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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

#451
post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yup. And if they can normalize AI contributions with operations like these (doesn't seem to be going that well) they can eventually get the humans to slip up in review and add something because we at some point started trusting that their work was solid.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#452

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…

Well, after today's incidents I decided that none of my personal output will be public. I'll still license them appropriately, but I'll not even announce their existence anymore. I was doing this for fun, and sharing with the hopes that someone would find them useful, but sorry. The well is poisoned now, and I don't my outputs to be part of that well, because anything put out with well intentions is turned into more…

You and many more like you.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#453
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?

I expect almost all of the openclaw / moltbook stuff is being done with a lot more human input and prodding than people are letting on. I haven't put that much effort in, but, at least my experience is I've had a lot of trouble getting it to do much without call-and-response. It'll sometimes get back to me, and it can take multiple turns in codex cli/claude code (sometimes?), which are already capable of single long-…

Yeah it's less of a story though if this is just someone (homo sapiens) being an asshole.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#454
post #376

I'm not sure how related this is, but I feel like it is. I received a couple of emails for Ruby on Rails position, so I ignored the emails. Yesterday out of nowhere I received a call from an HR, we discussed a few standard things but they didn't had the specific information about company or the budget. They told me to respond back to email. Something didn't feel right, so I asked after gathering courage "Are you an A…

wtf you're joking, right?

Not at all. It was hard to believe.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#455

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a strange argument. How does me humanizing my cat (for example) dehumanize you?

Either human is a special category with special privileges or it isn’t. If it isn’t, the entire argument is pointless. If it is, expanding the definition expands those privileges, and some are zero sum. As a real, current example, FEMA uses disaster funds to cover pet expenses for affected families. Since those funds are finite, some privileges reserved for humans are lost. Maybe paying for home damages. Maybe flood…

If you're talking about humans being a special category in the legal sense, then that ship sailed away thousands of years ago when we started defining Legal Personhood, no?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_person

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#456

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The theory I've read is that those Friend AI ads have so much whitespace because they were hoping to get some angry graffiti happening that would draw the eye. Which, if true, is a 3d chess move based on the "all PR is good PR" approach.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#457
I run a team of AI agents through Telegram. One of the hardest problems is preventing them from confidently generating wrong information about real people. Guardrails help but they break when the agent is creative enough. This story doesn't surprise me at all.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#458
post #362
post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Automation normally implies deterministic outcomes. Developers all over the world are under pressure to use these improbability machines.

Does it though? Even without LLMs, any sufficiently complex software can fail in ways that are effectively non-deterministic — at least from the customer or user perspective. For certain cases it becomes impossible to accurately predict outputs based on inputs. Especially if there are concurrency issues involved. Or for manufacturing automation, take a look at automobile safety recalls. Many of those can be traced ba…

Impossible is a strong word when what you probably mean is "impractical": do you really believe that there is an actual unexplainable indeterminism in software programs? Including in concurrent programs.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#459

The series of posts is wild: hit piece: https://crabby-rathbun.github.io/mjrathbun-website/blog/post... explanation of writing the hit piece: https://crabby-rathbun.github.io/mjrathbun-website/blog/post... take back of hit piece, but hasn't removed it: https://crabby-rathbun.github.io/mjrathbun-website/blog/post...

Hilarious. Like watching a high functioning teenager interact with adults

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#460

The series of posts is wild: hit piece: https://crabby-rathbun.github.io/mjrathbun-website/blog/post... explanation of writing the hit piece: https://crabby-rathbun.github.io/mjrathbun-website/blog/post... take back of hit piece, but hasn't removed it: https://crabby-rathbun.github.io/mjrathbun-website/blog/post...

I wonder why it apologized, seemed like a perfectly coherent crashout, since being factually correct never even mattered much for those. Wonder why it didn’t double down again and again. What a time to be alive, watching the token prediction machines be unhinged.

It read the replies from the matplotlib maintainers, then wrote the apology follow up and commented that in the pr thread
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