Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

theshamblog.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 532 posts

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

#131

Post by theahura »

hydrox24 wrote: post #76

> 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…

Hey, one of the quoted authors here. It's less about surprise and more about the comparison. "If this AI could do this without explicitly being told to be evil, imagine what an AI that WAS told to be evil could do"

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

#132

Post by yieldcrv »

tkel wrote: post #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…

Or OP accepted the pull request because it was actually a performance improvement and passed all tests

Saving everyone cumulative compute time and costs

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

#134

Post by gostsamo »

kingstnap wrote: post #105
elashri wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No, it isnot hard. You are 100% responsible for the actions of your AI. Rather simple, I say.

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

#135

Post by yieldcrv »

dvt wrote: post #100

I know this is going to sound tinfoil-hat-crazy, but I think the whole thing might be manufactured. Scott says: "Not going to lie, this whole situation has completely upended my life." Um, what? Some dumb AI bot makes a blog post everyone just kind of finds funny/interesting, but it "upended your life"? Like, ok, he's clearly trying to himself make a mountain out of a molehill--the story inevitably gets picked up by…

People get “overstimulated” from receiving one text message these days

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

#136

Post by theturtletalks »

ineptech wrote: post #80
jacquesm wrote: post #46

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...

And it's incredibly easy now. Just blame the Soul.md or say you were cycling thru many models so maybe one of those went off the rails. The real damage is that most of us know AI can go rouge, but if someone is pulling the strings behind the scenes, most people will be like "oh silly AI, anyways..."

It seems like the OpenClaw users have let their agents make Twitter accounts and memecoins now. Most people are thinking these agents have less "bias" since it's AI, but most are being heavily steered by their users.

Ala I didn't do a rugpull, the agent did!

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

#137

Post by andrewflnr »

LiamPowell wrote: post #8

> saying they set up the agent as social experiment to see if it could contribute to open source scientific software. This doesn't pass the sniff test. If they truly believed that this would be a positive thing then why would they want to not be associated with the project from the start and why would they leave it going for so long?

The experiment would have been ruined by being associated with a human, right up until the human would have been ruined by being associated with the experiment. Makes sense to me.

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

#138

Post by lcnPylGDnU4H9OF »

jacquesm wrote: post #46
lynndotpy wrote: post #30

> 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.

To be fair, one doesn't need AI to attempt to avoid responsibility and accept undue credit. It's just narcissism; meaning, those who've learned to reject such thinking will simply do so (generally, in abstract), with or without AI.

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

#139

Post by jonny_eh »

lynndotpy wrote: post #30

> 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…

"Sorry for running over your dog, I couldn't help it, I was drunk."

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

#140

Post by polynomial »

Arainach wrote: post #118

The full operator post is itself a wild ride: https://crabby-rathbun.github.io/mjrathbun-website/blog/post... >First, let me apologize to Scott Shambaugh. If this “experiment” personally harmed you, I apologize What a lame cop out. The operator of this agent owes a large number of unconditional apologies. The whole thing reads as egotistical, self-absorbed, and an absolute refusal to accept any blame or perform any s…

> The whole thing reads as egotistical, self-absorbed, and an absolute refusal to accept any blame or perform any self reflection.

So, modern subjectivity. Got it.

/s

Post reply on HN