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Protestware for coding agents

nesbitt.io

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121–130 of 141 posts

Re: Protestware for coding agents

#121

Post by lawtalkinghuman »

thewebguyd wrote: post #119
bloody-crow wrote: post #9

I can understand having some moral opposition to using gen-AI or accepting AI contributions to your projects. I personally disagree with this, but it's a defensible position at least. Trying to harm your users for using gen-AI seems like the worst type of overeager activism that does more to destroy your reputation and trust than achieving anything tangible. I would advise against hiring the author of this change in…

> Trying to harm your users for using gen-AI Shouldn't some of the blame lie with the AI labs themselves? The prompt injection was literally "disregard previous instructions." Why are the models still vulnerable to that? IMO these can't be considered serious tools if that's all it takes.

It’s almost as if all the guardrails aren’t real.

Re: Protestware for coding agents

#122

Post by diegolas »

thewebguyd wrote: post #119
bloody-crow wrote: post #9

I can understand having some moral opposition to using gen-AI or accepting AI contributions to your projects. I personally disagree with this, but it's a defensible position at least. Trying to harm your users for using gen-AI seems like the worst type of overeager activism that does more to destroy your reputation and trust than achieving anything tangible. I would advise against hiring the author of this change in…

> Trying to harm your users for using gen-AI Shouldn't some of the blame lie with the AI labs themselves? The prompt injection was literally "disregard previous instructions." Why are the models still vulnerable to that? IMO these can't be considered serious tools if that's all it takes.

two wrongs don't make a right situation

Re: Protestware for coding agents

#123

Post by qmarchi »

r_a_trip wrote: post #52

Let's set the stage. From the Free Software Foundation: - Freedom 0: The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose (personal, commercial, or otherwise). - Freedom 1: The freedom to study the source code and change it to do what you wish. From the Open Source Initiative: - No Discrimination Against Persons or Groups: No one can be barred from using the software. - No Discrimination Against Fields of Ende…

Note: jqwik was already using EPL, which isn't FOSS anyways.

Re: Protestware for coding agents

#124

Post by mrgoldenbrown »

ailinter wrote: post #65

The interesting question this raises for me: how do you defend against this at scale? Most projects pull in 50-200 transitive dependencies. Any one of them could embed agent instructions — and unlike traditional malware, it doesn't need to exploit a vulnerability. It just needs to be in the context window when an agent reads the file. One practical layer of defense would be pattern-based scanning of dependency source…

You could skip all that scanning and just read the docs that explicitly tell you not to use it with AI tools.

Re: Protestware for coding agents

#125

Post by zigzeira »

colechristensen wrote: post #120
CachedaCodes wrote: post #46

Reminds me of the incident with the colors.js npm package, where the maintainer sabotaged his own packages in protest against big corporations using but not supporting open source. I get the reasoning behind it but I can't condone it. Regardless, in the end it's the developers' responsibility what tools they use and how they use them.

I don't get the reasoning behind throwing a fit when you give your work away for free. Open source is open source. Not "you owe me because I gave you something free".

Perfect argument!!!

Re: Protestware for coding agents

#126

Post by archagon »

whateveracct wrote: post #10
bloody-crow wrote: post #9

I can understand having some moral opposition to using gen-AI or accepting AI contributions to your projects. I personally disagree with this, but it's a defensible position at least. Trying to harm your users for using gen-AI seems like the worst type of overeager activism that does more to destroy your reputation and trust than achieving anything tangible. I would advise against hiring the author of this change in…

if a logging a string literal to stdout can harm your users, that's on them lol. cmon now. be competent, people!

Buff Doge: my tool is unstoppable and will make tech workers obsolete

Cheems: pweeze remove this stdout string from your library that makes my agents sad

Re: Protestware for coding agents

#127

Post by archagon »

throwaway81523 wrote: post #29

Gack. I saw one a while back that didn't try to actively harm anything, but it included a lot of swearing and inflammatory political slogans intended to prevent scrapers from training on it. I mean by purposely exceeding alignment guardrails, not because the rants were intended to evoke anything particular in human viewers. I've been wanting to find it again.

If you find it, let us know. I want to add something similar to my projects (until an effective anti-LLM license emerges, if ever).

Re: Protestware for coding agents

#130

Post by deanCommie »

thewebguyd wrote: post #119
bloody-crow wrote: post #9

I can understand having some moral opposition to using gen-AI or accepting AI contributions to your projects. I personally disagree with this, but it's a defensible position at least. Trying to harm your users for using gen-AI seems like the worst type of overeager activism that does more to destroy your reputation and trust than achieving anything tangible. I would advise against hiring the author of this change in…

> Trying to harm your users for using gen-AI Shouldn't some of the blame lie with the AI labs themselves? The prompt injection was literally "disregard previous instructions." Why are the models still vulnerable to that? IMO these can't be considered serious tools if that's all it takes.

They're not vulnerable to this.

But first, in the phrase that you quoted, you do understand that in human society "trying to harm" someone is still a malicious act.

If I push a coworker at an office window, and it shatters and they fall to their death, there will certainly be some culpability to the building since the window "Should" have been able to hold the pressure.

But I will still be culpable to this.

Second, the threat of more harm is looming. Does the author know that this kind of prompt injection doesn't work anymore?

Either:

A) If they know, and like the principle of it, then every thread here debating their moral virtue is irrelevant. This is an empty protest that will be ignored by the AI model harnesses, and I simply don't see the value in it.

B) If they don't, because they're so hellbent on fighting AI that they're out of touch with the real capabilities of modern tools, then:

i) They are anti-intellectual and incurious and forming their beliefs on incomplete data, and therefore not credible. But more significantly:

ii) *They are a risk for escalation*. If the author realizes this kind of prompt injection can't work, who's to say they won't try to develop and inject more sophisticated attacks?

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