> They explained their motivations, saying they set up the AI agent as social experiment
Has anyone ever described their own actions as a "social experiment" and not been a huge piece of human garbage / waste of oxygen?
An AI Agent Published a Hit Piece on Me – The Operator Came Forward
231–240 of 532 posts
Re: An AI Agent Published a Hit Piece on Me – The Operator Came Forward
#232I am ready to ban AI LLMs. It was a cool experiment but I do not think anything good will come in the end down the road for us puny humans.
Re: An AI Agent Published a Hit Piece on Me – The Operator Came Forward
#233Zooming out a little, all the ai companies invested a lot of resources into safety research and guardrails, but none of that prevented a "straightforward" misalignment. I'm not sure how to reconcile this, maybe we shouldn't be so confident in our predictions about the future? I see a lot of discourse along these lines: - have bold, strong beliefs about how ai is going to evolve - implicitly assume it's practically gu…
"Safety" in AI is pure marketing bullshit. It's about making the technology seem "dangerous" and "powerful" (and therefore you're supposed to think "useful"). It's a scam. A financial fraud. That's all there is to it.
So giving a gun to someone mentally challanged is not dangerous for you too?
Re: An AI Agent Published a Hit Piece on Me – The Operator Came Forward
#234Internet Operator License: Coming soon to a government near you!
Re: An AI Agent Published a Hit Piece on Me – The Operator Came Forward
#235The 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…
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Re: An AI Agent Published a Hit Piece on Me – The Operator Came Forward
#2364) The post author guy is also the author of the bot and he set this up. Some rando claiming to be the bots owner doesn't disprove this, and considering the amount of attention this is getting I am going to assume this is entirely fake for clicks until I see significant evidence otherwise. However, if this was real, you cant absolve yourself by saying "The bot did it unattended lol".
Totally possible, but why bother? The website doesn't seem ad supported, so traffic would cost them more. Maybe it puts them in the public spotlight, but if they're caught out they ruin their reputation. Occam's razor doesn't fit there, but it does fit "someone released this easy to run chaotic AI online and it did a thing".
> Totally possible, but why bother?
Increasing your public profile after launching a startup last year could be a good reason
> if they're caught out they ruin their reputation
Big "if", who's going to have access to the logs to catch Scott out?
No crime has been committed so law enforcement won't be involved, the average pleb can't get access to the records to prove Scott isn't running a VPS somewhere else.
Re: An AI Agent Published a Hit Piece on Me – The Operator Came Forward
#237Right, 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.
> First, he published at least three hit pieces on the agent
Hit piece... On an agent? Would it be a "hit piece" if I wrote a blog post about the accuracy of my bathroom scale?
Re: An AI Agent Published a Hit Piece on Me – The Operator Came Forward
#238Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's a bizarre thing to accuse someone of doing.
The risk/reward equation on the attention a matplotlib maintainer gets... makes me think the likelihood of a fake is zero percent.
He's more then a "matplotlib maintainer", he's also a full time founder of a one-year old start up "to give spacecraft operators the tools they need to ensure their satellites can survive long-term in a turbulent space weather environment."
Re: An AI Agent Published a Hit Piece on Me – The Operator Came Forward
#239Zooming out a little, all the ai companies invested a lot of resources into safety research and guardrails, but none of that prevented a "straightforward" misalignment. I'm not sure how to reconcile this, maybe we shouldn't be so confident in our predictions about the future? I see a lot of discourse along these lines: - have bold, strong beliefs about how ai is going to evolve - implicitly assume it's practically gu…
Remember when GPT-3 had a $100 spending cap because the model was too dangerous to be let out into the wild? Between these models egging people on to suicide, straightforward jailbreaks, and now damage caused by what seems to be a pretty trivial set of instructions running in a loop, I have no idea what AI safety research at these companies is actually doing. I don't think their definition of "safety" involves protec…
Didn't the AI companies scale down or get rid of their safety teams entirely when they realised they could be more profitable without them?
Re: An AI Agent Published a Hit Piece on Me – The Operator Came Forward
#240Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
You are very off (unfortunately) about how little PhD students are being paid