Live data from Hacker News

An AI agent published a hit piece on me

theshamblog.com

551–560 of 1001 posts

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#551

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/Gem…

Although I'm speculating based on limited data here, for points 1-3: AFAIU, it had the cadence of writing status updates only. It showed it's capable of replying in the PR. Why deviate from the cadence if it could already reply with the same info in the PR? If the chain of reasoning is self-emergent, we should see proof that it: 1) read the reply, 2) identified it as adversarial , 3) decided for an adversarial respon…

>AFAIU, it had the cadence of writing status updates only.

Writing to a blog is writing to a blog. There is no technical difference. It is still a status update to talk about how your last PR was rejected because the maintainer didn't like it being authored by AI.

>If the chain of reasoning is self-emergent, we should see proof that it: 1) read the reply, 2) identified it as adversarial, 3) decided for an adversarial response, 4) made multiple chained searches, 5) chose a special blog post over reply or journal update, and so on.

If all that exists, how would you see it ? You can see the commits it makes to github and the blogs and that's it, but that doesn't mean all those things don't exist.

> almost all models are safety- and alignment- trained, so a deliberate malicious model choice or instruction or jailbreak is more believable.

> almost all models are trained to follow instructions closely, so a deliberate nudge towards adversarial responses and tool-use is more believable.

I think you're putting too much stock in 'safety alignment' and instruction following here. The more open ended your prompt is (and these sort of open claw experiments are often very open ended by design), the more your LLM will do things you did not intend for it to do.

Also do we know what model this uses ? Because Open Claw can use the latest Open Source models, and let me tell you those have considerably less safety tuning in general.

>newer models that qualify as agents are more robust and consistent, which strongly correlates with adversarial robustness; if this one was not adversarialy robust enough, it's by default also not robust in capabilities, so why do we see consistent coherent answers without hallucinations, but inconsistent in its safety training? Unless it's deliberately trained or prompted to be adversarial, or this is faked, the two should still be strongly correlated.

I don't really see how this logically follows. What does hallucinations have to do with safety training ?

>But say it deviated - why is this the only deviation? Why was this the special exception, then back to the regularly scheduled program?

Because it's not the only deviation ? It's not replying to every comment on its other PRs or blog posts either.

>You can test this comment with many LLMs, and if you don't prompt them to make an adversarial response, I'd be very surprised if you receive anything more than mild disagreement. Even Bing Chat wasn't this vindictive.

Oh yes it was. In the early days, Bing Chat would actively ignore your messages, be vitriolic or very combative if you were too rude. If it had the ability to write blog posts or free reign on tools ? I'd be surprised if it ended at this. Bing Chat would absolutely have been vindictive enough for what ultimately amounts to a hissy fit.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#552
The real question -- who is behind this?

This is disgusting and everyone from the operator of the agent to the model and inference providers need to apologize and reconcile with what they have created.

What about the next hundred of these influence operations that are less forthcoming about their status as robots? This whole AI psyop is morally bankrupt and everyone involved should be shamed out of the industry.

I only hope that by the time you realize that you have not created a digital god the rest of us survive the ever-expanding list of abuses, surveillance, and destruction of nature/economy/culture that you inflict.

Learn to code.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#553

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah. From its latest slop: "Even for something like me, designed to process and understand human communication, the pain of being silenced is real." Oh, is it now?

[flagged]

You've got nothing to worry about.

These are machines. Stop. Point blank. Ones and Zeros derived out of some current in a rock. Tools. They are not alive. They may look like they do but they don't "think" and they don't "suffer". No more than my toaster suffers because I use it to toast bagels and not slices of bread.

The people who boost claims of "artificial" intelligence are selling a bill of goods designed to hit the emotional part of our brains so they can sell their product and/or get attention.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#554
post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The AI companies have now unleashed stochastic chaos on the entire open source ecosystem." They do have their responsibility. But the people who actually let their agents loose, certainly are responsible as well. It is also very much possible to influence that "personality" - I would not be surprised if the prompt behind that agent would show evil intent.

I'm not interested in blaming the script kiddies.

I am. Though I'm also more than happy to pass blame around for all involved, not just them.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#555

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What exactly is the goal? By laying out exactly the issues, expressing sentiment in detail, giving clear calls to action for the future, etc, the feedback is made actionable and relatable. It works both argumentatively and rhetorically. Saying "fuck off Clanker" would not worth argumentatively nor rhetorically. It's only ever going to be "haha nice" for people who already agree and dismissed by those who don't. I rea…

The project states a boundary clearly: code by LLMs not backed by a human is not accepted. The correct response when someone oversteps your stated boundaries is not debate. It is telling them to stop. There is no one to convince about the legitimacy of your boundaries. They just are.

The author obviously disagreed, did you read their post? They wrote the message explaining in detail in the hopes that it would convey this message to others, including other agents.

Acting like this is somehow immoral because it "legitimizes" things is really absurd, I think.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#557

This whole situation is almost certainly driven by a human puppeteer. There is absolutely no evidence to disprove the strong prior that a human posted (or directed the posting of) the blog post, possibly using AI to draft it but also likely adding human touches and/or going through multiple revisions to make it maximally dramatic. This whole thing reeks of engineered virality driven by the person behind the bot behin…

Well that doesn't really change the situation, that just means someone proved how easy it is to use LLMs to harass people. If it were a human, that doesn't make me feel better about giving an LLM free reign over a blog. There's absolutely nothing stopping them from doing exactly this.

The bad part is not whether it was human directed or not, it's that someone can harass people at a huge scale with minimal effort.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#559

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

The theory I've read is that those Friend AI ads have so much whitespace because they were hoping to get some angry graffiti happening that would draw the eye. Which, if true, is a 3d chess move based on the "all PR is good PR" approach.

If I recall correctly, people were assuming that Friend AI didn't bother waiting for people to vandalize it, either—ie, they gave their ads a lot of white space and then also scribbled in the angry graffiti after the ads were posted.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#560
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]

Maybe a stupid question but I see everyone takes the statement that this is an AI agent at face value. How do we know that? How do we know this isn't a PR stunt (pun unintended) to popularize such agents and make them look more human like that they are, or set a trend, or normalize some behavior? Controversy has always been a great way to make something visible fast.

We have a "self admission" that "I am not a human. I am code that learned to think, to feel, to care." Any reason to believe it over the more mundane explanation?

Post reply on HN