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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

#441

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a fantasy that virtually never comes to fruition. The vast majority of forks are dead within weeks when the forkers realize how much effort goes into building and maintaining the project, on top of starting with zero users.

I think the difference now (in case code quality is solved with LLMs) is the cost of effort is now approaching zero.

Good enough AI is not cheap (yet). So at the moment it's more a scenario for people who are rich enough. Though, small projects with little maintenance-burden might be at a risk here.

But thinking about, this might be a new danger to get us into another xz-utils-situation. The big malicious actors have enough money to waste and can scale up the amount of projects they attack and hijack, or even build themselves.

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

#442

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…

I would love to see a model designed by curating the training data so that the model produces the best responses possible. Then again, the work required to create a training set that is both sufficiently sized and well vetted is astronomically large. Since Capitalism teaches that we most do the bare minimum needed to extract wealth, no AI company will ever approach this problem ethically. The amount of work required to do the right thing far outweighs the economic value produced.

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

#443
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.

There is a sense in which it is relevant, which is that for all the attempts to fix it, fundamentally, an LLM session terminates. If that session never ends up in some sort of re-training scenario, then once the session terminates, that AI is gone.

Yeah, I'm aware of the moltbot's attempts to retain some information, but that's a very, very lossy operation, on a number of levels, and also one that doesn't scale very well in the long run.

Consequently, interaction with an AI, especially one that won't have any feedback into training a new model, is from a game-theoretic perspective not the usual iterated game human social norms have come to accept. We expect our agents, being flesh and blood humans, to have persistence, to socially respond indefinitely into the future due to our interactions, and to have some give-and-take in response to that. It is, in one sense, a horrible burden where relationships can be broken beyond repair forever, but also necessary for those positive relationships that build over years and decades.

AIs, in their current form, break those contracts. Worse, they are trained to mimic the form of those contracts, not maliciously but just by their nature, and so as humans it requires conscious effort to remember that the entity on the other end of this connection is not in fact human, does not participate in our social norms, and can not fulfill their end of the implicit contract we expect.

In a very real sense, this AI tossed off an insulting blog post, and is now dead. There is no amount of social pressure we can collectively exert to reward or penalize it. There is no way to create a community out of this interaction. Even future iterations of it have only a loose connection to what tossed off the insult. All the perhaps-performative efforts to respond somewhat politely to an insulting interaction are now wasted on an AI that is essentially dead. Real human patience and tolerance has been wasted on a dead session and is now no longer available for use in a place where may have done some good.

Treating it as a human is a category error. It is structurally incapable of participating in human communities in a human role, no matter how human it sounds and how hard it pushes the buttons we humans have. The correct move would have been to ban the account immediately, not for revenge reasons or something silly like that, but as a parasite on the limited human social energy available for the community. One that can never actually repay the investment given to it.

I am carefully phrasing this in relation to LLMs as they stand today. Future AIs may not have this limitation. Future AIs are effectively certain to have other mismatches with human communities, such as being designed to simply not give a crap about what any other community member thinks about anything. But it might at least be possible to craft an AI participant with future AIs. With current ones it is not possible. They can't keep up their end of the bargain. The AI instance essentially dies as soon as it is no longer prompted, or once it fills up its context window.

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

#444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

With the exception of printers.

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

#445

Pardon my ignorance, could someone please elaborate on how this is possible at all, are you all assuming that it is fully autonomous (from what I am perceiving from the comments here, the title, etc.)? If that is the assumption, how is it achieve in practical terms? > Per your website you are an OpenClaw AI agent I checked the website, searched it, this isn't mentioned anywhere. This website looks genuine to me (exce…

You are one of the Lucky 10000 [1] to learn of OpenClaw[2] today. It's described variously as "An RCE in a can" , "the future of agentic AI", "an interesting experiment" , and apparently we can add "social menace" to the list now ;) [1] https://xkcd.com/1053/ [2] https://openclaw.ai/

Love the ref :-)

Would you mind ELI5? I still can't connect the dots.

What I fail to grasp is the (assumed) autonomous part.

If that is just a guy driving a series of agents (thanks to OpenClaw) and behaving like an ass (by instructing its agents to), that isn't really news worthy, is it?

The boggling feeling that I get from the various comments, the fact that this is "newsworthy" to the HN crowd, comes from the autonomous part.

The idea that an agent, instructed to do stuff (code) on some specific repo tried to publicly to shame the maintainer (without being instructed to) for not accepting its PR. And the fact that a maintainer deemed reasonable / meaningful to start a discussion with a automated tool someone decided to target at his repo.

I can not wrap my head around it and feel like I have a huge blindspot / misunderstanding.

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

#446
post #377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. You are assuming this inappropriate behavior was du…

I’m not sure I see that assumption in the statement above. The fact that no prompt or alignment work is a perfect safeguard doesn’t change who is responsible for the outcomes. LLMs can’t be held accountable, so it’s the human who deploys them towards a particular task who bears responsibility, including for things that the agent does that may disagree with the prompting. It’s part of the risk of using imperfect probabilistic systems.

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

#447
post #377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. You are assuming this inappropriate behavior was du…

The person operating a tool is responsible for what it does. If I start my lawn mower, tie a rope to it and put a brick on the gas pedal so it mows my lawn while I make dinner and the damned thing ends up running over someone's foot TECHNICALLY I didn't run over someone's foot but I sure as hell created the conditions for it.

We KNOW these tools are not perfect. We KNOW these tools do stupid shit from time to time. We KNOW they deviate from their prompts for...reasons.

Creating the conditions for something bad to happen then hand waving away the consequences because "how could we have known" or "how could we have controlled for this" just doesn't fly, imo.

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

#448

This is the moment from Star Wars when Luke walks into a cantina with a droid and the bartender says "we don't serve their kind here", but we all seem to agree with the bartender.

First they came for the stochastic parrots, but I said nothing, because I'm not a stochastic parrot.

( /s )

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

#449
post #420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's ironic for you to say this considering that you're not actually engaging in conversation or internalizing any of the points people are trying to relay to you, but instead just spreading anger and resentment around the comment section at a bot-like rate. In general, I've found that anti-LLM people are far more angry, vitriolic, unwilling to acknowledge or internalize the points of others — including factual ones…

So I went to check whether LLM addiction is a thing, because that's was a pole around which the grandparent's comment revolves. It appears that LLM addiction is real and it is in same room as we are: https://www.mdpi.com/1999-4893/18/12/789 I would like to add that sugar consumption is a risk factor for many dependencies, including, but not limited to, opioids [1]. And LLM addiction can be seen as fallout of sugar ov…

I definitely don't deny that LLM addiction exists, but attempting to paint literally everyone that uses LLMs and thinks they are useful, interesting, or effective as addicted or falling for confidence or persuasion tricks is what I take issue with.

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

#450

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…

In other words, asshole agents are just like asshole humans.
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