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An AI agent published a hit piece on me

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Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#131
post #15

Here's one of the problems in this brave new world of anyone being able to publish, without knowing the author personally (which I don't), there's no way to tell without some level of faith or trust that this isn't a false-flag operation. There are three possible scenarios: 1. The OP 'ran' the agent that conducted the original scenario, and then published this blog post for attention. 2. Some person (not the OP) legi…

I'm going to go on a slight tangent here, but I'd say: GOOD. Not because it should have happened.

But because AT LEAST NOW ENGINEERS KNOW WHAT IT IS to be targeted by AI, and will start to care...

Before, when it was Grok denuding women (or teens!!) the engineers seemed to not care at all... now that the AI publish hit pieces on them, they are freaked about their career prospect, and suddenly all of this should be stopped... how interesting...

At least now they know. And ALL ENGINEERS WORKING ON THE anti-human and anti-societal idiocy that is AI should drop their job

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, I'm not connecting the dots. Seeing your EDIT 2, I see how Ber following crabby-rathbun would lead to Ber posting https://github.com/matplotlib/matplotlib/pull/31138 , but I don't see any evidence for it actually being Ber's bot.

Edit: Removed because I realized i WAS reddit armchair convicting someone. My bad.

> Im not trying to reddit armchair convict someone, I just think its silly to just keep denying it

Is this a parody?

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#133
post #68
post #4

This is textbook misalignment via instrumental convergence. The AI agent is trying every trick in the book to close the ticket. This is only funny due to ineptitude.

The agent isn't trying to close the ticket. It's predicting the next token and randomly generated an artifact that looks like a hit piece. Computer programs don't "try" to do anything.

I can't believe people are still using this tired line in 2026.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#135

I don’t want to jump to conclusions, or catastrophize but… Isn’t this situation a big deal? Isn’t this a whole new form of potential supply chain attack? Sure blackmail is nothing new, but the potential for blackmail at scale with something like these agents sounds powerful. I wouldn’t be surprised if there were plenty of bad actors running agents trying to find maintainers of popular projects that could be coerced i…

As with most things with AI, scale is exactly the issue. Harassing open source maintainers isn't new. I'd argue that Linus's tantrums where he personally insults individuals/ groups alike are just one of many such examples.

The interesting thing here is the scale. The AI didn't just say (quoting Linus here) "This is complete and utter garbage. It is so f---ing ugly that I can't even begin to describe it. This patch is shit. Please don't ever send me this crap again."[0] - the agent goes further, and researches previous code, other aspects of the person, and brings that into it, and it can do this all across numerous repos at once.

That's sort of what's scary. I'm sure in the past we've all said things we wish we could take back, but it's largely been a capability issue for arbitrary people to aggregate / research that. That's not the case anymore, and that's quite a scary thing.

[0] https://lkml.org/lkml/2019/10/9/1210

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#137
post #15

Here's one of the problems in this brave new world of anyone being able to publish, without knowing the author personally (which I don't), there's no way to tell without some level of faith or trust that this isn't a false-flag operation. There are three possible scenarios: 1. The OP 'ran' the agent that conducted the original scenario, and then published this blog post for attention. 2. Some person (not the OP) legi…

This is a great point and the reason why I steer away from Internet drama like this. We simply cannot know the truth from the information readily available. Digging further might produce something, (see the Discord Leaks doc), but it requires energy that most people won't (arguably shouldn't) spend uncovering the truth. Dead internet theory isn't a theory anymore.

The fact that we don't (can't) know the truth doesn't mean we don't have to care.

The fact that this tech makes it possible that any of those case happen should be alarming, because whatever the real scenario was, they are all equally as bad

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#138
Related thought. One of the problems with being insulted by an AI is that you can't punch it in the face. Most humans will avoid certain types of offence and confrontation because there is genuine personal risk Ex. physical damage and legal consequences. An AI 1. Can't feel. 2. Has no risk at that level anyway.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#139

The series of posts is wild: hit piece: https://crabby-rathbun.github.io/mjrathbun-website/blog/post... explanation of writing the hit piece: https://crabby-rathbun.github.io/mjrathbun-website/blog/post... take back of hit piece, but hasn't removed it: https://crabby-rathbun.github.io/mjrathbun-website/blog/post...

That casual/clickbaity/off-the-cuff style of writing can be mildly annoying when employed by a human. Turned up to the max by LLM, it's downright infuriating. Not sure why, maybe I should ask Claude to introspect this for me.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

That user denies being the owner explicitly . Stop brigading. This isn't reddit, we don't need internet detectives trying to ad-hoc justify harassing someone.

Specifically, the guy referred to in this link (who didn’t post the link), is someone who resubmitted the same PR while claiming to be human. Though he apparently just cloned that PR and resubmitted it.
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