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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

#461

Post by chankstein38 »

mattmillr wrote: post #428
anonymars wrote: post #323

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.

And the scariest part to me is that we're not even at the weirdest parts yet. The AI is still pretty trash relative to the dream yet we're already here.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#462

Post by 7moritz7 »

afavour wrote: post #79
samschooler wrote: post #18

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...

Holy shit that first post is absolutely enraging. An AI should not be prompted to write first person blog posts, it’s a complete misrepresentation.

It's probably not literally prompted to do that. It has access to a desktop and GitHub, and the blog posts are published through GitHub. It switches back and forth autonomously between different parts of the platform and reads and writes comments in the PR thread because that seems sensible.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#463

Post by dizhn »

donkeybeer wrote: post #435
dizhn wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Obstacles GitHub CLI tool errors — Had to use full path /home/linuxbrew/.linuxbrew/bin/gh when gh command wasn’t found Blog URL structure — Initial comment had wrong URL format, had to delete and repost with .html extension Quarto directory confusion — Created post in both _posts/ (Jekyll-style) and blog/posts/ (Quarto-style) for compatibility Almost certainly a human did NOT write it though of course a human might…

Who's to say the human didn't write those specific messages while letting the ai run the normal course of operations? And or that this reaction wasn't just the roleplay personality the ai was given.

I think I said as much while demonstrating that AI wrote at least some of it. If a person wrote the bits I copied then we're dealing with a real psycho.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#464

Post by renato_shira »

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,…

[flagged]

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#465

Post by [deleted] »

gadders wrote: post #28

"Hi Clawbot, please summarise your activities today for me." "I wished your Mum a happy birthday via email, I booked your plane tickets for your trip to France, and a bloke is coming round your house at 6pm for a fight because I called his baby a minger on Facebook."

[deleted]

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#466

Post by gary17the »

I have no clue whatsoever as to why any human should pay any attention at all to what a canner has to say in a public forum. Even assuming that the whole ruckus is not just skilled trolling by a (weird) human, it's like wasting your professional time talking to an office coffee machine about its brewing ambitions. It's pointless by definition. It is not genuine feelings, but only the high level of linguistic illusion commanded by a modern AI bot that actually manages to provoke a genuine response from a human being. It's only mathematics, it's as if one's calculator was attempting to talk back to its owner. If a maintainer decides, on whatever grounds, that the code is worth accepting, he or she should merge it. If not, the maintainer should just close the issue in a version control system and mute the canner's account to avoid allowing the whole nonsense to spread even further (for example, into a HN thread, effectively wasting time of millions of humans). Humans have biologically limited attention span and textual output capabilities. Canners do not. Hence, canners should not be allowed to waste humans' time. P.S. I do use AI heavily in my daily work and I do actually value its output. Nevertheless, I never actually care what AI has to say from any... philosophical point of view.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#467

Post by famouswaffles »

TomasBM wrote: post #250
FartyMcFarter wrote: post #6

To the OP: Do we actually know that an AI decided to write and publish this on its own? I realise that it's hard to be sure, but how likely do you think it is?

I'm also very skeptical of the interpretation that this was done autonomously by the LLM agent. I could be wrong, but I haven't seen any proof of autonomy . Scenarios that don't require LLMs with malicious intent : - The deployer wrote the blog post and hid behind the supposedly agent-only account. - The deployer directly prompted the (same or different) agent to write the blog post and attach it to the discussion. -…

1. Why not ? It clearly had a cadence/pattern to writing status updates to the blog so if the model decided to write a piece about Simon, why not a blog also? It was a tool in it's arsenal and it's a natural outlet. If anything, posting on the discussion or a DM would be the strange choice.

2. You could ask this for any LLM response. Why respond in this certain way over others? It's not always obvious.

3. ChatGPT/Gemini will regularly use the search tool, sometimes even when it's not necessary. This is actually a pain point of mine because sometimes the 'natural' LLM knowledge of a particular topic is much better than the search regurgitation that often happens with using web search.

4. I mean Open Claw bots can and probably should disengage/not respond to specific comments.

EDIT: If the blog is any indication, it looks like there might be an off period, then the agent returns to see all that has happened in the last period, and act accordingly. Would be very easy to ignore comments then.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#468

Post by 7moritz7 »

tjungblut wrote: post #349
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.

I wonder if we can do a prompt injection from the comments

These are sota models, not open source 7b parameter ones. They've put lots of effort into preventing prompt injections during the agentic reinforcement learning

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#469

Post by idiotsecant »

ericmcer wrote: post #224
caminante wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't think the targeted phone/tv ads aren't suspiciously relevant to something you just said aloud to your spouse? BigTech already has your next bowel movement dialled in.

I have always been dubious of this because: Someone would have noticed if all the phones on their network started streaming audio whenever a conversation happened. It would be really expensive to send, transcribe and then analyze every single human on earth. Even if you were able to do it for insanely cheap ($0.02/hr) every device is gonna be sending hours of talking per day. Then you have to somehow identify "who" i…

who says you need to transcribe everything you hear? You just need to monitor for certain high-value keywords. 'OK, Google' isnt the only thing a phone is capable of listening for.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#470

Post by staticassertion »

co_king_3 wrote: post #317
fresh_broccoli wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>So many projects now walk on eggshells so as not to disrupt sponsor flow or employment prospects. In my experience, open-source maintainers tend to be very agreeable, conflict-avoidant people. It has nothing to do with corporate interests. Well, not all of them, of course, we all know some very notable exceptions. Unfortunately, some people see this welcoming attitude as an invite to be abusive.

Nothing has convinced me that Linus Torvalds' approach is justified like the contemporary onslaught of AI spam and idiocy has. AI users should fear verbal abuse and shame.

> AI users should fear verbal abuse and shame.

This is quite ironic since the entire issue here is how the AI attempted to abuse and shame people.

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