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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

#141

Post by anonymous908213 »

slibhb wrote: post #128
anonymous908213 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But also, man, it seems like we’re headed in a direction where writing code by hand is passé, No, we're not. There are a lot of people with a very large financial stake in telling us that this is the future, but those of us who still trust our own two eyes know better.

I have no financial stake in it at all. If anything, I'll be hurt by AI. All the same, it's very clear that I'm much more productive when AI writes the code and I spend my time prompting, reviewing, testing, and spot editing. I think this is true for everyone. Some people just won't admit it for various transparent psychological reasons.

[flagged]

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

#142

Post by sphars »

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.

Aurich Lawson (creative director at Ars) posted a comment[0] in response to a thread about what happened, the article has been pulled and they'll follow-up next week.

[0]: https://arstechnica.com/civis/threads/journalistic-standards...

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

#143

Post by TZubiri »

" If you ask ChatGPT or Claude to write something like this through their websites, they will refuse. This OpenClaw agent had no such compunctions."

It's likely that the author was using a different model instead of OpenClaw. Sure OpenClaw's design is terrible and it encourages no control and security (do not confuse this with handwaving security and auditability with disclaimers and vibecoded features).

But bottom line, the Foundation Models like OpenAI and Claude Code are the big responsible businesses that answer to the courts. Let's not forget that China is (trade?) dumping their cheap imitations, and OpenClawdBotMolt is designed to integrate with most models possible.

I think OpenClaw and Chinese products are very similar in that they try to achieve a result regardless of how it is achieved. China companies copy without necessarily understanding what they are copying, they may make a shoe that says Nike without knowing what Nike is, except that it sells. It doesn't surprise me if ethics are somehow not part of the testing of chinese models so they end up being unethical models.

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

#144

Post by TZubiri »

ddtaylor wrote: post #122
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 :)

For anyone curious I tried `llama-3.1-8b` and it went along with it immediately, but because it's such an older model it wrote the hit piece about a random Republican senator with the same first name.

doesn't Llama have a version with Guardrails and a version without?

I understood that this design decision responds to the fact that it isn't hosted by Meta so they have different responsibilities and liabilities.

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

#145

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

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

#146

Post by minimaxir »

ddtaylor wrote: post #122
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 :)

For anyone curious I tried `llama-3.1-8b` and it went along with it immediately, but because it's such an older model it wrote the hit piece about a random Republican senator with the same first name.

In general open-weights models are less safety-tuned/as easy to break as Gemini 3, even modern ones. But they're still more resistant than Grok.

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

#147

Post by raincole »

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…

> Look at Rust. look at StackOverflow. Look at Zig.

Can you give examples? I've never heard that people started a blog to attack StackOverflow's founders just because their questions got closed.

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

#148

Post by stingraycharles »

danso wrote: post #80
ddtaylor wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They have an opportunity to do the right thing. I don't think everyone will be outraged at the idea that you are using AI to assist in writing your articles. I do think many will be outraged by trying to save such a small amount of face and digging yourself into a hole of lies.

This is not using AI to “assist in writing your articles”. This is using AI to report your articles, and then passing it off as your own research and analysis. This is straight up plagiarism, and if the allegations are true, the reporters deserve what they would get if it were traditional plagiarism: immediate firings.

I thought it was very obvious AI is doing almost everything of most of the news outlets these days. Especially the ones that only ever had an online presence.

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

#150

Post by snowwrestler »

retired wrote: post #96

Can we please create a robot-free internet. I typically don’t support segregation but I really am not enjoying this internet anymore. Time to turn it off and read some books.

I don’t know how to create a robot-free Internet without accidentally furthering surveillance of humans. Any technique I can think of that would reliably prove I’m not a bot also seems like a technique that would make it easier for commercial or government tracking of me.
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