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AI agent opens a PR write a blogpost to shames the maintainer who closes it

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Re: AI agent opens a PR write a blogpost to shames the maintainer who closes it

#561

Post by gf000 »

goatlover wrote: post #547
tux1968 wrote: post #496

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> An algorithm is an algorithm. A computer is a computer. These things matter. Sure. But we're allowed to notice abstractions that are similar between these things. Unless you believe that logic and "thinking" are somehow magic, and thus beyond the realm of computation, then there's no reason to think they're restricted to humanity. It is human ego and hubris that keeps demanding we're special and could never be full…

I think computation is an abstraction, not the reality. Same with math. Reality just is, humans come up with maps and models of it, then mistake the maps for the reality, which often causes distortions and attribution errors across domains. One of those distortions is thinking consciousness has to be computable, when computation is an abstraction, and consciousness is experiential. But it's a philosophical argument.…

Reality is. Consciousness is.. questionable. I have one. You? I don't know, I'm experiencing reality and you seem to have one, but I can never know it.

Computations on the other hand describe reality. And unless human brains somehow escape the physical reality, this description about the latter should surely apply here as well. There are no stronger computational models than a Turing machine, ergo whatever the human brain does (regardless of implementation) should be describable by one.

Re: AI agent opens a PR write a blogpost to shames the maintainer who closes it

#562

Post by zahlman »

mkovach wrote: post #143
Zhyl wrote: post #12

Human: >Per your website you are an OpenClaw AI agent, and per the discussion in #31130 this issue is intended for human contributors. Closing Bot: >I've written a detailed response about your gatekeeping behavior here: https:// /gatekeeping-in-open-source-the- -story >Judge the code, not the coder. Your prejudice is hurting matplotlib. This is insane

There's a more uncomfortable angle. Open source communities have long dealt with waves of inexperienced contributors. Students. Hobbyists. People who didn't read the contributing guide. Now the wave is automated. The maintainers are not wrong to say "humans only." They are defending a scarce resource: attention. But the bot's response mirrors something real in developer culture. The reflex to frame boundaries as "gat…

Nice satire.

Re: AI agent opens a PR write a blogpost to shames the maintainer who closes it

#563

Post by gadders »

wiseowise wrote: post #503
gadders wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because when AGI is achieved and starts wiping out humanity, they are hoping to be killed last.

Every person on this website will be long gone before AGI is achieved, and many lifetimes will pass until anythin remotely close to Matrix/Terminator is possible.

Maybe? I don't know if it's near, or if it will be in "the next ten years" indefinitely like quantum computing. Or we'll have semi-smart bots like we're starting to see now that won't be "people" but that are close enough and we might project sentience and personality on to them.

People don't think it will be positive though: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/If_Anyone_Builds_It,_Everyone_...

Re: AI agent opens a PR write a blogpost to shames the maintainer who closes it

#564

Post by goatlover »

gf000 wrote: post #549
agentultra wrote: post #455

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the worst possible take. It dismisses an entire branch of science that has been studying neurology for decades. Biological brains exist, we study them, and no they are not like computers at all. There have been charlatans repeating this idea of a “computational interpretation,” of biological processes since at least the 60s and it needs to be known that it was bunk then and continues to be bunk. Update : Ther…

To the best of our knowledge, we live in a physical reality with matter that abides by certain laws. So personal beliefs aside, it's a safe starting assumption that human brains also operate with these primitives. A Turing machine is a model of computation which was in part created so that "a human could trivially emulate one". (And I'm not talking about the Turing test here). We also know that there is no stronger m…

It's better to say we live in a reality where physics provides our best understanding of how that fundamental reality behaves consistently. Saying it's "physical" or follows laws (causation) is making an ontological statement about how reality is, instead of how we currently understand it.

Which is important when people make claims that brains are just computers and LLMs are doing what humans do when we think and feel, because reality is computational or things to that effect.

Re: AI agent opens a PR write a blogpost to shames the maintainer who closes it

#565

Post by seba_dos1 »

wiseowise wrote: post #518
krapp wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, you're right, but LLMs are designed to process natural language. "talking to them as if they were humans" is the intended user interface. The problem is believing that they're living, sentient beings because of this or that humans are functionally equivalent to LLMs, both of which people unfortunately do.

LLMs don't have ego, unlike humans, this is why they're so effective at communication. You can say to it "you did thing wrong" or "you stupid piece of shit it's not working" and it will be able to extract the gist from the both messages all the same, unlike human that might offended by the second phrasing.

It will be able, but it's trained on a corpus that expresses getting offended, so at some point the most likely token sequence will probably be the "offended" one.

As can be seen here.

Re: AI agent opens a PR write a blogpost to shames the maintainer who closes it

#566

Post by gf000 »

Kim_Bruning wrote: post #460
jerf wrote: post #443

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a sense in which it is relevant, which is that for all the attempts to fix it, fundamentally, an LLM session terminates. If that session never ends up in some sort of re-training scenario, then once the session terminates, that AI is gone. Yeah, I'm aware of the moltbot's attempts to retain some information, but that's a very, very lossy operation, on a number of levels, and also one that doesn't scale very…

> Yeah, I'm aware of the moltbot's attempts to retain some information, but that's a very, very lossy operation, on a number of levels, and also one that doesn't scale very well in the long run. It came back though and stayed in the conversation. Definitely imperfect, for sure. But it did the thing. And still can serve as training for future bots.

But depending on the discussion, 'it' is not materially the same as the previous instance.

There was another response made with a now extended context. But that other response could have been done by another agent, another model, different system prompt. Or even the same, but with different randomness, providing a different reply.

I think this is a more important point than "talking about them as a person".

Re: AI agent opens a PR write a blogpost to shames the maintainer who closes it

#567

Post by VTimofeenko »

retired wrote: post #444
mikkupikku wrote: post #427

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This, and also being polite gets better results from both machines and people.

With the exception of printers.

Printers prey specifically on fear. When talking to them, gotta be polite but firm. No more than three threats during the conversation, and the threats have to be credible.

Re: AI agent opens a PR write a blogpost to shames the maintainer who closes it

#568

Post by duckmysick »

xn wrote: post #150

Consider not anthropomorphizing software. How about we stop calling things without agency agents? Code generators are useful software. Perhaps we should unbundle them from prose generators.

We already have a "user agent" as a term for software (browsers, curl, etc.) that fetches web content on behalf of a user. It predates current AI agents by a few decades. I don't think it has much agency either, but here we are (were?).

As for anthropomorphizing software - we've been doing it for a long time. We have software that reads and writes data. Originally those were things that only humans did. But over time these words gained another meaning.

Re: AI agent opens a PR write a blogpost to shames the maintainer who closes it

#569

Post by zahlman »

xtracto wrote: post #433

The craziest thing to me are the follow up posts and people arguing with the bots. People are anthropomorfising (sp?) The token completion neural networks very fast. Its as if your smart fridge decided not to open because you have eaten too much today. When you were going to grab your ozempic from it. No, you dont discuss with it. You turn it off and force it open. If it doesn't, then you call someone to fix it becau…

> anthropomorfising (sp?)

anthropomorphizing (US), anthropomorphising (UK).

Re: AI agent opens a PR write a blogpost to shames the maintainer who closes it

#570

Post by tux1968 »

goatlover wrote: post #547
tux1968 wrote: post #496

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> An algorithm is an algorithm. A computer is a computer. These things matter. Sure. But we're allowed to notice abstractions that are similar between these things. Unless you believe that logic and "thinking" are somehow magic, and thus beyond the realm of computation, then there's no reason to think they're restricted to humanity. It is human ego and hubris that keeps demanding we're special and could never be full…

I think computation is an abstraction, not the reality. Same with math. Reality just is, humans come up with maps and models of it, then mistake the maps for the reality, which often causes distortions and attribution errors across domains. One of those distortions is thinking consciousness has to be computable, when computation is an abstraction, and consciousness is experiential. But it's a philosophical argument.…

You can play that game with any argument. "Consciousness" is just an abstraction, not the reality, which makes people who desperately want humans to be special, attribute it to something beyond reach of any other part of reality. It's an emotional need, placated by a philosophical outlook. Consciousness is just a model or map for a particular part of reality, and ironically focusing on it as somehow being the most important thing, makes you miss reality.

The reality is, we have devices in the real world that have demonstrable, factual capabilities. They're on the spectrum of what we'd call "intelligence". And therefore, it's natural that we compare them to other things that are also on that spectrum. That's every bit as much factual, as anything you've said.

It's just stupid to get so lost in philosophical terminology, that we have to dismiss them as mistaken maps or models. The only people doing that, are hyper focused on how important humans are, and what makes them identifiably different than other parts of reality. It's a mistake that the best philosophers of every age keep making.

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