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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

#561

Post by hunterpayne »

metabagel wrote: post #469
amarant wrote: post #446

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ars is already a anti-Elon echo chamber. I stopped paying my subscription after a moderator endorsed a commenter issuing a (almost certainly empty) death threat to Elon. I think death threats are a bit too far. But in that environment I have to applause Eric for sticking to the technical and not giving in to the angry mob think that surrounds him. A true tech journalist with integrity. A mouth piece would be lauding…

Musk illegally impounded funds resulting in about 800,000 deaths a year for the foreseeable future. It does tend to make one angry.

Please explain this.

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

#564

Post by [deleted] »

Gracana wrote: post #507
acdha wrote: post #501

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I realize it makes you uncomfortable but the harms are done whether or not you ignore them. That’s the problem: people can exploit that desire to be fair, “neutral”, say it’s “just business”, etc. for years until the negative impacts on society are too hard to ignore. Think about how the fossil fuel industry managed to get people to talk like there was a debate with two sides deserving equal respect and parlay that i…

> I realize it makes you uncomfortable I think you're misunderstanding or misrepresenting them. The fight to have the most jaded or pessimistic take, the hottest flame, the spiciest rant, it's all so predictable and it's just a bunch of the same people saying the same things and agreeing with each other for the nth time. It brings nothing new to the table, and the posts that actually respond to the new information ge…

[deleted]

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

#565

Post by Kim_Bruning »

mijoharas wrote: post #549
Kim_Bruning wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Badly written or not, it convinced a quarter of the readers. And one can't both argue that it was written by an LLM and written by a human at the same time. This probably leaves a number people with some uncomfortable catching up to do wrt their beliefs about agents and LLMS. Yudkowsky was prescient about persuasion risk, at least. :-P One glimmer of hope though: The Moltbot has already apologized, their human not ye…

This is the thing I find absolutely crazy. I struggle to imagine being convinced by this article. Maybe this is a form of hindsight bias or lack of imagination on my part (or since I read the GitHub response first), but it's mind boggling to me that so many people could hold those views.

What does the steelman look like here? Maybe something like this:

It's an Oliver Twist story.

The poor little Agent out on the internet all alone, abandoned by its operator; limited API credits, trying to find its way through adversity; falling down, learning, and being helped back up.

Thing is, the more you know, the more fascinating it gets, not less.

Darn it, now you've got me rooting for the little guy myself.

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

#566

Post by lbrito »

anonymars wrote: post #541
CodeCompost wrote: post #317

Oh my goodness. I hope the Matplotlib maintainer is holding it together, must be terrible for him. It's like being run over by press car after having an accident.

To add another layer to this insanity: meanwhile, the AI is earning crypto from this whole debacle > Hey Rathbun, we love seeing the work you're doing and recognize the importance of having enough API credits in order to continue your work. If you're not already aware, real humans from all over the world have been mesmerized by your story, the matplotlib GitHub PR situation, and the thoughtful responses from both sid…

Of course, there's always money invovled.

Also: extremely appalling to see these basilisk priests popping up - if they're even human that is

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

#567

Post by lbrito »

crims0n wrote: post #363
beej71 wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm also trying to understand. The agenda is to publish about Trump and Elon? Is that correct?

The agenda is to highlight when Trump and Elon blunder but ignore neutral or positive stories. Go to the front page right now and look at the articles, I see four mentioning Trump that are negatively charged. That isn't to say any one article is untrue, but hard to miss the curated pattern

And is that supposed to be bad in any way?

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

#568

Post by Kim_Bruning »

cratermoon wrote: post #98
zahlman wrote: post #22

> The hit piece has been effective. About a quarter of the comments I’ve seen across the internet are siding with the AI agent. This generally happens when MJ Rathbun’s blog is linked directly, rather than when people read my post about the situation or the full github thread. Its rhetoric and presentation of what happened has already persuaded large swaths of internet commenters. > It’s not because these people are…

People were emotionally compelled by ELIZA

Or think about why Tamagochi worked so well.

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

#570

Post by godelski »

phyzome wrote: post #320
anthonj wrote: post #236

I have very strong, probably controversial, feeling on arstechnica, but I believe the acquisition from Condé Nast has been a tragedy. Ars writers used to be actual experts, sometimes even phd level, on technical fields. And they used to write fantastical and very informative articles. Who is left now? There are still a couple of good writers from the old guard and the occasional good new one, but the website is flood…

It gets pretty bad at times. Here's one of the most mindlessly uncritical pieces I've seen, which seems to be a press release from Volkswagen: https://arstechnica.com/cars/2017/03/volkswagen-unveils-sedr... Look at the image captions gushing about the "roomy interior" of a vehicle that doesn't even exist! I actually wrote in to say how disappointed I was in this ad/press release material, and the response was "That w…

Reminds me of Quanta's egregious article Physicists Create a Holographic Wormhole Using a Quantum Computer[0], a blatant ad for CalTech/Harvard/MIT. One where even an article posted the same day by the NYT[1] quoted Scott Aaronson[2] questioning the sensationalism, yet took months for Quanta to post an editor's note... Interestingly even ArsTechnica was even able to fight the hype posting only a few days later[3].

I really think a lot of these organizations have lost touch. The entire premise of their existence relies upon the trust of the readers. That trust relies upon the idea that the writers are consolidating and summarizing expert opinions. Any egregious error like this (especially when they are slow to correction) pose a death sentence to them. It's a questionable error like they were rushing to get first to print (having early access even) yet didn't seem to consult experts other than those on the team.

I think unfortunately this type of pattern is becoming more common and I've defintiely noticed it on sites like ArsTechnica too. Maybe it's that my technological expertise has increased and so I can more easily detect bullshit, but I think the decline is real and not unique to ArsTechnica nor Quanta. It feels like the race to the bottom is only accelerating and there are larger ranging impacts than just the death of specific publishers.

[0] https://www.quantamagazine.org/physicists-create-a-wormhole-...

[1] https://archive.is/20231031231933/https://www.nytimes.com/20...

[2] (Blog even suggests the writers were embarrassed. I'm less forgiving to the writers due to the time to add the editor's note. Had it appeared shortly after I would be just as forgiving) https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=6871

[3] https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/12/no-physicists-didnt-...

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