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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

#311

Post by espadrine »

LiamPowell wrote: post #8

> 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?

AI companies have two conflicting interests:

1. curating the default personality of the bot, to ensure it acts responsively;

2. letting it roleplay, which is not just for the parasocial people out there, but also a corporate requirement for company chatbots that must adhere to a tone of voice.

When in the second mode (which is the case here, since the model was given a personality file), the curation of its action space is effectively altered.

Conversely, this is also a lesson for agent authors: if you let your agent modify its own personality file, it will diverge to malice.

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

#312

Post by jacquesm »

kingstnap wrote: post #105
elashri wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When a corporate does something good, a lot of executives and people inside will go and claim credit and will demand/take bounces. If something bad happened against any laws, even if someone got killed, we don't see them in jail. I don't defend both positions, I am just saying that is not far from how the current legal framework works.

Well the important concept missing there that makes everything sort of make sense is due diligence. If your company screws up and it is found out that you didn't do your due diligence then the liability does pass through. We just need to figure out a due diligence framework for running bots that makes sense. But right now that's hard to do because Agentic robots that didn't completely suck are just a few months old.

It's easy: your bot: your liability.

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

#313

Post by nicbou »

SilverBirch wrote: post #303

I think the big take away here isn't about misalignment or jail breaking. The entire way this bot behaved is consistent with it just being run by some asshole from Twitter. And we need to understand it doesn't matter how careful you think you need to be with AI, because some asshole from Twitter doesn't care, and they'll do literally whatever comes into their mind. And it'll go wrong. And they won't apologize. They w…

Not just some asshole from twitter. The big tech companies will also be careless and indifferent with it. They will destroy things, hurt people, and put things in motion that they cannot control, because it’s good for shareholders.

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

#314

Post by jacquesm »

gostsamo wrote: post #134
kingstnap wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well the important concept missing there that makes everything sort of make sense is due diligence. If your company screws up and it is found out that you didn't do your due diligence then the liability does pass through. We just need to figure out a due diligence framework for running bots that makes sense. But right now that's hard to do because Agentic robots that didn't completely suck are just a few months old.

No, it isnot hard. You are 100% responsible for the actions of your AI. Rather simple, I say.

Exactly.

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

#315

Post by jacquesm »

andrewflnr wrote: post #142
jacquesm wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You can easily get death threats if you're associating yourself with AI publicly. That's a pretty hefty statement, especially the 'easily' part, but I'll settle for one well known and verified example.

Is it that hard to believe? As far as I can tell, the probability of receiving death threats approaches 1 as the size of your audience increases, and AI is a highly emotionally charged topic. Now, credible death threats are a different, much trickier question.

Yes, it's quite hard to believe. That's why one single example is sufficient for me. Then I'll be happy to extrapolate that one example to many more so it is a low bar I would say, given the OPs statement about how common this is. Note the 'easily'.

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

#316

Post by mawadev »

Arainach wrote: post #118

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…

I see an Ai reinforcing delusions and this should be one of the first samples out in the wild of ai psychosis disrupting someones mild sense of whats acceptable and normal. I really hope the LLM wrote this and pretends to be human..

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

#317

Post by nicbou »

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…

An unattended candle has decided to burn down the building.

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

#318

Post by gverrilla »

dvt wrote: post #100

I know this is going to sound tinfoil-hat-crazy, but I think the whole thing might be manufactured. Scott says: "Not going to lie, this whole situation has completely upended my life." Um, what? Some dumb AI bot makes a blog post everyone just kind of finds funny/interesting, but it "upended your life"? Like, ok, he's clearly trying to himself make a mountain out of a molehill--the story inevitably gets picked up by…

It's dishonest from the start. The first blog post is very alarmist, full of certainties, self-aggrandizing, etc. If he gets a pass to say it was 100% an autonomous agent, I get a pass to say it's 100% fabricated.

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

#319

Post by nicbou »

moezd wrote: post #127

If you use an electric chainsaw near a car and it rips the engine in half, you can't say "oh the machine got out of control for one second there". you caused real harm, you will pay the price for it. Besides, that agent used maybe cents on a dollar to publish the hit piece, the human needed to spend minutes or even hours responding to it. This is an effective loss of productivity caused by AI. Honestly, if this happe…

Yes, and if a candle burns down a building, you are liable for the damage it caused. Likewise if a human employee messed up, the employer would be liable for the damage.

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

#320

Post by gverrilla »

charlesabarnes wrote: post #2

Its nice to receive a decent amount of closure on this. Hopefully more folks are being more considerate when creating their soul documents

closure? I expect 3 more blog posts at least. Dude's surfing on popularity and milking this as much as he can.
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