Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

theshamblog.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

451–460 of 532 posts

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

#451

Post by PeterStuer »

duskdozer wrote: post #364
PeterStuer wrote: post #289

I find the reactions to this interesting. Why are people so emotional about this? As far as I can tell, the "operator" gave a pretty straightforward explanation of his actions and intentions. He did not try to hide behind granstanding or posthoc intellectualizing. He, at least to me, sounds pretty real in an "I'm dabbling in this exiting new tech on the side as we all are without a genious masterplan, just seeing wha…

Is "emotional" here supposed to mean "bad" or "unreasonable" or the like?

It is not meant derogatory. How would I phrase this better (not native speaker)? Evoking strong feelings or passionate responses?

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

#452

Post by UncleMeat »

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…

Rice's Thm does not say this. You can absolutely have 100% confident knowledge of what a program will not do, it just means that you also have false positives. You cannot have a both sound and complete static analysis for some program property. But you can have a sound or complete analysis.

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

#453

Post by ericmcer »

Gigachad wrote: post #154
brumar wrote: post #67

6 months ago I experimented what people now call Ralph Wiggum loops with claude code. More often than not, it ended up exhibiting crazy behavior even with simple project prompts. Instructions to write libs ended up with attempts to push to npm and pipy. Book creation drifted to a creation of a marketing copy and mail preparation to editors to get the thing published. So I kept my setup empty of any credentials at all…

We have finally invented paperclip optimisers. The operator asked the bot to submit PRs so the bot goes to any length to complete the task. Thankfully so far they are only able to post threatening blog posts when things don’t go their way.

That is one of the big issues with "vibe-coding" right now, it does what you ask it to do. No matter how dumb or how off base your requests are, it will try to write code that does what you ask.

They need to add some kind of sanity check layer to the pipelines, where a few LLMs are just checking to see if the request itself is stupid. That might be bad UX though and the goal is adoption right now.

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

#454

Post by lynndotpy »

abnry wrote: post #180
lynndotpy wrote: post #30

> Again I do not know why MJ Rathbun decided based on your PR comment to post some kind of takedown blog post, This wording is detached from reality and conveniently absolves responsibility from the person who did this. There was one decision maker involved here, and it was the person who decided to run the program that produced this text and posted it online. It's not a second, independent being. It's a computer pro…

I'm still struggling to care about the "hit piece". It's an AI. Who cares what it says? Refusing AI commits is just like any other moderation decision people experience on the web anywhere else.

The thing is:

1. There is a critical mass of people sharing the delusion that their programs are sentient and deserving of human rights. If you have any concerns about being beholden to delusional or incorrect beliefs widely adopted by society, or being forced by network effects to do things you disagree with, then this is concerning.

2. Whether or not we legitimize bots on the internet, some are run to masquerade as a human. Today, it's a "I'm a bot and this human annoyed me!" Maybe tomorrow, it's "Abnry is a pedophile and here are the receipts" with myriad 'fellow humans' chiming in to agree, "Yeah, I had bad experiences with them", etc.

3. The text these generate are informed by its training corpus, the mechanics of the neural architecture, and by the humans guiding the models as they run. If you believe these programs are here to stay for the foreseeable future, then the type of content it generates is interesting.

For me, my biggest concern are the waves of people who want to treat these programs as independent and conscious, absolving the person running them of responsibility. Even as someone who believes a program can theoretically be sentient, LLMs definitely are not. I think this story is and will be exemplary so I care a good amount.

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

#457

Post by ericmcer »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #21

Soul document? More like ego document . Agents are beginning to look to me like extensions of the operator's ego. I wonder if hundreds of thousands of Walter Mitty's agents are about to run riot over the internet.

It reminds me of people with big trucks or loud cars. Like "look at what I can do" when someone else engineered, designed and manufactured the entire thing and all they did was step on a pedal.

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

#458

Post by dang »

moeffju wrote: post #275
dang wrote: post #230

The sequence in reverse order - am I missing any? OpenClaw is dangerous - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47064470 - Feb 2026 (93 comments) An AI Agent Published a Hit Piece on Me – Forensics and More Fallout - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47051956 - Feb 2026 (80 comments) Editor's Note: Retraction of article containing fabricated quotations - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47026071 - Feb 2026 (205…

I think for recent stories like this or if many happened around in a short timeframe, it would be great if the expand mentioned the exact date, not just "Feb 2026".

Oh that's a great idea! let me see if I can do that

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

#459

Post by insane_dreamer »

SilverBirch wrote: post #303

I think the big take away here isn't about misalignment or jail breaking. The entire way this bot behaved is consistent with it just being run by some asshole from Twitter. And we need to understand it doesn't matter how careful you think you need to be with AI, because some asshole from Twitter doesn't care, and they'll do literally whatever comes into their mind. And it'll go wrong. And they won't apologize. They w…

I agree with your point.

But I also find interesting that the agent wasn't instructed to write the hit piece. That was on its own initiative.

I read through the SOUL.md and it didn't have anything nefarious in there. Sure it could have been more carefully worded, but it didn't instruct the agent to attack people.

To me this exemplifies how delicate it will be to keep agents on the straight and narrow and how easily they can go of the rails if you have someone who isn't necessarily a "bad actor" but who just doesn't care enough to ensure they act in a socially acceptable way.

Ultimately I think there will be requirements for agents to identify their user when acting on their behalf.

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

#460

Post by eqvinox »

hliyan wrote: post #441
hdhdhsjsbdh wrote: post #438

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'd argue a lot of this is rooted in a lack of self esteem, which is halfway to a mental health issue but not quite there (yet). The attention-seeking itself is the mental health issue. But it's kinda splitting hairs, these people are not fully mentally healthy either way.
Post reply on HN