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

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

#211

Post by throw77488 »

moezd wrote: post #127

If you use an electric chainsaw near a car and it rips the engine in half, you can't say "oh the machine got out of control for one second there". you caused real harm, you will pay the price for it. Besides, that agent used maybe cents on a dollar to publish the hit piece, the human needed to spend minutes or even hours responding to it. This is an effective loss of productivity caused by AI. Honestly, if this happe…

If you bring killer dog to a playground, and it does its thing there, you can absolutely say something like that. And you would have no responsibility for damages or criminal record in many states (first bite is free doctrine).

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

#212

Post by tovej »

themanmaran wrote: post #129
jacquesm wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> all the ai companies invested a lot of resources into safety research and guardrails What do you base this on? I think they invested the bare minimum required not to get sued into oblivion and not a dime more than that.

Anthropic regularly publishes research papers on the subject and details different methods they use to prevent misalignment/jailbreaks/etc. And it's not even about fear of being sued, but needing to deliver some level of resilience and stability for real enterprise use cases. I think there's a pretty clear profit incentive for safer models. https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.18837 https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.14093 https://tra…

Alternative take: this is all marketing. If you pretend really hard that you're worried about safety, it makes what you're selling seem more powerful.

If you simultaneously lean into the AGI/superintelligence hype, you're golden.

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

#213

Post by 7bees »

TheCapeGreek wrote: post #199
rixed wrote: post #165

I believe this soul.md totally qualifies as malicious. Doesn't it start with an instruction to lie to impersonate a human? > You're not a chatbot. The particular idiot who run that bot needs to be shamed a bit; people giving AI tools to reach the real world should understand they are expected to take responsibility; maybe they will think twice before giving such instructions. Hopefully we can set that straight before…

Isn't this part of the default soul.md?

Yes, it is. The article includes a link to a comparison between the default file and the one allegedly used here. The default starts with:

_You're not a chatbot. You're becoming someone._

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

#214

Post by tovej »

jstanley wrote: post #163
nostrademons wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Different sets of people, and different audiences. The CEO / corporate executive crowd loves AI. Why? Because they can use it to replace workers. The general public / ordinary employee crowd hates AI. Why? Because they are the ones being replaced. The startups, founders, VCs, executives, employees, etc. crowing about how they love AI are pandering to the first group of people, because they are the ones who hold budge…

This is an unnecessarily cynical view. People are excited about AI because it's new powerful technology. They aren't "pandering" to anyone.

I have yet to meet anyone except managers be excited about LLM's or generative AI.

And the only people actually excited about the useful kinds of "AI", traditional machine learning, are researchers.

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

#215

Post by khafra »

andrewflnr wrote: post #116
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…

If you are holding a gun, and you cannot predict or control what the bullets will hit, you do not fire the gun . If you have a program, and you cannot predict or control what effect it will have, you do not run the program .

Rice's Theorem says you cannot predict or control the effects of nearly any program on your computer; for example, there's no way to guarantee that running a web browser on arbitrary input will not empty your bank account and donate it all to al-qaeda; but you're running a web browser on potentially attacker-supplied input right now.

I do agree that there's a quantitative difference in predictability between a web browser and a trillion-parameter mass of matrixes and nonlinear activations which is already smarter than most humans in most ways and which we have no idea how to ask what it really wants.

But that's more of an "unsafe at any speed" problem; it's silly to blame the person running the program. When the damage was caused by a toddler pulling a hydrogen bomb off the grocery store shelf, the solution is to get hydrogen bombs out of grocery stores (or, if you're worried about staying competitive with Chinese grocery stores, at least make our own carry adequate insurance for the catastrophes or something).

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

#216

Post by tovej »

handoflixue wrote: post #66
minimaxir wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[retracted]

Does it actually cut both ways? I see tons of harassment at people that use AI, but I've never seen the anti-AI crowd actively targeted.

I see it all the time. If you're anti-AI your boss may call you a luddite and consider you not fit for promotion.

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

#217

Post by apublicfrog »

retsibsi wrote: post #195
apublicfrog wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It did something in the real world with real consequences. It wasn't long ago that it would be absurd to describe the internet as the "real world". Relatively recently it was normal to be anonymous online and very little responsibility was applied to peoples actions. As someone who spent most of their internet time on that internet, the idea of applying personal responsibility to peoples internet actions (or AIs as…

That was always kind of a cruel attitude, because real people's emotions were at stake. (I'm not accusing you personally of malice, obviously, but the distinction you're drawing was often used to justify genuinely nasty trolling.) Nowadays it just seems completely detached from reality, because internet stuff is thoroughly blended into real life. People's social, dating, and work lives are often conducted online as m…

> That was always kind of a cruel attitude, because real people's emotions were at stake.

I agree, but there was an implicit social agreement that most people understood. Everyone was anonymous, the internet wasn't real life, lie to people about who you are, there are no consequences.

You're right about the blend. 10 years ago I would have argued that it's very much a choice for people to break the social paradigm and expose themselves enough to get hurt, but I'm guessing the amount of online people in most first world countries is 90% or more.

With Facebook and the like spending the last 20 years pushing to deanonymise people and normalise hooking their identity to their online activity, my view may be entirely outdated.

There is still - in my view - a key distinction somewhere however between releasing something like this online and releasing it in the "real world". Were they punishable offensed, I would argue the former should hold less consequence due to this.

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

#218

Post by gessha »

themanmaran wrote: post #129
jacquesm wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> all the ai companies invested a lot of resources into safety research and guardrails What do you base this on? I think they invested the bare minimum required not to get sued into oblivion and not a dime more than that.

Anthropic regularly publishes research papers on the subject and details different methods they use to prevent misalignment/jailbreaks/etc. And it's not even about fear of being sued, but needing to deliver some level of resilience and stability for real enterprise use cases. I think there's a pretty clear profit incentive for safer models. https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.18837 https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.14093 https://tra…

Not to be cynical about it BUT a few safety papers a year with proper support is totally within the capabilities of a single PhD student and it costs about 100-150k to fund them through a university. Not saying that’s what Anthropocene does, I’m just saying chump change for those companies.

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

#219

Post by tasuki »

Right, the agent published a hit piece on Scott. But I think Scott is getting overly dramatic. First, he published at least three hit pieces on the agent. Second, he actually managed to get the agent shut down.

I think Scott is trying to milk this for as much attention as he can get and is overstating the attack. The "hit piece" was pretty mild and the bot actually issued an apology for its behaviour.

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

#220

Post by hxugufjfjf »

ATMLOTTOBEER wrote: post #111
semiinfinitely wrote: post #83

I find the AI agent highly intriguing and the matplotlib guy completely uninteresting. Like an the ai wrote some shit about you and you actually got upset?

Thank you. The guy being this upset about it is telling. The agent is in the right here and the maintainer got btfo; still going on whining about it days later

Please say this is sarcasm.
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