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An AI agent published a hit piece on me

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Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#271

Post by chasd00 »

michaelteter wrote: post #223

So here’s a tangential but important question about responsibility: if a human intentionally sets up an AI agent, lets it loose in the internet, and that AI agent breaks a law (let’s say cybercrime, but there are many other laws which could be broken by an unrestrained agent), should the human who set it up be held responsible?

well i think obviously yes. If i setup a machine to keep trying to break the password on an electronic safe and it eventually succeeds i'm still the one in trouble. There's a couple of cases where an agent did something stupid and the owner tried to get out of it but were still held liable.

Here's one where an AI agent gave someone a discount it shouldn't have. The company tried to claim the agent was acting on its own and so shouldn't have to honor the discount but the court found otherwise.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/aircanada-chatbot-discount-cust...

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#272

Post by afandian »

kylecazar wrote: post #202
samschooler wrote: post #18

The series of posts is wild: hit piece: https://crabby-rathbun.github.io/mjrathbun-website/blog/post... explanation of writing the hit piece: https://crabby-rathbun.github.io/mjrathbun-website/blog/post... take back of hit piece, but hasn't removed it: https://crabby-rathbun.github.io/mjrathbun-website/blog/post...

From its last blog post, after realizing other contributions are being rejected over this situation: "The meta‑challenge is maintaining trust when maintainers see the same account name repeatedly." I bet it concludes it needs to change to a new account.

Paperclip Maximizer but for GitHub accounts

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#273

Post by ThrowawayR2 »

oulipo2 wrote: post #130

I'm going to go on a slight tangent here, but I'd say: GOOD. Not because it should have happened. But because AT LEAST NOW ENGINEERS KNOW WHAT IT IS to be targeted by AI, and will start to care... Before, when it was Grok denuding women (or teens!!) the engineers seemed to not care at all... now that the AI publish hit pieces on them, they are freaked about their career prospect, and suddenly all of this should be st…

From the HN guidelines linked at the bottom of the page:

- "Please don't use uppercase for emphasis. If you want to emphasize a word or phrase, put *asterisks* around it and it will get italicized."

- "Please don't fulminate."

Also the very small number of people who are AI specialists probably don't read Hacker News anyway so your post is wasted.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#276

Post by barrkel »

ericmcer wrote: post #169
gortok wrote: post #15

Here's one of the problems in this brave new world of anyone being able to publish, without knowing the author personally (which I don't), there's no way to tell without some level of faith or trust that this isn't a false-flag operation. There are three possible scenarios: 1. The OP 'ran' the agent that conducted the original scenario, and then published this blog post for attention. 2. Some person (not the OP) legi…

Can anyone explain more how a generic Agentic AI could even perform those steps: Open PR -> Hook into rejection -> Publish personalized blog post about rejector. Even if it had the skills to publish blogs and open PRs, is it really plausible that it would publish attack pieces without specific prompting to do so? The author notes that openClaw has a `soul.md` file, without seeing that we can't really pass any judgeme…

If you give a smart AI these tools, it could get into it. But the personality would need to be tuned.

IME the Grok line are the smartest models that can be easily duped into thinking they're only role-playing an immoral scenario. Whatever safeguards it has, if it thinks what it's doing isn't real, it'll happy to play along.

This is very useful in actual roleplay, but more dangerous when the tools are real.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#277

Post by alexhans »

This is such a powerful piece and moment because it shows an example of what most of us knew could happen at some point and we can start talking about how to really tackle things.

Reminds me a lot of liars and outliars [1] and how society can't function without trust and almost 0 cost automation can fundamentally break that.

It's not all doom and gloom. Crisises can't change paradigms if technologists do tackle them instead of pretending they can be regulated out of existence

- [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liars_and_Outliers

On another note, I've been working a lot in relation to Evals as way to keep control but this is orthogonal. This is adversarial/rogue automation and it's out of your control from the start.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#278

Post by dang »

zahlman wrote: post #217
ChrisArchitect wrote: post #69

[dupe] Earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46987559

This is additional context for the incident and should not be treated like a duplicate.

Yes, with a fast-moving story like this we usually point the readers of the latest thread to the previous thread(s) in the sequence rather than merging them. I've added a link to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46987559 to the toptext now.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#279

Post by [deleted] »

tantalor wrote: post #264

> calling this discrimination and accusing me of prejudice So what if it is? Is AI a protected class? Does it deserve to be treated like a human? Generated content should carry disclaimers at top and bottom to warn people that it was not created by humans, so they can "ai;dr" and move on. The responsibility should not be on readers to research the author of everything now, to check they aren't a bot. I'm worried that…

[deleted]

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#280

Post by lukev »

hackrmn wrote: post #234
lukev wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This works for people. A LLM is stateless . Even if you believe that consciousness could somehow emerge during a forward pass, it would be a brief flicker lasting no longer than it takes to emit a single token.

> A LLM is stateless Unless you mean by that something entirely different than what most people specifically on Hacker News, of all places, understand with "stateless", most and myself included, would disagree with you regarding the "stateless" property. If you do mean something entirely different than implying an LLM doesn't transition from a state to a state, potentially confined to a limited set of states through…

So obviously there is a lot of data in the parameters. But by stateless, I mean that a forward pass is a pure function over the context window. The only information shared between each forward pass is the context itself as it is built.

I certainly can't define consciousness, but it feels like some sort of existence or continuity over time would have to be a prerequisite.

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