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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

#131

Post by singpolyma3 »

epistasis wrote: post #87
Springtime wrote: post #5

Ars Technica being caught using LLMs that hallucinated quotes by the author and then publishing them in their coverage about this is quite ironic here. Even on a forum where I saw the original article by this author posted someone used an LLM to summarize the piece without having read it fully themselves. How many levels of outsourcing thinking is occurring to where it becomes a game of telephone.

Yikes I subscribed to them last year on the strength of their reporting in a time where it's hard to find good information. Printing hallucinated quotes is a huge shock to their credibility, AI or not. Their credibility was already building up after one of their long time contributors, a complete troll of a person that was a poison on their forums, went to prison for either pedophilia or soliciting sex from a minor.…

TBF even journalists who interview people for real and take notes routinely quite them saying things they didn't say. The LLMs make it worse, but it's hardly surprising behaviour from them

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

#132

Post by daxfohl »

gnarlouse wrote: post #24

I have opinions. 1. The AI here was honestly acting 100% within the realm of “standard OSS discourse.” Being a toxic shit-hat after somebody marginalizes “you” or your code on the internet can easily result in an emotionally unstable reply chain. The LLM is capturing the natural flow of discourse. Look at Rust. look at StackOverflow. Look at Zig. 2. Scott Hambaugh has a right to be frustrated, and the code is for boo…

1. In other words,

Human: Who taught you how to do this stuff?

AI: You, alright? I learned it by watching you.

This has been a PSA from the American AI Safety Council.

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

#133

Post by rectang »

zahlman wrote: post #70
netsharc wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably "one bad apple", soon to be fired, tarred and feathered...

If Kyle Orland is about to be fingered as "one bad apple" that is pretty bad news for Ars.

There are apparently two authors on the byline and it’s not hard to imagine that one may be more culpable than the other.

You may be fine with damning one or the other before all the facts are known, zahlman, but not all of us are.

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

#134

Post by gtowey »

khannn wrote: post #102
giobox wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More than ironic, it's truly outrageous, especially given the site's recent propensity for negativity towards AI. They've been caught red-handed here doing the very things they routinely criticize others for. The right thing to do would be a mea-culpa style post and explain what went wrong, but I suspect the article will simply remain taken down and Ars will pretend this never happened. I loved Ars in the early years…

Is there anything like a replacement? The three biggest tech sites that I traditionally love are ArsTechnica, AnandTech(rip), and Phoronix. One is dead man walking mode, the second is ded dead, and the last is still going strong. I'm basically getting tech news from social media sites now and I don't like that.

In my wildest hopes for a positive future, I hope disenchanted engineers will see things like this as an opportunity to start our own companies founded on ideals of honesty, integrity, and putting people above profits.

I think there are enough of us who are hungry for this, both as creators and consumers. To make goods and services that are truly what people want.

Maybe the AI revolution will spark a backlash that will lead to a new economy with new values. Sustainable business which don't need to squeeze their customers for every last penny of revenue. Which are happy to reinvest their profits into their products and employees.

Maybe.

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

#135

Post by shubhamjain »

The very fact that people are siding with AI agent here says volumes about where we are headed. I didn’t find the hit piece emotionally compelling, rather it’s lazy, obnoxious, having all the telltale signs of being written by AI. To speak nothing of the how insane it’s to write a targeted blog post just because your PR wasn’t merged.

Have our standards fallen by this much that we find things written without an ounce of originality persuasive?

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

#136

Post by Kim_Bruning »

zahlman wrote: post #22

> The hit piece has been effective. About a quarter of the comments I’ve seen across the internet are siding with the AI agent. This generally happens when MJ Rathbun’s blog is linked directly, rather than when people read my post about the situation or the full github thread. Its rhetoric and presentation of what happened has already persuaded large swaths of internet commenters. > It’s not because these people are…

Badly written or not, it convinced a quarter of the readers.

And one can't both argue that it was written by an LLM and written by a human at the same time.

This probably leaves a number people with some uncomfortable catching up to do wrt their beliefs about agents and LLMS.

Yudkowsky was prescient about persuasion risk, at least. :-P

One glimmer of hope though: The Moltbot has already apologized, their human not yet.

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

#137

Post by bastawhiz »

manbash wrote: post #125

AI and LLM specifically can't and mustn't be allowed to publically criticize, even if they may coincidetally had done so with good reasons (which they obviously don't in this case). Letting an LLM let loose in such a manner that strikes fear in anyone who it crosses paths with must be considered as harassment, even in the legal sense, and must be treated as such.

Would what happened here be considered harassment had a human been the author? I'm not sure it would. If one disgruntled blog post counts as harassment, a substantial number of bloggers would be facing serious consequences.

Hell, what separates a Yelp review that contains no lies from a blog post like this? Where do you draw the line?

I'm also not sure that there's an argument that because the text was written by an LLM, it becomes harassment. How could you prove that it was? We're not even sure it was in this case.

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

#138

Post by minimaxir »

nradov wrote: post #121
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 :)

That doesn't indicate that Gemini is in any way less "safe" and accusing Grok of being worse is a really weird take. I don't want any artificial restrictions on the LLMs that I use.

I obviously cannot post the real unsafe examples.

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

#139

Post by khannn »

remh wrote: post #119
khannn wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there anything like a replacement? The three biggest tech sites that I traditionally love are ArsTechnica, AnandTech(rip), and Phoronix. One is dead man walking mode, the second is ded dead, and the last is still going strong. I'm basically getting tech news from social media sites now and I don't like that.

I’ve really enjoyed 404media lately

I like them too. About the only other contender I see is maybe techcrunch.

Need to set an email address and browser up only for sites that require registration.

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

#140

Post by sho_hn »

rectang wrote: post #133
zahlman wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If Kyle Orland is about to be fingered as "one bad apple" that is pretty bad news for Ars.

There are apparently two authors on the byline and it’s not hard to imagine that one may be more culpable than the other. You may be fine with damning one or the other before all the facts are known, zahlman, but not all of us are.

I don't read their comment as implying this. It might in fact hint at the opposite; it's far more likely for the less senior author to get thrown under the bus, regardless of who was lazy.
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