31–40 of 95 posts
Whether or not its true, we only have to look at Peter Steinberger, the guy who made Moltbook - the "social media for ai", and then got hired amist great publicity fanfare by OpenAI to know that there is a lot of money out there for people making exciting stores about AI. Never mind that much of the media attention on moltbook was based on human written posts that were faking AI. I think Mr. Shambaugh is probably tel…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What a weird, victim-blame-y thing to say. Something genuinely shitty was done to this guy by an LLM - who, as an open source maintainer, probably already is kind of pissed about what LLMs are doing to the world. Then another shitty thing was done to him by Ars' LLM! Of course he's thinking about it a lot. Of course he has thoughts about the consequences of AI on the future. Of course he wants to share his thoughts.…
i think i sort of skimmed the hit piece but what exactly was so shitty about it? im not saying this dude is histrionic but he sure is generating a lot of front page HN posts about something i was ready to forget about a week ago. obviously AI has become such a lightning rod now that everyone is upset one way or the other but this seems a bit like small potatoes at this point. forest for the trees.
Whether or not its true, we only have to look at Peter Steinberger, the guy who made Moltbook - the "social media for ai", and then got hired amist great publicity fanfare by OpenAI to know that there is a lot of money out there for people making exciting stores about AI. Never mind that much of the media attention on moltbook was based on human written posts that were faking AI. I think Mr. Shambaugh is probably tel…
This is terrible news not only for open source maintainers, but any journalist, activist or person that dares to speak out against powerful entities that within the next few months have enough LLM capabilities, along with their resources, to astro-turf/mob any dissident out of the digital space - or worse (rent-a-human but dark web).
We need laws for agents, specifically that their human-maintainers must be identifiable and are responsible. It's not something I like from a privacy perspective, but I do not see how society can overcome this without. Unless we collectively decide to switch the internet off.
We built accountability systems that assume bad actors are humans with reputations to protect. none of that works when the attacker is disposable.
My main takeaway from this episode is that anonymity on the web is getting harder to support. There are some forums that people want to go to to talk to humans , and as AI agents get increasingly good at operating like humans, we're going to see some products turn to identity verification as a fix. Not an outcome I'm eager to see!
One could build up a reputation with a completely anonymous PGP key. That was somewhat the point of USENET ca. 1998.
We built accountability systems that assume bad actors are humans with reputations to protect. none of that works when the attacker is disposable.
Whether or not its true, we only have to look at Peter Steinberger, the guy who made Moltbook - the "social media for ai", and then got hired amist great publicity fanfare by OpenAI to know that there is a lot of money out there for people making exciting stores about AI. Never mind that much of the media attention on moltbook was based on human written posts that were faking AI. I think Mr. Shambaugh is probably tel…
At this point OpenAI seems to be scrambling to sustain its own hype and needs these kind of pure PR acquisition to justify themselves amid dense competition - otherwise, the bubble risks bursting. Hiring someone who built a product as secure as Swiss cheese that racked up "stars" from a wave of newly minted "vibe-coders" fits perfectly into their short-term strategy. It buys them another month or two of momentum befo…
> I had already been thoughtful about what I publicly post under my real name, had removed my personal information from online data brokers, frozen my credit reports, and practiced good digital security hygiene. I had the time, expertise, and wherewithal to spend hours that same day drafting my first blog post in order to establish a strong counter-narrative, in the hopes that I could smother the reputational poisoni…
This just creates a resource/power hurdle. The hoi polloi will be forced to disclose their connection to various agents. State actors or those with the resources/time to cover their tracks better will simply ignore the law.
I don't really have a better solution, and I think we're seeing the slow collapse of the internet as a useful tool for genuine communication. Even before AI, things like user reviews were highly gamed and astroturfed. I can imagine that this is only going to accelerate. Information on the internet - which was always a little questionable - will become nearly useless as a source of truth.
> I had already been thoughtful about what I publicly post under my real name, had removed my personal information from online data brokers, frozen my credit reports, and practiced good digital security hygiene. I had the time, expertise, and wherewithal to spend hours that same day drafting my first blog post in order to establish a strong counter-narrative, in the hopes that I could smother the reputational poisoni…
I know politics is forbidden on HN, but, as non-politically as possible: institutional power has been collapsing across the board (especially in US, but elsewhere as well) as wealthy individuals yield increasingly more power.
The idea that any solutions to problems as subtle as this one will be solved with "legal authority" is out of touch with the direction things are going. Especially since you propose legislation as a method to protect those that:
> that dares to speak out against powerful entities
It's increasingly clear that the vast majority of political resource are going towards the interests of those "powerful entities". If you're not one of them it's best you try to stay out of their way. But if you want to speak out against them, the law is far more likely to be warped against you than the be extended to protect you.