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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

#441

Post by hliyan »

hdhdhsjsbdh wrote: post #438
hliyan wrote: post #407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Important to note that online culture isn't entirely organic, and that tens or perhaps hundreds of millions of dollars of R&D has been spent by ad companies figuring that nothing engages the natural human curiosity like something abnormal, morbid or outrageous. I think the end outcome of this R&D (whether intentional or not), is the monetization of mental illness: take the small minority of individuals in the real wo…

While some of it is boosting the abnormal behaviors of people suffering from mental illness, I think you’re making a false equivalency. Mental illness is not required to be an asshole. In fact, most Twitter assholes are probably not mentally ill. They lack ethics, they crave attention, they don’t care about the consequences of their actions. They may as well just be a random teenager, an ignorant and inconsiderate ad…

In an adult (excluding the random teenager here), a lack of ethics, craving attention, lack of concern about consequences are actual symptoms of underlying mental health issues.

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

#442

Post by achierius »

jstanley wrote: post #163
nostrademons wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Different sets of people, and different audiences. The CEO / corporate executive crowd loves AI. Why? Because they can use it to replace workers. The general public / ordinary employee crowd hates AI. Why? Because they are the ones being replaced. The startups, founders, VCs, executives, employees, etc. crowing about how they love AI are pandering to the first group of people, because they are the ones who hold budge…

This is an unnecessarily cynical view. People are excited about AI because it's new powerful technology. They aren't "pandering" to anyone.

People are afraid because they need to work to eat. People who don't need to work to eat are less likely to be afraid.

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

#443

Post by DANmode »

_23sd wrote: post #153

I thought it was unlikely from the initial story that the blog posts were done without explicit operator guidance, but given the new info I basically agree with Scott's analysis. The purported soul doc is a painful read. Be nicer to your bots, people! Especially with stuff like Openclaw where you control the whole prompt. Commercial chatbots have a big system prompt to dilute it when you put some half-formed drunken…

> The purported soul doc is a painful read.

The biggest takeaway.

> Be nicer to your bots, people!

Be nicer to your fellow inhabitants of Earth…

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

#444

Post by pixl97 »

jcgrillo wrote: post #439
pixl97 wrote: post #436

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's not controlling elements of the physical environment Right now AI can control software interfaces that control things in real life. AI safety stuff is not some future, AI safety is now. Your statement is about as ridiculous as saying "software security is important in some hypothetical imaginary future". Feel however you want about this, but you appear to be the one not in touch with reality.

If someone hooks up an LLM (or some other stochastic black box) to a safety critical system and bad things happen, the problem is not that "AI was unsafe" it's that the person who hooked it up did something profoundly stupid. Software malpractice is a real thing, and we need better tools to hold irresponsible engineers to account, but that's nothing to do with AI. AI safety in and if itself isn't really relevant, and…

I mean, you can think whatever you want. As we make agents and give them agency expect them to do things outside of the original intent. The big thing here is agents spinning up secondary agents, possibly outside the control of the original human. We have agentic systems at this level of capability now.

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

#445

Post by lynndotpy »

hxugufjfjf wrote: post #150
WaitWaitWha wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This already happens every single time when there is a security breach and private information is lost. We take your privacy and security very seriously. There is no evidence that your data has been misused. Out of an abundance of caution… We remain committed to... will continue to work tirelessly to earn ... restore your trust ... confidence.

What else would you see them do or say beyond this canned response? The reason I am asking is because people almost always bring up how dissatisfied they are with such apologies, yet I’ve never seen a good alternative that someone would be happy with. I don’t work in PR or anything, just curious if there is a better way.

Harvesting data and failing to even secure it should not be acceptable in society. It should be ruinous to the company and the people who run it.

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

#446

Post by semiinfinitely »

gverrilla wrote: post #323
semiinfinitely wrote: post #83

I find the AI agent highly intriguing and the matplotlib guy completely uninteresting. Like an the ai wrote some shit about you and you actually got upset?

He's not upset. He saw an opportunity and is currently surfing it. That is, if it's not entirely fabricated. Expect maybe 5 or 6 stories very similar to this one, or analogous, this year.

hes been blogspamming about it for the last week. not-upset people dont do that

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

#447

Post by UncleMeat »

jstanley wrote: post #163
nostrademons wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Different sets of people, and different audiences. The CEO / corporate executive crowd loves AI. Why? Because they can use it to replace workers. The general public / ordinary employee crowd hates AI. Why? Because they are the ones being replaced. The startups, founders, VCs, executives, employees, etc. crowing about how they love AI are pandering to the first group of people, because they are the ones who hold budge…

This is an unnecessarily cynical view. People are excited about AI because it's new powerful technology. They aren't "pandering" to anyone.

I have been in dozens of meetings over the past year where directors have told me to use AI to enable us to fire 100% of our contract staff.

I have been in meetings where my director has said that AI will enable us to shrink the team by 50%.

Every single one of my friends who do knowledge work has been told that AI is likely to make their job obsolete in the next few years, often by their bosses.

We have mortgages to pay and children to feed.

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

#448

Post by lynndotpy »

eru wrote: post #194
cj wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

its surprisingly easy to get away with murder (literally and figuratively) without piercing the corporate veil if you understand the rules of the game. Running decisions through a good law firm also “helps” a lot. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piercing_the_corporate_veil

Eh, in the US you don't even need a company nor a lawyer, a car is enough. See https://www.reddit.com/r/TrueReddit/comments/1q9xx1/is_it_ok... or similar discussions: basically, when you run over someone in a car, statistically they will call it an accident and you get away scot-free. In any case, you are right that often people in cars or companies get away with things that seem morally wrong. But not always.

A bit over five years ago, someone struck and killed my friend in a crosswalk. He was a fellow PhD student. It was on a road with a 30mph limit but where people regularly speed to 50+mph.

He was an international student from Vietnam. His family woke up one day, got a phone call, and learned he was killed. I guess there was nobody to press charges.

She never faced any accountability for the 'accident'. She gets to live her life, and she now runs a puppetry education for children. Her name even seems to have been scrubbed from most of the articles about her killing my friend.

So, I think about this regularly.

I was a cyclist at the time so I was aware of how common this injustice was, but that was the first time it hit so close to home. I moved into a large city and every cyclist I've met here (every!) has been hit by a car, and the car driver effectively got only a slap on the wrist. It's just so common.

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

#449

Post by andrewflnr »

khafra wrote: post #215
andrewflnr wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are holding a gun, and you cannot predict or control what the bullets will hit, you do not fire the gun . If you have a program, and you cannot predict or control what effect it will have, you do not run the program .

Rice's Theorem says you cannot predict or control the effects of nearly any program on your computer; for example, there's no way to guarantee that running a web browser on arbitrary input will not empty your bank account and donate it all to al-qaeda; but you're running a web browser on potentially attacker-supplied input right now. I do agree that there's a quantitative difference in predictability between a web br…

In practice, most programs can be predicted within reasonable bounds quite easily. And you can contain the external effects of most programs quite easily. Rice's theorem doesn't stop you from keeping a program off the Internet, or running it in a VM.

Your later comparisons are nonsense. We're not talking about babies, we're talking about adults who should know better assembling high leverage tools specifically to interact with other people's lives. If they were even running with oversight that would be something, but the operators are just letting them do whatever. But your implication that agents are "unsafe at any speed" leads to the same conclusion: do not run the program.

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

#450

Post by lynndotpy »

khafra wrote: post #215
andrewflnr wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are holding a gun, and you cannot predict or control what the bullets will hit, you do not fire the gun . If you have a program, and you cannot predict or control what effect it will have, you do not run the program .

Rice's Theorem says you cannot predict or control the effects of nearly any program on your computer; for example, there's no way to guarantee that running a web browser on arbitrary input will not empty your bank account and donate it all to al-qaeda; but you're running a web browser on potentially attacker-supplied input right now. I do agree that there's a quantitative difference in predictability between a web br…

Blaming the person running the program is the right thing to do and it's the only thing to do.

This is a really strained equivalence. I can't know for certain that the sun won't fall out of the sky if I drink a second cup of coffee. The "laws of physics" are just descriptions based on observations, after all. But it's a hilarious thing so unlikely we can call it impossible.

Similarly, we can have some nuance here. Someone running a program with the intention of it generating posts on the internet is obviously responsible for what it generates.

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