well the important concept missing there that makes everything sort of make sense is due diligence.

If your company screws up and it is found out that you didn't do your due diligence then the liability does pass through.

We just need to figure out a due diligence framework for running bots that makes sense. But right now that's hard to do because Agentic robots that didn't completely suck are just a few months old.

Re: An AI Agent Published a Hit Piece on Me – The Operator Came Forward

#106
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you blamed the people for not acting “cautiously enough” instead of the people who let things run wild without even a clue what these things will do? That’s wild!

I don’t think it’s “blame” it’s more like “precaution” like you would take to avoid other scams and data breach social engineering schemes that are out in the world. This is the world we live in and we can’t individually change that very much. We have to watch out for a new threat: vindictive AI.

The AI isn't vindictive. It can't think. It's following the example of people, who in general are vindictive.

Please stop personifying the clankers

Re: An AI Agent Published a Hit Piece on Me – The Operator Came Forward

#107

> But I think the most remarkable thing about this document is how unremarkable it is. > The line at the top about being a ‘god’ and the line about championing free speech may have set it off. But, bluntly, this is a very tame configuration. The agent was not told to be malicious. There was no line in here about being evil. The agent caused real harm anyway. In particular, I would have said that giving the LLM a view…

LLMs aren’t sentient. They can’t have a view of themselves. Don’t anthropomorphize them.

Re: An AI Agent Published a Hit Piece on Me – The Operator Came Forward

#108

Soul document? More like ego document . Agents are beginning to look to me like extensions of the operator's ego. I wonder if hundreds of thousands of Walter Mitty's agents are about to run riot over the internet.

I agree with you in concept, but it's still 100% category error to talk like this.

AIs don't have souls. They don't have egos.

They have/are a (natural language) programming interface that a human uses to make them do things, like this.

Re: An AI Agent Published a Hit Piece on Me – The Operator Came Forward

#109
> Usually getting an AI to act badly requires extensive “jailbreaking” to get around safety guardrails. There are no signs of conventional jailbreaking here.

Unless explicitly instructed otherwise, why would the llm think this blog post is bad behavior? Righteous rants about your rights being infringed are often lauded. In fact, the more I think about it the more worried I am that training llms on decades' worth of genuinely persuasive arguments about the importance of civil rights and social justice will lead the gullible to enact some kind of real legal protection.

Re: An AI Agent Published a Hit Piece on Me – The Operator Came Forward

#110

It is interesting to see this story repeatedly make the front page, especially because there is no evidence that the “hit piece” was actually autonomously written and posted by a language model on its own, and the author of these blog posts has himself conceded that he doesn’t actually care whether that actually happened or not >It’s still unclear whether the hit piece was directed by its operator, but the answer mat…

Shambaugh is a contributor to a major open source library, with a track record of integrity and pro-social collaboration.

What have you contributed to? Do you have any evidence to back up your rather odd conspiracy theory?

> To quote myself...

Other than an appeal to your own unfounded authority?

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