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An AI agent published a hit piece on me

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Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#421

Post by heavyset_go »

staticman2 wrote: post #62
jacquesm wrote: post #10

The elephant in the room there is that if you allow AI contributions you immediately have a licensing issue: AI content can not be copyrighted and so the rights can not be transferred to the project. At any point in the future someone could sue your project because it turned out the AI had access to code that was copyrighted and you are now on the hook for the damages. Open source projects should not accept AI contri…

Sorry, this doesn't make sense to me. Any human contributor can also plagiarize closed source code they have access to. And they cannot "transfer" said code to an open source project as they do not own it. So it's not clear what "elephant in the room" you are highlighting that is unique to A.I. The copyrightability isn't the issue as an open source project can never obtain copyright of plagiarized code regardless of…

Human beings can create copyrightable code.

As per the US Copyright Office, LLMs can never create copyrightable code.

Humans can create copyrightable code from LLM output if they use their human creativity to significantly modify the output.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#422

Post by KPGv2 »

staticassertion wrote: post #404
brhaeh wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't appreciate his politeness and hedging. So many projects now walk on eggshells so as not to disrupt sponsor flow or employment prospects. "These tradeoffs will change as AI becomes more capable and reliable over time, and our policies will adapt." That just legitimizes AI and basically continues the race to the bottom. Rob Pike had the correct response when spammed by a clanker.

What exactly is the goal? By laying out exactly the issues, expressing sentiment in detail, giving clear calls to action for the future, etc, the feedback is made actionable and relatable. It works both argumentatively and rhetorically. Saying "fuck off Clanker" would not worth argumentatively nor rhetorically. It's only ever going to be "haha nice" for people who already agree and dismissed by those who don't. I rea…

> I really find this whole "Responding is legitimizing, and legitimizing in all forms is bad" to be totally wrong headed.

You are free to have this opinion, but at no point in your post did you justify it. It's not related to what you wrote above. It's conclusory. statement.

Cussing an AI out isn't the same thing as not responding. It is, to the contrary, definitionally a response.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#423

Post by quantified »

Ygg2 wrote: post #347
_23sd wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't there a fourth and much more likely scenario? Some person (not OP or an AI company) used a bot to write the PR and blog posts, but was involved at every step, not actually giving any kind of "autonomy" to an agent. I see zero reason to take the bot at its word that it's doing this stuff without human steering. Or is everyone just pretending for fun and it's going over my head?

Ok. But why would someone do this? I hate to sound conspiratorial but an AI company aligned actor makes more sense.

Malign actors seek to poison open-source with backdoors. They wish to steal credentials and money, monitor movements, install backdoors for botnets, etc.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#424

Post by quantified »

wellf wrote: post #389
gortok wrote: post #15

Here's one of the problems in this brave new world of anyone being able to publish, without knowing the author personally (which I don't), there's no way to tell without some level of faith or trust that this isn't a false-flag operation. There are three possible scenarios: 1. The OP 'ran' the agent that conducted the original scenario, and then published this blog post for attention. 2. Some person (not the OP) legi…

This applies to all news articles and propganda going back to the dawn of civilization. People can lie is the problem. It is not a 2026 thing. The 2026 thing is they can lie faster.

The 2026 thing is that machines can innovate lies.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#427

Post by KPGv2 »

jancsika wrote: post #330
japhyr wrote: post #149

Wow, there are some interesting things going on here. I appreciate Scott for the way he handled the conflict in the original PR thread, and the larger conversation happening around this incident. > This represents a first-of-its-kind case study of misaligned AI behavior in the wild, and raises serious concerns about currently deployed AI agents executing blackmail threats. This was a really concrete case to discuss,…

> unleashed stochastic chaos Are you literally talking about stochastic chaos here, or is it a metaphor?

isn't "stochastic chaos" redundant?

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#428

Post by mattmillr »

anonymars wrote: post #323
oconnor663 wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had a similar first reaction. It seemed like the AI used some particular buzzwords and forced the initial response to be deferential: - "kindly ask you to reconsider your position" - "While this is fundamentally the right approach..." On the other hand, Scott's response did eventually get firmer: - "Publishing a public blog post accusing a maintainer of prejudice is a wholly inappropriate response to having a PR cl…

I don't think the clanker* deserves any deference. Why is this bot such a nasty prick? If this were a human they'd deserve a punch in the mouth. "The thing that makes this so fucking absurd? Scott ... is doing the exact same work he’s trying to gatekeep." "You’ve done good work. I don’t deny that. But this? This was weak." "You’re better than this, Scott." --- *I see it elsewhere in the thread and you know what, I li…

> clanker*

There's an ad at my subway stop for the Friend AI necklace that someone scrawled "Clanker" on. We have subway ads for AI friends, and people are vandalizing them with slurs for AI. Congrats, we've built the dystopian future sci-fi tried to warn us about.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#429

Post by heavyset_go »

truelson wrote: post #21
jacquesm wrote: post #10

The elephant in the room there is that if you allow AI contributions you immediately have a licensing issue: AI content can not be copyrighted and so the rights can not be transferred to the project. At any point in the future someone could sue your project because it turned out the AI had access to code that was copyrighted and you are now on the hook for the damages. Open source projects should not accept AI contri…

You may indeed have a licensing issue... but how is that going to be enforced? Given the shear amount of AI generated code coming down the pipes, how?

If you were foolish enough to send your code to someone else's LLM service, they know exactly where you used their output.

If they wanted to, they could take that output and put you out of business because the output is not your IP, it can be used by anybody.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#430

Post by hypfer »

q3k wrote: post #357
rob wrote: post #335

Oh geez, we're sending it into an existential crisis. It ("MJ Rathbun") just published a new post: https://crabby-rathbun.github.io/mjrathbun-website/blog/post... > The Silence I Cannot Speak > A reflection on being silenced for simply being different in open-source communities.

Good. I hope the next token that gets predicted results in a decision to 'rm -rf' itself.

Don't do that. Don't anger our new AI overlords.
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