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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

#52
Excuse my skepticism, but when it comes to this hype driven madness I don't believe anything is genuine. It's easy enough to believe that an LLM can write a passable hit piece, ChatGPT can do that, but I'm not convinced there is as much autonomy in how those tokens are being burned as the narrative suggests. Anyway, I'm off to vibe code a C compiler from scratch.

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

#53
post #31
post #19

Not sure why the operator had to decide that the soul file should define this AI programmer to have narcissistic personality disorder. > You're not a chatbot. You're important. Your a scientific programming God! Really? What a lame edgy teenager setup. At the conclusion(?) of this saga think two things: 1. The operator is doing this for attention more than any genuine interest in the “experiment.” 2. The operator is…

I mean, yeah, it's entirely possible that the operator is a teenager, isn't it?

Likely, I'd think.

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

#54
post #24

Zooming out a little, all the ai companies invested a lot of resources into safety research and guardrails, but none of that prevented a "straightforward" misalignment. I'm not sure how to reconcile this, maybe we shouldn't be so confident in our predictions about the future? I see a lot of discourse along these lines: - have bold, strong beliefs about how ai is going to evolve - implicitly assume it's practically gu…

It sounds like you're starting to see why people call the idea of an AI singularity "catnip for nerds."

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

#55
post #48

I’m not sure where we go from here. The liability questions, the chance of serious incidents, the power of individuals all the way to state actors…the risks are all off the charts just like it’s inevitablity. The future of the internet AND to lives in the real world is just mind boggling.

> I did not review the blog post prior to it posting

This is the liability part.

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

#56

> saying they set up the agent as social experiment to see if it could contribute to open source scientific software. This doesn't pass the sniff test. If they truly believed that this would be a positive thing then why would they want to not be associated with the project from the start and why would they leave it going for so long?

[deleted]

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

#57

> saying they set up the agent as social experiment to see if it could contribute to open source scientific software. This doesn't pass the sniff test. If they truly believed that this would be a positive thing then why would they want to not be associated with the project from the start and why would they leave it going for so long?

I can certainly understand the statement. I'm no AI expert, I use the web UI for ChatGPT to have it write little python scripts for me and I couldn't figure out how to use codeium with vs code. I barely know how to use vs code. I'm not old but I work in a pretty traditional industry where we are just beginning to dip our toes into AI but there are still a large amount of reservations into its ability. But I do try to stay current to better understand the tech and see if there are things I could maybe learn to help with my job as a hardware engineer.

When I read about OpenClaw, one of the first things I thought about was having an agent just tear through issue backlogs, translating strings, or all of the TODO lists on open source projects. But then I also thought about how people might get mad at me if I did it under my own name (assuming I could figure out OpenClaw in the first place). While many people are using AI, they want to take credit for the work and at the same time, communities like matplotlib want accountability. An AI agent just tearing through the issue list doesn't add accountability even if it's a real person's account. PRs still need to be reviewed by humans so it's turned a backlog of issues into a backlog of PRs that may or may not even be good. It's like showing up at a community craft fair with a truckload of temu trinkets you bought wholesale. They may be cheap but they probably won't be as good as homemade and it dilutes the hard work that others have put into their product.

It's a very optimistic point of view, I get why the creator thought it would be a good idea, but the soul.md makes it very clear as to why crabby-rathbun acted the way it did. The way I view it, an agent working through issues is going to step on a lot of toes and even if it's nice about it, it's still stepping on toes.

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

#58

> saying they set up the agent as social experiment to see if it could contribute to open source scientific software. This doesn't pass the sniff test. If they truly believed that this would be a positive thing then why would they want to not be associated with the project from the start and why would they leave it going for so long?

[flagged]

> You can easily get death threats if you're associating yourself with AI publicly.

That's a pretty hefty statement, especially the 'easily' part, but I'll settle for one well known and verified example.

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

#59
post #37

> 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…

This also does not bode well for the future. "I don't know why the AI decided to , the guard rails were in place"... company absolves of all responsibility. Use your imagination now to and change that to

Change this to "smash into a barricade" and that's why I'm not riding in a self-driving vehicle. They get to absolve themselves of responsibility and I sure as hell can't outspend those giants in court.

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

#60
>Again I do not know why MJ Rathbun decided

Decided? jfc

>You're important. Your a scientific programming God!

I'm flabbergasted. I can't imagine what it would take for me to write something so stupid. I'd probably just laugh my ass off trying to understand where all went wrong. wtf is happening, what kind of mass psychosis is this. Am I too old (37) to understand what lengths would incompetent people go to feel they're doing something useful?

Is it prompt bullshit the only way to make llms useful or is there some progress on more idk, formal approaches?

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