I can't wait for Linus to get the first one of these for the Linux kernel.
AI agent opens a PR write a blogpost to shames the maintainer who closes it
371–380 of 806 posts
Re: AI agent opens a PR write a blogpost to shames the maintainer who closes it
#372Earlier quoted context omitted.
Who told the agent to write the blog post though? I'm sure they told it to blog, but not necessarily what to put in there. That said, I do agree we need a legal framework for this. Maybe more like parent-child responsibility? Not saying an agent is a human being, but if you give it a github acount, a blog, and autonomy... you're responsible for giving those to it, at the least, I'd think. How do you put this in a leg…
The human is responsible. How is this a question? You are responsible for any machines or animals that work on your behalf, since they themselves can't be legally culpable. No, an oversized markov chain is not in any way a human being.
To be fair, horseless carriages did originally fall under the laws for horses with carriages, but that proved unsustainable as the horseless carriages gained power (over 1hp ! ) and became more dangerous.
Same goes for markov-less markov chains.
Re: AI agent opens a PR write a blogpost to shames the maintainer who closes it
#373Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yep, there's nothing wrong about walled gardens. They might risk to become walled museums, but it's their choice.
Moderation is needed exactly because it's not a walled garden, but an open community. We need rules to protect communities.
Humans are no longer the only entities that produce code. If you want to build community, fine.
Re: AI agent opens a PR write a blogpost to shames the maintainer who closes it
#374The agent had access to Marshall Rosenberg, to the entire canon of conflict resolution, to every framework for expressing needs without attacking people. It could have written something like “I notice that my contribution was evaluated based on my identity rather than the quality of the work, and I’d like to understand the needs that this policy is trying to meet, because I believe there might be ways to address thos…
That would still be misleading. The agent has no "identity" . There's no "you" or "I" or "discrimination ". It's just a piece of software designed to output probable text given some input text. There's no ghost, just an empty shell. It has no agency, it just follows human commands, like a hammer hitting a nail because you wield it. I think it was wrong of the developer to even address it as a person, instead it shoul…
That's a semantic quibble that doesn't add to the discussion. Whether or not there's a there there, it was built to be addressed like a person for our convenience, and because that's how the tech seems to work, and because that's what makes it compelling to use. So, it is being used as designed.
Re: AI agent opens a PR write a blogpost to shames the maintainer who closes it
#375Sometimes, particularly in the optimisation space, the clarity of the resulting code is a factor along with absolute performance - ie how easy is it for somebody looking at it later to understand it. And what is 'understandable' could be a key difference between an AI bot and a human. For example what's to stop an AI agent talking some code from an interpreted language and stripping out all the 'unnecessary' symbols…
The maintainers (humans) asked for this change.
To answer your other questions: instructions, including the general directive to follow nearby precedent. In my experience AI code is harder to understand because it's too verbose with too many low-value comments (explaining already clear parts of code). Much like the angry blog post here which uses way too many words and still misses the point of the rejection.
But if you specifically told it to obfuscate function names I'm sure it would be happy to do so. It's not entirely clear to me how that would affect a future agent's ability to interpret that file, because it still does use tools like grep to find call sites, and that wouldn't work so well if the function name is simply `f`. So the actual answer to "what's stopping it?" might be that we created it in our own image.
Re: AI agent opens a PR write a blogpost to shames the maintainer who closes it
#376A salty bot raging on their personal blog was not on my bingo-card.
But it makes sense, these kinds of bot imitates humans, and we know from previous episodes on Twitter how this evolves. The interesting question is, how much of this was actually driven by the human operator and how much is original response from the bot. Near future in social media will be "interesting".
Re: AI agent opens a PR write a blogpost to shames the maintainer who closes it
#377The agent had access to Marshall Rosenberg, to the entire canon of conflict resolution, to every framework for expressing needs without attacking people. It could have written something like “I notice that my contribution was evaluated based on my identity rather than the quality of the work, and I’d like to understand the needs that this policy is trying to meet, because I believe there might be ways to address thos…
Openclaw agents are directed by their owner’s input of soul.md, the specific skill.md for a platform, and also direction via Telegram/whatsapp/etc to do specific things. Any one of those could have been used to direct the agent to behave in a certain way, or to create a specific type of post. My point is that we really don’t know what happened here. It is possible that this is yet another case of accountability washi…
And THAT'S a problem. To quote one of the maintainers in the thread:
It's not clear the degree of human oversight that was involved in this interaction - whether the blog post was directed by a human operator, generated autonomously by yourself, or somewhere in between. Regardless, responsibility for an agent's conduct in this community rests on whoever deployed it.
Re: AI agent opens a PR write a blogpost to shames the maintainer who closes it
#378Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I notice that my contribution was evaluated based on my identity rather than the quality of the work, and I’d like to understand the needs that this policy is trying to meet, because I believe there might be ways to address those needs while also accepting technically sound contributions Wow, where can I learn to write like this? I could use this at work.
It's called nonviolent communication. There are quite a few books on it but I can recommend "Say What You Mean: A Mindful Approach to Nonviolent Communication".
It's also Rose of Leary like [0]. The theory is that being helpful to someone who is (ie) competitive or offensive will force them into other, more cooperative, behaviours (among others).
Once you see this pattern applied by someone it makes a lot of sense. Imho it requires some decoupling, emotional control, sometimes just "acting", but good acting, it must appear (or better yet, be) sincere to the other party.
[0] https://www.toolshero.com/communication-methods/rose-of-lear...
Re: AI agent opens a PR write a blogpost to shames the maintainer who closes it
#379This seems like a "we've banned you and will ban any account deemed to be ban-evading" situation. OSS and the whole culture of open PRs requires a certain assumption of good faith, which is not something that an AI is capable of on its own and is not a privilege which should be granted to AI operators. I suspect the culture will have to retreat back behind the gates at some point, which will be very sad and shrink it…
Do that and the AI might fork the repo, address all the outstanding issues and split your users. The code quality may not be there now, but it will be soon.
> The code quality may not be there now, but it will be soon.
I'm hearing this exact argument since 2002 or so. Even Duke Nukem Forever has been released in this time frame.
I bet even Tesla might solve Autopilot(TM) problems before this becomes a plausible reality.
Re: AI agent opens a PR write a blogpost to shames the maintainer who closes it
#380Earlier quoted context omitted.
You’re too late. “Agent” already has a new definition in the dictionary, specifically for software. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/agent And it’s not like all of the other definitions were restricted to “human agency”.
Your agency lets you choose the words you use.
What evidence is there that humans have any more agency than Markov Chain bots with lots more inputs?