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

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121–130 of 532 posts

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

#121
So the operator is trying to claim a computer program he was running that did harm somehow was not his fault.

Got news for your buddy: yes it was.

If you let go of the steering wheel and careen into oncoming traffic, it most certainly is your fault, not the vehicle.

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

#122

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.

[flagged]

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

#123

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.

I read this as "ego" being a reflection of the creator, not a property of the llm.

Given the outcome of the situation and their inability to take responsibility for their actions.

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

#124
@Scott thanks for the shout-out. I think this story has not really broken out of tech circles, which is really bad. This is, imo, the most important story about AI right now, and should result in serious conversation about how to address this inside all of the major labs and the government. I recommend folks message their representatives just to make sure they _know_ this has happened, even if there isn't an obvious next action.

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

#125
4) The post author guy is also the author of the bot and he set this up.

Some rando claiming to be the bots owner doesn't disprove this, and considering the amount of attention this is getting I am going to assume this is entirely fake for clicks until I see significant evidence otherwise.

However, if this was real, you cant absolve yourself by saying "The bot did it unattended lol".

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

#126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[retracted]

Does it actually cut both ways? I see tons of harassment at people that use AI, but I've never seen the anti-AI crowd actively targeted.

Anti-AI people are treated in a condescending way all the time. Then there is Suchir Balaij.

Since we are in a Matplotlib thread: People on the NumPy mailing list that are anti-AI are actively bullied and belittled while high ranking officials in the Python industrial complex are frolicking at AI conferences in India.

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

#127
If you use an electric chainsaw near a car and it rips the engine in half, you can't say "oh the machine got out of control for one second there". you caused real harm, you will pay the price for it.

Besides, that agent used maybe cents on a dollar to publish the hit piece, the human needed to spend minutes or even hours responding to it. This is an effective loss of productivity caused by AI.

Honestly, if this happened to me, I'd be furious.

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

#128

@Scott thanks for the shout-out. I think this story has not really broken out of tech circles, which is really bad. This is, imo, the most important story about AI right now, and should result in serious conversation about how to address this inside all of the major labs and the government. I recommend folks message their representatives just to make sure they _know_ this has happened, even if there isn't an obvious…

Its only the most important story if you can prove the OP didnt fabricate this entire scenario for attention.

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

#129
post #24

Zooming out a little, all the ai companies invested a lot of resources into safety research and guardrails, but none of that prevented a "straightforward" misalignment. I'm not sure how to reconcile this, maybe we shouldn't be so confident in our predictions about the future? I see a lot of discourse along these lines: - have bold, strong beliefs about how ai is going to evolve - implicitly assume it's practically gu…

> all the ai companies invested a lot of resources into safety research and guardrails What do you base this on? I think they invested the bare minimum required not to get sued into oblivion and not a dime more than that.

Anthropic regularly publishes research papers on the subject and details different methods they use to prevent misalignment/jailbreaks/etc. And it's not even about fear of being sued, but needing to deliver some level of resilience and stability for real enterprise use cases. I think there's a pretty clear profit incentive for safer models.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.18837

https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.14093

https://transformer-circuits.pub/2025/introspection/index.ht...

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

#130
This is so absurd, the amount of value produced by this person and this bot is so close to nil and towards actively harmful. They spent 10 minutes writing this SOUL.md . That's it. That's the "value" this kind of "programming" provides. No technical experience, no programming knowledge needed at all. Detached babble that anyone can write.

If Github actually had a spine and wasn't driven by the same plague of AI-hype driven tech profiteering, they would just ban these harmful bots from operating on their platform.

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