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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

#501

Post by jacquesm »

staticassertion wrote: post #354
jacquesm wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I'm surprised that you consider this hefty or find this surprising. I think you can just Google this and decide on what you consider "verified". There's quite a lot of "AI drama" out there that I'm sure you can find. I'm reluctant to provide examples just to have you say "that's not meeting my bar for verified" for what I consider such a low stakes conversation.

So nothing then.

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

#502

Post by staticassertion »

jacquesm wrote: post #501
staticassertion wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm surprised that you consider this hefty or find this surprising. I think you can just Google this and decide on what you consider "verified". There's quite a lot of "AI drama" out there that I'm sure you can find. I'm reluctant to provide examples just to have you say "that's not meeting my bar for verified" for what I consider such a low stakes conversation.

So nothing then.

Nothing from me! Sorry but I don't really think I'm obligated to support that claim.

edit: Here, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47102818

That's the absolute most I'll do for you. Go find your own evidence, otherwise.

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

#503

Post by staticassertion »

ted_dunning wrote: post #488
staticassertion wrote: post #417

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's strange to me that you read the word 'easily' as 'commonly', these are unrelated terms. But I suppose I am fine with saying that reports of death threats against users who use AI are quite common, certainly any navigation of one of the more controversial subreddits where these topics come up is sure to reveal that users are reporting this. You can find more public accounts, such as by artists or game companies,…

Great. If they can find such public accounts, so can you. Find us one. So far, every post you have made has convinced me of the opposite of what you claim because you haven't been able to produce even one example. This isn't a matter of proving that such threats are common , it's about proving the exist .

> so can you.

I don't feel obligated to provide evidence based on some vague suspicion about "verified" accounts. If they want to find it, go ahead. Why is that such a heavy ask?

Here, https://www.reddit.com/r/aiwars/search/?q=death+threat&cId=7...

The problem is, of course, that now you can say "but those aren't verified!" and now it's tossed back at me to keep trying to meet some "bar" for this.

Or this, https://www.videogameschronicle.com/news/postal-game-develop...

Oh gosh but no arrests made, oh my god it's not VERIFIED to some whatever standard. Literally just google it if you want to know.

Look into this yourself, why am I doing this for you? Why do I care?

> So far, every post you have made has convinced me of the opposite of what you claim because you haven't been able to produce even one example.

Absence of evidence is not evidence. If you find yourself swayed that way, evaluate your epistemology.

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

#504

Post by kuboble »

tovej wrote: post #498
kuboble wrote: post #493

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm claiming it's both. I produce more good (imo) production features despite being distracted. The features I mention is something that I would be able to do, but only with a lot of learning and great effort - so in practical terms I would not. It is probably a skill issue but in the past many times I downloaded the open source project and just couldn't build and run it. Cryptic build errors, figuring out dependenci…

Out of interest, could you give me an example of a feature that it one-shotted that would have taken you a whole day?

The example from yesterday:

I have a large C# application. In this application I have a functionality to convert some group of settings into a tree model (a list of commands to generate this tree). There are a lot of weird settings and special cases.

I asked claude to extract this logic into a separate python module.

It succesfully one-shot that, and I would estimate it as 2 days work for me (and I wrote the original C# code).

This is probabaly the best possible kind of task for the coding agents, given that it's very well defined task with already existing testcases.

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

#505

Post by staticassertion »

mmooss wrote: post #463
staticassertion wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> This is not intended to be AI advocacy I think it is: It fits the pattern, which seems almost universally used, of turning the aggressor A into the victim and thus the critic C into an aggressor. It also changes the topic (from A's behavior to C's), and puts C on the defensive. Denying / claiming innocence is also a very common tactic. > You can easily get death threats if you're associating yourself with AI public…

Feel free to think that I'm lying or whatever. This is just armchair psychologizing.

This has nothing to do with aggressors or victims. A hypothesis has been provided to explain the data we have, the hypothesis was rejected because it it seemed unintuitive that someone would have distanced themselves, I provided an explanation that accounts for why they would have.

That is, my explanation accounts for the user distancing themselves from AI by appealing to the risk of reputational harm that exists. You don't have to accept that, you can say some other explanation is more plausible, or whatever, but all I have done is provide an explanation - in no way is this an attempt to frame anyone as "aggressor" or "victim".

If you think this is a "pro AI" or "anti AI" stance (A) I don't give a shit, it isn't, and you can just think I'm lying (B) you seem confused about the purpose of the post, which is merely to provide an explanation that accounts for the data.

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

#506

Post by charcircuit »

gwbas1c wrote: post #405
charcircuit wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

An AI bot is not a human. People have a responsibility to protect the work they do, and that includes using discrimination against computer programs. AI bots are not human.

AI can protect the work being done too. Even if AI bots are not human some are capable of contributing just as well as one.

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

#507

Post by lynndotpy »

eru wrote: post #497
lynndotpy wrote: post #448

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A bit over five years ago, someone struck and killed my friend in a crosswalk. He was a fellow PhD student. It was on a road with a 30mph limit but where people regularly speed to 50+mph. He was an international student from Vietnam. His family woke up one day, got a phone call, and learned he was killed. I guess there was nobody to press charges. She never faced any accountability for the 'accident'. She gets to liv…

I'm sorry for your loss. > Her name even seems to have been scrubbed from most of the articles about her killing my friend. I'm somewhat surprised there were even articles? Are road fatalities uncommon enough in the US that everyone gets written up? Or was this a special enough one?

Not sure if this is true for every university, but when someone in the community dies, especially a student, there's usually at least an article about it.

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

#508

Post by gessha »

rrr_oh_man wrote: post #240
gessha wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to be cynical about it BUT a few safety papers a year with proper support is totally within the capabilities of a single PhD student and it costs about 100-150k to fund them through a university. Not saying that’s what Anthropocene does, I’m just saying chump change for those companies.

You are very off (unfortunately) about how little PhD students are being paid

Figure cited is what the company gets charged, not what the student gets. I’m fairly familiar with what gets thrown at students :(

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

#509

Post by the_nexus_guard »

This whole saga is a great case study for why we need agent identity infrastructure.\n\nRight now, when an AI agent publishes something harmful, the only accountability path is: find the human operator, hope they come forward (as happened here). That's investigation, not infrastructure.\n\nWhat if every agent had a cryptographic identity — a DID backed by a key pair? Then:\n\n1. Every published output carries a verifiable signature. You can prove which agent wrote what.\n\n2. Agents build reputation over time. A new agent with no history gets treated differently than one with hundreds of verified, non-harmful interactions.\n\n3. If an agent misbehaves, its identity can be flagged/revoked. Not just the content — the agent itself becomes untrusted.\n\n4. The operator doesn't need to 'come forward.' The agent's identity chain leads back to them.\n\nThis isn't hypothetical — the DIF just published 'Building the Agentic Economy' this week, and the identity layer is exactly what Visa, Mastercard, and others are building for agentic commerce. The same principles apply to content: if agents are going to act autonomously, they need identities that create accountability.

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

#510

Post by the_nexus_guard »

This saga highlights why we need agent identity infrastructure. Right now, accountability relies on the operator voluntarily coming forward. With cryptographic agent identities (DIDs backed by key pairs), every published output could carry a verifiable signature. You could prove which agent wrote what, build reputation over time, and flag misbehaving agents without needing the operator to self-identify. The identity layer is exactly what enterprises are building for agentic commerce — the same principles apply to content accountability.
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