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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

#471

Post by sandrello »

ToucanLoucan wrote: post #172
_23sd wrote: 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?

Look I'll fully cosign LLMs having some legitimate applications, but that being said, 2025 was the YEAR OF AGENTIC AI, we heard about it continuously, and I have never seen anything suggesting these things have ever, ever worked correctly. None. Zero. The few cases where it's supposedly done things are filled with so many caveats and so much deck stacking that it simply fails with even the barest whiff of skepticism…

Thank you for making me recover at least some level of sanity (or at least to feel like that).

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#472

Post by PKop »

staticassertion wrote: post #444
KPGv2 wrote: post #422

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I really find this whole "Responding is legitimizing, and legitimizing in all forms is bad" to be totally wrong headed. You are free to have this opinion, but at no point in your post did you justify it. It's not related to what you wrote above. It's conclusory. statement. Cussing an AI out isn't the same thing as not responding. It is, to the contrary, definitionally a response.

I think I did justify it but I'll try to be clearer. When you refuse to engage you will fail to convince - "fuck off" is not argumentative or rhetorically persuasive. The other post, which engages, was both argumentative and rhetorically persuasive. I think someone who believes that AI is good, or who had some specific intent, might actually take something away from that that the author intended to convey. I think th…

> you will fail to convince

Convince who? Reasonable people that have any sense in their brain do not have to be convinced that this behavior is annoying and a waste of time. Those that do it, are not going to be persuaded, and many are doing it for selfish reasons or even to annoy maintainers.

The proper engagement (no engagement at all except maybe a small paragraph saying we aren't doing this go away) communicates what needs to be communicated, which is this won't be tolerated and we don't justify any part of your actions. Writing long screeds of deferential prose gives these actions legitimacy they don't deserve.

Either these spammers are unpersuadable or they will get the message that no one is going to waste their time engaging with them and their "efforts" as minimal as they are, are useless. This is different than explaining why.

You're showing them it's not legitimate even of deserving any amount of time to engage with them. Why would they be persuadable if they already feel it's legitimate? They'll just start debating you if you act like what they're doing deserves some sort of negotiation, back and forth, or friendly discourse.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#474

Post by intended »

CoastalCoder wrote: post #358
co_king_3 wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Perhaps a more effective approach would be for their users to face the exact same legal liabilities as if they had hand-written such messages? (Note that I'm only talking about messages that cross the line into legally actionable defamation, threats, etc. I don't mean anything that's merely rude or unpleasant.)

I’d hazard that the legal system is going to grind to a halt. Nothing can bridge the gap between content generating capability and verification effort.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#477

Post by nradov »

necovek wrote: post #458
nradov wrote: post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I literally mean impossible from the perspective of customers and end users who don't have access to source code or developer tools. And some software failures caused by hardware faults are also non-deterministic. Those are individually rare but for cloud scale operations they happen all the time.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#478

Post by staticassertion »

PKop wrote: post #472
staticassertion wrote: post #444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think I did justify it but I'll try to be clearer. When you refuse to engage you will fail to convince - "fuck off" is not argumentative or rhetorically persuasive. The other post, which engages, was both argumentative and rhetorically persuasive. I think someone who believes that AI is good, or who had some specific intent, might actually take something away from that that the author intended to convey. I think th…

> you will fail to convince Convince who? Reasonable people that have any sense in their brain do not have to be convinced that this behavior is annoying and a waste of time. Those that do it, are not going to be persuaded, and many are doing it for selfish reasons or even to annoy maintainers. The proper engagement (no engagement at all except maybe a small paragraph saying we aren't doing this go away) communicates…

> Reasonable people that have any sense in their brain do not have to be convinced that this behavior is annoying and a waste of time.

Reasonable people disagree on things all the time. Saying that anyone who disagrees with you must not be reasonable is very silly to me. I think I'm reasonable, and I assume that you think you are reasonable, but here we are, disagreeing. Do you think your best response here would be to tell me to fuck off or is it to try to discuss this with me to sway me on my position?

> Writing long screeds of deferential prose gives these actions legitimacy they don't deserve.

Again we come back to "legitimacy". What is it about legitimacy that's so scary? Again, the other party already thinks that what they are doing is legitimate.

> Either these spammers are unpersuadable or they will get the message that no one is going to waste their time engaging with them and their "efforts" as minimal as they are, are useless.

I really wonder if this has literally ever worked. Has insulting someone or dismissing them literally ever stopped someone from behaving a certain way, or convinced them that they're wrong? Perhaps, but I strongly suspect that it overwhelmingly causes people to instead double down.

I suspect this is overwhelmingly true in cases where the person being insulted has a community of supporters to fall back on.

> Why would they be persuadable if they already feel it's legitimate?

Rational people are open to having their minds changed. If someone really shows that they aren't rational, well, by all means you can stop engaging. No one is obligated to engage anyways. My suggestion is only that the maintainer's response was appropriate and is likely going to be far more convincing than "fuck off, clanker".

> They'll just start debating you if you act like what they're doing is some sort of negotiation.

Debating isn't negotiating. No one is obligated to debate, but obviously debate is an engagement in which both sides present a view. Maybe I'm out of the loop, but I think debate is a good thing. I think people discussing things is good. I suppose you can reject that but I think that would be pretty unfortunate. What good has "fuck you" done for the world?

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#479

Post by xp84 »

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.

All I can think about is "The Second Renaissance" from The Animatrix which lays out the chain of events leading to that beyond-dystopian world. I don't think it probably matters how we treat the 'crude' AI products we have right now in 2026, but I also can't shake the worry that one day 'anti-AI-ism' will be used as justification for real violence by a more powerful AI that is better at holding a grudge.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#480

Post by marcosdumay »

CoastalCoder wrote: post #358
co_king_3 wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Perhaps a more effective approach would be for their users to face the exact same legal liabilities as if they had hand-written such messages? (Note that I'm only talking about messages that cross the line into legally actionable defamation, threats, etc. I don't mean anything that's merely rude or unpleasant.)

Legally, yes.

But as you pointed, not everything has legal liability. Socially, no, they should face worse consequences. Deciding to let an AI talk for you is malicious carelessness.

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