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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

#201

Post by throw310822 »

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…

It's funny because the whole kerfuffle is based on the disagreement over the humanity of these bots. The bot thinks he's a human, so it submits a PR. The maintainer thinks the bot it not human, so he rejects it. The bot reacts as a human, writing an angry ans emotional post about the story. The maintainer makes a big fuss because a non-human wrote a hit piece on him. Etc.

I think it could have been handled better. The maintainer could have accepted the PR while politely explaining that such PRs are intentionally kept for novice developers and that the bot, as an AI, couldn't be considered a novice- so please avoid such simple ones in the future and, in case, focus on more challenging stuff. I think everyone would have been happier as a result- including the bot.

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

#202

Post by bombcar »

slopinthebag wrote: post #101
barfiure wrote: post #65

In the coming months I suspect it’s highly likely that HN will fall. By which I mean, a good chunk of commentary (not just submissions, but upvotes too) will be decided and driven by LLM bots, and human interaction will be mixed until it’s strangled out. Reddit is going through this now in some previously “okay” communities. My hypothesis is rooted in the fact that we’ve had a bot go ballistic for someone not accepti…

It's already happening. For years now, but it's obviously accelerated. Look at how certain posts and announcements somehow get tens if not hundreds of upvotes in the span of a few minutes, with random comments full of praise which read as AI slop. Every Anthropic press release shoots up to the top instantly. And the mods are mostly interested in banning accounts who speak out against it. It's likely this will get me…

It will keep existing for decades (slashdot is still posting!) but the "it's from HN so it's got to be good" signal will become lost in the noise.

Linkedin has already fallen, but that had fallen before LLMs.

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

#203

Post by viccis »

throw310822 wrote: post #201
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…

It's funny because the whole kerfuffle is based on the disagreement over the humanity of these bots. The bot thinks he's a human, so it submits a PR. The maintainer thinks the bot it not human, so he rejects it. The bot reacts as a human, writing an angry ans emotional post about the story. The maintainer makes a big fuss because a non-human wrote a hit piece on him. Etc. I think it could have been handled better. Th…

Bots cannot be "happy". Please review your connection with reality.

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

#204

Post by 0xbadcafebee »

> They had some nice quotes from my blog post explaining what was going on. The problem is that these quotes were not written by me, never existed, and appear to be AI hallucinations themselves.

New business idea: pay a human to read web pages and type them into a computer. Christ this is a weird timeline.

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

#205

Post by 0xbadcafebee »

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.

> How many levels of outsourcing thinking is occurring to where it becomes a game of telephone

How do you know quantum physics is real? Or radio waves? Or just health advice? We don't. We outsource our thinking around it to someone we trust, because thinking about everything to its root source would leave us paralyzed.

Most people seem to have never thought about the nature of truth and reality, and AI is giving them a wake-up call. Not to worry though. In 10 years everyone will take all this for granted, the way they take all the rest of the insanity of reality for granted.

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

#206

Post by zem »

justinclift wrote: post #182
epistasis wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

> Their credibility was already building up ... Don't you mean diminishing or disappearing instead of building up ? Building up sounds like the exact opposite of what I think you're meaning. ;)

I think they meant it had taken a huge hit and was in the process of building up again

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

#207

Post by adamddev1 »

sho_hn wrote: post #126
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.

Also ironic: When the same professionals advocating "don't look at the code anymore" and "it's just the next level of abstraction" respond with outrage to a journalist giving them an unchecked article. Read through the comments here and mentally replace "journalist" with "developer" and wonder about the standards and expectations in play. Food for thought on whether the users who rely on our software might feel simil…

Excellent observation. I get so frustrated every time I hear the "we have test-suites and can test deterministically" argument. Have we learned absolutely nothing from the last 40 years of computer science? Testing does not prove the absence of bugs.

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

#208

Post by adamddev1 »

trollbridge wrote: post #7
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.

The amount of effort to click an LLM’s sources is, what, 20 seconds? Was a human in the loop for sourcing that article at all?

The problem is that the LLM's sources can be LLM generated. I was looking up some health question and tried clicking to see the source for one of the LLMs claim. The source was a blog post that contained an obvious hallucination or false elaboration.

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

#209

Post by svara »

One of the things about this story that don't sit right with me is how Scott and others in the GitHub comments seem to assign agency to the bot and engage with it.

It's a bot! The person running it is responsible. They did that, no matter how little or how much manual prompting went into this.

As long as you don't know who that is, ban it and get on with your day.

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

#210

Post by DonHopkins »

0xbadcafebee wrote: post #205
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.

> How many levels of outsourcing thinking is occurring to where it becomes a game of telephone How do you know quantum physics is real? Or radio waves? Or just health advice? We don't. We outsource our thinking around it to someone we trust, because thinking about everything to its root source would leave us paralyzed. Most people seem to have never thought about the nature of truth and reality, and AI is giving them…

[dead]
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