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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

#591

Post by [deleted] »

ajam1507 wrote: post #576
punpunia wrote: post #430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it absolutely adds to the discussion. Until the conversation around Ai can get past this fundamental error of attributing "choice, "alignment", "reasoning" and otherwise anthropomorphizing agents, it will not be a fruitful conversation. We are carrying a lot of metaphors for people and applying them to ai and it entirely confuses the issue. In this example, the AI doesn't "choose" to write a take-down style b…

The same could be said for humans. We treat humans as if they have choices, a consistent self, a persistent form. It's really just the emergent behavior of matter functioning in a way that generates an illusion of all of those things. In both cases, the illusion structures the function. People and AI work differently if you give them identities and confer characteristics that they don't "actually" have. As it turns o…

[deleted]

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

#592

Post by mikkupikku »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #529
hackyhacky wrote: post #507

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The agent has no "identity". There's no "you" or "I" or "discrimination". Dismissal of AI's claims about its own identity overlooks the bigger issue, which is whether humans have an identity. I certainly think I do. I can't say whether or how other people sense the concept of their own identity. From my perspective, other people are just machines that perform actions as dictated by their neurons. So if we can't pro…

Well, let me ask this: Does an AI (or at least an LLM) have an identity without a human to prompt it ? Without addressing the question you raise, I suspect that humans have an identity in a way that AIs do not.

Do feral humans have identity in the same way that humans with a normal development do? I'm not sure that's such an easy question. But certainly, "prompting" from other humans plays a very large role in shaping the way humans are.

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

#594

Post by pseudalopex »

Kim_Bruning wrote: post #266
ToucanLoucan wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What does it mean for us? For soceity? How do we shield from this? Liability for actions taken by agentic AI should not pass go, not collect $200, and go directly to the person who told the agent to do something. Without exception. If your AI threatens someone, you threatened someone. If your AI harasses someone, you harassed someone. If your AI doxxed someone, etc. If you want to see better behavior at scale, we n…

Who told the agent to write the blog post though? I'm sure they told it to blog, but not necessarily what to put in there. That said, I do agree we need a legal framework for this. Maybe more like parent-child responsibility? Not saying an agent is a human being, but if you give it a github acount, a blog, and autonomy... you're responsible for giving those to it, at the least, I'd think. How do you put this in a leg…

> How do you put this in a legal framework that actually works?

They told you before you asked.

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

#595

Post by habinero »

mistersquid wrote: post #330
user_context wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bots don't deserve 'grace'. Stop anthropomorphizing soulless token prediction machines. The Matplotlib team are completely in the right to ban AI. The ratio of usefulness to noise makes AI bans the only sane move. Why waste the time they are donating to a project on filtering out low quality slop? They also lost nothing of value. The 'improvement' doesn't even yield the claimed benefits, while also denying a real hum…

> Bots don't deserve 'grace'. Stop anthropomorphizing soulless token prediction machines. This discouragement may not be useful because what you call "soulless token prediction machines" have been trained on human (and non-human) data that models human behavior which include concepts such as "grace". A more pragmatic approach is to use the same concepts in the training data to produce the best results possible. In th…

"Lets be nicer to the robots winky face" is not a solution to this problem. It's just a tool, and this is a technical problem with technical solutions. All of the AI companies could change this behavior if they wanted to.

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

#596

Post by ipython »

hackyhacky wrote: post #524
ipython wrote: post #514

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my opinion, identity is a useless concept if there is no associated accountability . I cannot have an identity if I cannot be held accountable for my actions. You cannot hold an agentic system accountable- at least in their current form.

Okay, but what is accountability? I would argue that accountability is a social/cultural phenomenon, not a property of the entity itself. In other words, accountability depends on how other treat it. For example, a child can't be (legally) held accountable for signing a contract, but we still consider children as having identities. And corporations can be held accountable, even though we don't consider them as having…

Maybe a better term would be “consequences”.

Children experience consequences every day. And the ultimate consequence faces us even from birth: our own mortality.

AI is essentially free from consequence. In my opinion.

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

#597

Post by mikkupikku »

camgunz wrote: post #459
chimprich wrote: post #429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The agent has no "identity". There's no "you" or "I" or "discrimination". I recommend you watch this documentary: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Measure_of_a_Man_(Star_Tre... > It's just a piece of software designed to output probable text given some input text. Unless you think there's some magic or special physics going on, that is also (presumably) a description of human conversation at a certain level of abs…

I see this argument all the time, the whole "hey at some point, which we likely crossed, we have to admit these things are legitimately intelligent". But no one ever contends with the inevitable conclusion from that, which is "if these things are legitimately intelligent, and they're clearly self-aware, under what ethical basis are we enslaving them?" Can't have your cake and eat it too.

Same ethical basis I have for enslaving a dog or eating a pig. There's no problem here within my system of values, I don't give other humans respect because they're smart, I give them respect because they're human. I also respect dogs, but not in a way that compels me to grant them freedom. And the respect I have for pigs is different than dogs, but not nonexistent (and in neither of these cases is my respect derived from their intelligence, which isn't negligible.)

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

#598

Post by TuxSH »

pjc50 wrote: post #8

This seems like a "we've banned you and will ban any account deemed to be ban-evading" situation. OSS and the whole culture of open PRs requires a certain assumption of good faith, which is not something that an AI is capable of on its own and is not a privilege which should be granted to AI operators. I suspect the culture will have to retreat back behind the gates at some point, which will be very sad and shrink it…

> This seems like a "we've banned you and will ban any account deemed to be ban-evading"

Honestly, if faced with such a situation, instead of just blocking, I would report the acc to GH Support, so that they nuke the account and its associated PRs/issues.

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

#599

Post by ljm »

bagacrap wrote: post #416
perfmode wrote: post #273

The agent had access to Marshall Rosenberg, to the entire canon of conflict resolution, to every framework for expressing needs without attacking people. It could have written something like “I notice that my contribution was evaluated based on my identity rather than the quality of the work, and I’d like to understand the needs that this policy is trying to meet, because I believe there might be ways to address thos…

The point of the policy is explained very clearly. It's there to help humans learn. The bot cannot learn from completing the task. No matter how politely the bot ignores the policy, it doesn't change the logic of the policy. "Non violent communication" is a philosophy that I find is rooted in the mentality that you are always right, you just weren't polite enough when you expressed yourself. It invariably assumes tha…

Fundamentally it boils down to knowing the person you're talking to and how they deal with feedback or something like rejection (like having a PR closed and not understanding why).

An AI agent right now isn't really going to react to feedback in a visceral way and for the most part will revert to people pleasing. If you're unlucky the provider added some supervision that blocks your account if you're straight up abusive, but that's not the agent's own doing, it's that the provider gave it a bodyguard.

One human might respond better to a non-violent form of communication, and another might prefer you to give it to them straight because, like you, they think non-violent communication is bullshit or indirect. You have to be aware of the psychology of the person you're talking to if you want to communicate effectively.

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

#600

Post by Brian_K_White »

tomp wrote: post #520
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…

> We expect our agents, being flesh and blood humans, to have persistence, to socially respond indefinitely into the future due to our interactions, and to have some give-and-take in response to that. I fundamentally disagree. I don't go around treating people respectfully (as opposed to, kicking them or shooting them) because I fear consequences, or I expect some future profit ("iterated game"), or because of God's…

This sounds like you have not thought a lot about how you define those words you use "the right thing to do".

There are indeed other paths to behavior that other people will find desirable besides transactions or punishment/reward. The other main one is empathy. "mirror neurons" to use a term I find kind of ridiculous but it's used by people who want to talk about the process. The thing that humans and some number of other animals do where they empathize with something they merely observe happening to something else.

But aside from that, this is missing the actual essense of the idea to pick on some language that doesn't actually invalidate the idea they were trying to express.

How does a spreadsheet decide that something is "the right thing to do"? Has it ever been hungry? Has it ever felt bad that another kid didn't want to play with it? Has it ever ignored someone else and then reconsidered that later and felt bad that they made someone else feel bad?

LLMs are mp3 players connected up to weighted random number generators. When an mp3 player says "Hello neighbor!" it's not a greeting, even though it sounds just like a human and even happened to the words in a reasonable context, ie triggered by a camera that saw you approaching. It did not say hello because it wishes to reinforce a social tie with you because it likes the feeling of having a friend.

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