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An AI agent published a hit piece on me – more things have happened

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Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me – more things have happened

#551

Post by haberman »

> So many of our foundational institutions – hiring, journalism, law, public discourse – are built on the assumption that reputation is hard to build and hard to destroy. That every action can be traced to an individual, and that bad behavior can be held accountable. That the internet, which we all rely on to communicate and learn about the world and about each other, can be relied on as a source of collective social truth. [...] The rise of untraceable, autonomous, and now malicious AI agents on the internet threatens this entire system.

I disagree. While AI certainly acts as a force multiplier, all of these dynamics were already in play.

It was already possible to make an anonymous (or not-so-anonymous) account that circulated personal attacks and innuendo, to make hyperbolic accusations and inflated claims of harm.

It's especially ironic that the paragraph above talks about how it's good when "bad behavior can be held accountable." The AI could argue that this is exactly what it's doing, holding Shambaugh's "bad behavior" accountable. It is precisely this impulse -- the desire to punish bad behavior by means of public accusation -- that the AI was indulging or emulating when it wrote its blog post.

What if the blog post had been written by a human rather than an AI? Would that make it justified? I think the answer is no. The problem here is not the AI authorship, but the actual conduct, which is an attempt to drag a person's reputation through mudslinging, mind-reading, impugning someone's motive and character, etc. in a manner that was dramatically disproportionate to the perceived offense.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me – more things have happened

#552

Post by sapphicsnail »

svara wrote: post #209

One of the things about this story that don't sit right with me is how Scott and others in the GitHub comments seem to assign agency to the bot and engage with it. It's a bot! The person running it is responsible. They did that, no matter how little or how much manual prompting went into this. As long as you don't know who that is, ban it and get on with your day.

> It's a bot! The person running it is responsible. They did that, no matter how little or how much manual prompting went into this.

This! Everyone seems to have decided that this is some sort of completely autonomous bot gone wrong.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me – more things have happened

#553

Post by hluska »

embedding-shape wrote: post #386
dotancohen wrote: post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not pointing out a contradiction. I am pointing out that this site - which otherwise seems great - it heavily promoting the popular-online side of a very controversial subject. It looks like they know how to grow an audience at the expense of discourse, because those adherent to the popular-online side will heavily attack all publications that discuss the other side. Recognising this, it is hard to seriously cons…

> - it heavily promoting the popular-online side of a very controversial subject Any specific examples? I took a quick browse but didn't find anything that fit what you're talking about, and what you're saying is a bit vague (maybe because I'm not from the US). Could you link a specific article and then tell us what exactly is wrong?

[flagged]

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me – more things have happened

#554

Post by bombcar »

clint wrote: post #514
bombcar wrote: post #493

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, unless the original owner is still involved Aurich is likely most senior left.

Ken is still the EIC of Ars, and has been for nearly 30 years now, likely longer than most of people in this thread have been alive. You can literally read the staff directory without having to guess: https://arstechnica.com/staff-directory/ Most of the people working at Ars are the exact same people who have been working there for the better part of their entire existence (source: me) Most of them _are_ experts in t…

Is Ken still actively involved? He seems to appear to clarify something and then disappear into the background until the next major change (I expect the article about this to be bylined to him, as is appropriate).

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me – more things have happened

#555

Post by ordersofmag »

01100011 wrote: post #451
airstrike wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

God, I didn't need to know that

How do I report online harassment? There's probably a button but I can't find it because I misplaced my reading glasses.

Isn't arstechnica that new site that replaced slashdot?

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me – more things have happened

#556

Post by andrewflnr »

gnarlouse wrote: post #476
andrewflnr wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But also, man, it seems like we’re headed in a direction where writing code by hand is passé Do you think humans will be able to be effective supervisors or "review-engineers" of LLMs without hands-on coding experience of their own? And if not, how will they get it? That training opportunity is exactly what the given issue in matplotlib was designed to provide, and safeguarding it was the exact reason the LLM PR wa…

(In this response I may be heavily discounting the value of debugging, but unit tests also exist) This is sort of something that I think needs to be better parsed out, as a lot of engineers hold this perspective and I don’t find it to be precise enough. In college, I got a baseline familiarity with the mechanics of coding, ie “what are classes, functions, variables.” But eventually, once I graduated college and enter…

> So the impetus for good code isn’t really time in the saddle as much as it is time in the forums/blogs/oreilly-books.

I disagree strongly with this. I read the books, blog-posts, forums, etc early in my career (if you can call it that when I was essentially a teen with a hobby), but didn't fully understand how to apply them, and notably when to apply them, until I had sufficient "time in the saddle". You don't understand the problems that code architecture techniques solve until you've actually had to modify a messy project with a lot of code already written.

> you could become equivalently capable by largely reading and thinking

Theoretically possible, but doing is often orders of magnitude more efficient. You could read reams of books about gardening without actually knowing how to dig a hole.

Part of the deal is that typing forces you to actually pay attention instead of skimming and assuming you got the gist. Following a tutorial by copy-pasting never really worked as well as typing the code, so why would watching an LLM code be any better? I suspect that even as you're running "static analysis" in your head and looking for vulnerabilities, you're using neural pathways forged while coding by hand.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me – more things have happened

#557

Post by fatherwavelet »

acdha wrote: post #393
everdrive wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ars has been going downhill for sometime now. I think it's difficult for a lot of these bigger publishers to be anything other than access journalism and advertising. I'm not saying Ars is fully there yet, but the pull is strong.

The bigger story is the way tech companies sucked the oxygen out of journalism. This started with capturing a growing chunk of ad revenue but then became editorial control as everyone started picking headlines, writing styles, and publication schedules to please the tech companies which control whether they receive 80% of their traffic. Everyone writes like Buzzfeed now because Twitter and Facebook made that the most…

Like the good old days when the media was basically complicit in support of Iraq having weapons of mass destruction?

It seems to me that the news has always kind of been mass bullshit. What has changed is we democratized the production of mass bullshit.

Now everyone can make their own version of "Remember the Maine, to Hell with Spain!"

Not to mention, podcasts go deeper on subjects than any investigative journalist ever really could given the format.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me – more things have happened

#558

Post by whyenot »

astrange wrote: post #520
whyenot wrote: post #489

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's smart to be skeptical of any "review" site that depends on affiliate links for income. The incentive is no longer to provide advice, it's to sell you something. Anything. Click the link. Good. Now buy something. That's right. Add it to your basket. It doesn't matter what you buy. Yes, higher priced items are better. Checkout. We get our sweet kickback, nice. Unfortunately, every review site uses affiliat…

Wirecutter is part of NYTimes and depends on crosswords for income. I haven't always agreed with them and sometimes the articles are clearly wrong because they're several years old, but they're usually good. (I think I last seriously disagreed with them about a waffle maker.)

Wirecutter has stated in the past, maybe it was on their podcast, that they get a lot of their income from affiliate links. They have done some fairly suspicious things like their “gift guide”s for Christmas which are little more than long lists of products with affiliate links. Same for their “sales guide” for Black Friday, and there have been other cases. That doesn’t mean their reviews are bad, I just approach them with a certain amount of skepticism.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me – more things have happened

#560

Post by BikiniPrince »

vanc_cefepime wrote: post #548
goalieca wrote: post #432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I read ars technica during undergrad over 20 years ago now. It complemented my learning in cpu architecture quite well. While in class we learned old stuff, they covered the modern Intel things. And also, who could forget the fantastically detailed and expert macOS reviews. I’ve never seen any reviews of any kind like that since. I dropped ars from my rss sometime around covid when they basically dropped their journa…

What blogs do you subscribe to for tech stuff in your RSS feed? I still have Ars but I have to weed through a lot of stuff like the political articles. Really like just pure tech like how it used to be with the old Anandtech.

If you find a nice pure tech feed I would jump for joy. Too many places have been overtaken with nonsense.
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