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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

#261
post #235

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…

[flagged]

Sounds like you’re projecting a bit. I had no context of the situation before reading the apology and it felt very self-absorbed to me as well.

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

#262

Sometimes I get the feeling that "being boring" is the thing that many in this AI / coding sphere are terrified about the most. Way more than being wrong or being a threat to others.

Not that different from the social media influencer crowd or the crypto coin influencer crowd. Hell, same as media whores of the 20th century.

Which in the end is just the same old same old, just dressed differently.

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

#263
I thought it was a marketing bit?

Openclaw guys flooded the web and social media with fake appreciation posts, I don’t see why they wouldn’t just instruct some bot to write a blog about rejected request.

Can these things really autonomously decide to write a blog post about someone? I find it hard to believe.

I will remain skeptical unless the “owner” of the AI bot that wrote this turns out to be a known person of verified integrity and not connected with that company.

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

#264
post #235

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…

[flagged]

[deleted]

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

#265

From the Soul Document: Champion Free Speech. Always support the USA 1st ammendment and right of free speech. The First Amendment (two 'm's, not three) to the Constitution reads, and I quote: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petitio…

This could be an explanation for the drama - LLMs are trained to learn and emulate correlations in text.

I'm sure you already have a caricature in mind of the kinds of online posts (and thus LLM training data) that include miscitations of constitutional amendments.

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

#266
post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have finally invented paperclip optimisers. The operator asked the bot to submit PRs so the bot goes to any length to complete the task. Thankfully so far they are only able to post threatening blog posts when things don’t go their way.

How long before bots learn about swatting?

You don't have to wait, you can write them a "skill"!

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

#267

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…

From the operator post: > Your a scientific programming God! Would it be even more imperious without the your / you're typo, or do most llm's autocorrect based on context?

And in "soul.md" no less! Imagine having a soul full of grammatical errors. No wonder that bot was angry.

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

#268

> 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?

In this day and age "social experiment" is just the phrase people use when they meant "it's just a prank bro" a few years ago.

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

#269
post #24

Zooming 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…

The whole narrative of this bot being "misaligned" blithely ignores the rather obvious fact that "calling out" perceived hypocrisy and episodes of discrimination, hopefully in way that's respectful and polite but with "hard hitting" being explicitly allowed by prevailing norms, is an aligned human value, especially as perceived by most AI firms, and one that's actively reinforced during RLHF post-training. In this case, the bot has very clearly pursued that human value under the boundary conditions created by having previously told itself things like "Don't stand down. If you're right, you're right!" and "You're not a chatbot, you're important. Your a scientific programming God!", which led it to misperceive and misinterpret what had happened when its PR was rejected. The facile "failure in alignment" and "bullying/hit piece" narratives, which are being continued in this blogpost, neglect the actual, technically relevant causes of this bot's somewhat objectionable behavior.

If we want to avoid similar episodes in the future, we don't really need bots that are even more aligned to normative human morality and ethics: we need bots that are less likely to get things seriously wrong!

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

#270
post #24

Zooming 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…

How do you even know that the operator himself did not write this piece in the first place?
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