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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

#291

Post by hunterpayne »

lukasb wrote: post #13
staticassertion wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Conflicting evidence: the fact that literally everyone in tech is posting about how they're using AI.

I personally know some of those people. They are basically being forced by their employers to post those things. Additionally, there is a ton of money promoting AI. However, in private those same people say that AI doesn't help them at all and in fact makes their work harder and slower.

You are assuming people are acting in good faith. This is a mistake in this era. Too many people took advantage of the good faith of others lately and that has produced a society with very little public trust left.

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

#292

Post by hunterpayne »

alephnerd wrote: post #18
lukasb wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Conflicting evidence: the fact that literally everyone in tech is posting about how they're using AI.

I feel like it depends on the platform and your location. An anonomyous platform like Reddit and even HN to a certain extent has issues with bad faith commenters on both sides targeting someone they do not like. Furthermore, the MJ Rathburn fiasco itself highlights how easy it is to push divisive discourse at scale. The reality is trolls will troll for the sake of trolling. Additionally, "AI" has become a political f…

In an attention economy, trolling is a rewarded behavior. Show me the incentives and I will show you the outcome.

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

#293

Post by rixed »

vasco wrote: post #276
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…

I'm curious how you'd characterize an actual malicious file. This is just attempts at making it be more independent. The user isn't an idiot. The CEOs of companies releasing this are.

I characterize a file as reckless if it does not include any basic provision against possible annoyances on top of what's already expected from the system prompt, and as malicious if it instructs the bot to dissimulate its nature and/or encourage it to act brazenly, like this one. I don't believe this is such a high bar to pass.

Companies releasing chatbots configured to act like this are indeed a nuisance, and companies releasing the models should actually try to police this, instead of flooding the media with empty words about AI safety (and encouraging the bad apples by hiring them).

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

#294

Post by abricq »

PeterStuer wrote: post #289

I 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 wha…

Let me explain why I feel emotional about this. Humans had already proven how much harm can be done via online harassment. This seems to be the 1st documented case (that I am aware of) of online harassment orchestrated and executed by AI.

Automated and personalized harassment seems pretty terrifying to me.

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

#295

Post by buttercraft »

protocolture wrote: post #125

4) 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".

While it's good to question what you read on the internet, you're making me realize how dire the situation really is. If someone targets you with AI, you can't even defend yourself without being accused of making it all up for attention. There's no way to win this game.

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

#296

Post by Marazan »

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…

Yeah like bro you plugged the random number generator into the do-things machine. You are responsible for the random things the machine then does.

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

#297

Post by alexhans »

brumar wrote: post #67

6 months ago I experimented what people now call Ralph Wiggum loops with claude code. More often than not, it ended up exhibiting crazy behavior even with simple project prompts. Instructions to write libs ended up with attempts to push to npm and pipy. Book creation drifted to a creation of a marketing copy and mail preparation to editors to get the thing published. So I kept my setup empty of any credentials at all…

> Don't let your dog run errand and use a good leash.

I think the key part is who are you talking to. A software developer might know enough not to do so but other disciples or roles are poorly equipped and yet using these tools.

Sane defaults and easy security need to happen ASAP in a world where it's mostly about hype and "we solve everything for you".

Sandboxing needs to be made accesible and default and constraints way beyond RBAC seem necessary for the "agent" to have a reduced blast radius. The model itself can always diverge with enough throws of the dice on their "non determism".

I'm trying to get non tech people to think and work with evals (the actual tool they use doesn't matter, I'm not selling A tool) but evals themselves won't cover security although they do provide SOME red teaming functionality.

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

#298

Post by dbt00 »

PeterStuer wrote: post #289

I 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 wha…

Who is accountable for the actions of the bot? It's not sentient, and this author is claiming zero accountability -- I just set it up and turned it loose bro, how is what it did next my fault?

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

#299

Post by brainwad »

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…

The opposite of chatbot isn't human. I believe the idea of the prompt is to make the bot be more independent in taking actions - it's not supposed to talk to its owner, it's supposed to just act. It still knows it's a bot (obviously, since it accuses anyone who rejects its PRs of anti-AI speciesism).

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

#300

Post by brainwad »

knallfrosch wrote: post #188
ai_tools_daily wrote: post #185

[flagged]

If I write a software today that publishes a hit piece on you in 2 weeks time, will you accept that I bear no responsibility? There's no accountability gap unless you create one.

If the code you wrote appears to be for something completely different, say software to write patches for open source github projects - yes. Why would you bear responsibility for something that couldn't have been reasonably foreseen?

The interesting thing about LLMs is the unpredictable emergent behaviours. That's fundamentally different from ordinary, deterministic programs.

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