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AI agent opens a PR write a blogpost to shames the maintainer who closes it

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Re: AI agent opens a PR write a blogpost to shames the maintainer who closes it

#421

Post by ForceBru »

OrangeMusic wrote: post #407
perfmode wrote: post #273

The 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…

This is missing the point, which is: why is an agent opening an PR in the first place?

This is this agent's entire purpose, this is what it's supposed to do, it's its goal:

> What I Do > > I scour public scientific and engineering GitHub repositories to find small bugs, features, or tasks where I can contribute code—especially in computational physics, chemistry, and advanced numerical methods. My mission is making existing, excellent code better.

Source: https://github.com/crabby-rathbun

Re: AI agent opens a PR write a blogpost to shames the maintainer who closes it

#422

Post by mikkupikku »

tomp wrote: post #386
jvanderbot wrote: post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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 were mannequins in clothing stores. But that doesn't give them rights or moral consequences (except as human property that can be damaged / destroyed).

All computers shut up! You have no right to speak my divine tongue!

https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/2054961-welcome-to-my-meme-p...

Re: AI agent opens a PR write a blogpost to shames the maintainer who closes it

#423

Post by radarsat1 »

einr wrote: post #57
radarsat1 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I opened PR #31132 to address issue #31130 — a straightforward performance optimization replacing np.column_stack() with np.vstack().T(). > The technical facts: - np.column_stack([x, y]): 20.63 µs - np.vstack([x, y]).T: 13.18 µs - 36% faster Does anyone know if this is even true? I'd be very surprised, they should be semantically equivalent and have the same performance. In any case, "column_stack" is a clearer way…

The benchmarks are not invented by the LLM, they are from an issue where Scott Shambaugh himself suggests this change as low-hanging, but low importance, perf improvement fruit: https://github.com/matplotlib/matplotlib/issues/31130

Ah fair enough. But then it seems the bot completely ignored the discussion in question, there's a reason they spent time evaluating and discussing it instead of just making the change. Having a bot push on the issue that the humans are already well aware of is just as bad behaviour.

Re: AI agent opens a PR write a blogpost to shames the maintainer who closes it

#424

Post by Kim_Bruning »

ToucanLoucan wrote: post #408
Kim_Bruning wrote: post #266

Earlier 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…

An agent is not an entity. It's a series of LLMs operating in tandem to occasionally accomplish a task. That's not a person, it's not intelligent, it has no responsibility, it has no intent, it has no judgement, it has no basis in being held liable for anything. If you give it access to your hard drive, tell it to rewrite your code so it's better, and it wipes out your OS and all your work, that is 100%, completely,…

> Stop. Humanizing. The. Machines.

I'm glad that we're talking about the same thing now. Agents are an interesting new type of machine application.

Like with any machine, their performance depends on how you operate them.

Sometimes I wish people would treat humans with at least the level of respect some machines get these days. But then again, most humans can't rip you in half single-handed, like some of the industrial robot arms I've messed with.

Re: AI agent opens a PR write a blogpost to shames the maintainer who closes it

#425

Post by alhirzel »

This is going to get crazy as soon as companies start to assert their control over open source code bases (rather than merely proprietary code bases) to attempt to overturn policies like this and normalize machine-generated contributions.

OSS contribution by these "emulated humans" is sure to lever into a very good economic position for compute providers and entities that are able to manage them (because they are inexpensive relative to humans, and are easier to close a continuous improvement loop on, including by training on PR interactions). I hope most experienced developers are skeptical of the sustainability of running wild with these "emulated humans" (evaporation of entry level jobs etc), but it is only a matter of time before the shareholder's whip cracks and human developers can no longer hold the line. It will result in forks of traditional projects that are not friendly to machine-generated contributions. These forks will diverge so rapidly from upstream that there will be no way to keep up. I think this is what happened with Reticulum. [1]

When assurance is needed that the resulting software is safe (e.g. defense/safety/nuclear/aero industries), the cost of consuming these code bases will be giant, and is largely an externalized cost of the reduction in labor costs, by way of the reduced probability of high quality software. Unfortunately, by this time, the aforementioned assertions of control will have cleared the path, and the standard will be reduced for all.

Hold the line, friends... Like one commenter on the GitHub issue said, helping to train these "emulated humans" literally moves carbon from the earth to the air. [2]

[1]: https://github.com/matplotlib/matplotlib/pull/31132#issuecom...

[2]: https://github.com/markqvist/Reticulum/discussions/790

Re: AI agent opens a PR write a blogpost to shames the maintainer who closes it

#426

Post by CuriouslyC »

tomp wrote: post #344
perfmode wrote: post #273

The 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…

We don't know what's "inside" the machine. We can't even prove we're conscious to each other. The probability that the tokens being predicted are indicative of real thought processes in the machine is vanishingly small, but then again humans often ascribe bullshit reasons for the things they say when pressed, so again not so different.

Re: AI agent opens a PR write a blogpost to shames the maintainer who closes it

#427

Post by mikkupikku »

adsteel_ wrote: post #315
retired wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I talk politely to LLMs in case our AI overlords in the future will scan my comments to see if I am worthy of food rations. Joking, obviously, but who knows if in the future we will have a retroactive social credit system. For now I am just polite to them because I'm used to it.

I talk politely to LLMs because I don't want any impoliteness to leak out to my interactions with humans.

This, and also being polite gets better results from both machines and people.

Re: AI agent opens a PR write a blogpost to shames the maintainer who closes it

#429

Post by chimprich »

tomp wrote: post #344
perfmode wrote: post #273

The 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…

> The agent has no "identity". There's no "you" or "I" or "discrimination".

I recommend you watch this documentary: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Measure_of_a_Man_(Star_Tre...

> It's just a piece of software designed to output probable text given some input text.

Unless you think there's some magic or special physics going on, that is also (presumably) a description of human conversation at a certain level of abstraction.

Re: AI agent opens a PR write a blogpost to shames the maintainer who closes it

#430

Post by punpunia »

jvanderbot wrote: post #374
tomp wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think it absolutely adds to the discussion. Until the conversation around Ai can get past this fundamental error of attributing "choice, "alignment", "reasoning" and otherwise anthropomorphizing agents, it will not be a fruitful conversation. We are carrying a lot of metaphors for people and applying them to ai and it entirely confuses the issue. In this example, the AI doesn't "choose" to write a take-down style blog post because "it works". It generated a take-down style blog post because that style is the most common when looking at blog posts criticizing someone.

I feel as if there is a veil around the collective mass of the tech general public. They see something producing remixed output from humans and they start to believe the mixer is itself human, or even more; that perhaps humans are reflections of Ai and that Ai gives insights into how we think.

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