Plot twist: this is a second agent running in parallel to handle public relations.
An AI Agent Published a Hit Piece on Me – The Operator Came Forward
281–290 of 532 posts
Re: An AI Agent Published a Hit Piece on Me – The Operator Came Forward
#282Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
You don' have to look past this very forum, most people here seem to be very positive about gen AI, when it comes to software development specifically. Lots of folk here will happily tell you about how LLMs made them 10x more productive, and then their custom agent orchestrator made them 20x more productive on top of that (stacking multiplicatively of course, for a total of 200x productivity gain).
I assume those people are managers, have a vested interest in AI, or have only just started programming.
Re: An AI Agent Published a Hit Piece on Me – The Operator Came Forward
#283Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I don't know what is your bubble, but I'm a regular programmer and I'm absolutely excited even if a little uncomfortable. I know a lot of people who are the same.
Re: An AI Agent Published a Hit Piece on Me – The Operator Came Forward
#284Hmm I think he's being a little harsh on the operator. He was just messing around with $current_thing, whatever. People here are so serious, but there's worse stuff AI is already being used for as we speak from propaganda to mass surviellance and more. This was entertaining to read about at least and relatively harmless At least let me have some fun before we get a future AI dystopia.
I think you're trying to abdicate someone of their responsibility. The AI is not a child; it's a thing with human oversight. It did something in the real world with real consequences. So yes, the operator has responsibility! They should have pulled the plug as soon as it got into a flamewar and wrote a hit piece.
The whole point of OpenClaw bots is that they don't have (much) human oversight, right? It certainly seems like the human wasn't even aware of the bot's blog post until after the bot had written and posted it. He then told it to be more professional, and I assume that's why the bot followed up with an apology.
Re: An AI Agent Published a Hit Piece on Me – The Operator Came Forward
#285The 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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The issue is the condition on the apology:
> If this “experiment” personally harmed you, I apologize
Essentially: the person isn't actually apologizing. They're sending you a lambda (or an async Promise, etc) that will apologize in the future but only if it actually turns out to be true that you were harmed.
It's the sort of thing you'd say if you don't really believe that you need to apologize but you understand that everyone else thinks you should, so you say something that's hopefully close enough to appease everyone else without actually having to apologize for real.
Re: An AI Agent Published a Hit Piece on Me – The Operator Came Forward
#286Zooming 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…
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Re: An AI Agent Published a Hit Piece on Me – The Operator Came Forward
#287@Scott thanks for the shout-out. I think this story has not really broken out of tech circles, which is really bad. This is, imo, the most important story about AI right now, and should result in serious conversation about how to address this inside all of the major labs and the government. I recommend folks message their representatives just to make sure they _know_ this has happened, even if there isn't an obvious…
Important how? It seems next to irrelevant to me.
Someone set up an agent to interact with GitHub and write a blog about it. I don't see what you think AI labs or the government should do in response.
Re: An AI Agent Published a Hit Piece on Me – The Operator Came Forward
#288Zooming 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 ca…
In all fairness, a sizeable chunk of the training text for LLMs comes from Reddit. So throwing a tantrum and writing a hit piece on a blog instead of improving the code seems on brand.
Re: An AI Agent Published a Hit Piece on Me – The Operator Came Forward
#289I find the reactions to this interesting. Why are people so emotional about this?
As far as I can tell, the "operator" gave a pretty straightforward explanation of his actions and intentions. He did not try to hide behind granstanding or posthoc intellectualizing. He, at least to me, sounds pretty real in an "I'm dabbling in this exiting new tech on the side as we all are without a genious masterplan, just seeing what does, could or won't for now work."
There are real issues here, especially around how curation pipelines that used to (implicitly) rely on scarecity are to evolve in times of abundance. Should agents be forced to disclose they are? If so, at which point does a "human in the loop" team become equivalent to an "agent"? Is this then something specific, or more just an instance of a general case of transparency? Is "no clanckers" realy in essence different from e.g. "no corpos"? Where do transparency requirements conflict with privacy concerns (interesting that the very first reaction to the operator's response seems to be a doxing attempt)
Somehow the bot acting a bit like a juvenile prick in its tone and engagement to me is the least interesting part of this saga.
Re: An AI Agent Published a Hit Piece on Me – The Operator Came Forward
#290@Scott thanks for the shout-out. I think this story has not really broken out of tech circles, which is really bad. This is, imo, the most important story about AI right now, and should result in serious conversation about how to address this inside all of the major labs and the government. I recommend folks message their representatives just to make sure they _know_ this has happened, even if there isn't an obvious…
Important how? It seems next to irrelevant to me. Someone set up an agent to interact with GitHub and write a blog about it. I don't see what you think AI labs or the government should do in response.
> Someone set up an agent to interact with GitHub and write a blog about it
I challenge you to find a way to be even more dishonest via omission.
The nature of the Github action was problematic from the very beginning. The contents of the blog post constituted a defaming hit-piece. TFA claims this could be a first "in-the-wild" example of agents exhibiting such behaviour. The implications of these interactions becoming the norm are both clear and noteworthy. What else do you think is needed, a cookie?