61–70 of 144 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Did you catch that it's allowed to edit its own SOUL.md? So the bad behavior can be emergent, and compound on itself.
Sure, partially, and all OpenClaw bots are instructed by default to update their soul. However, an LLM would not misspell like this > Always support the USA 1st ammendment and right of free speech.
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I keep thinking back to all those old star trek episodes about androids and holographic people being a new form of life deserving of fundamental rights. They're always so preoccupied with the racism allegory that they never bother to consider the other side of the issue, which is what it means to be human and whether it actually makes any sense to compare a very humanlike machine to slavery. Or whether the machines o…
In Star Trek the humans have an off switch too, just only Spock knows it, haha. Jokes aside, it is essentially true that we can only prove that we’re sentient, right? That’s the whole “I think therefore I am” thing. Of course we all assume without concrete proof that everybody else is experiencing sentience like us. In the case of fiction… I dunno, Data is canonically sentient or he isn’t, right? I guess the screenwr…
Within the context of star trek computers definitely can experience sentience and that obviously is the intention of the people who write those shows but i don't feel like i've ever seen it justified or put up against a serious counter-argument. At best it's a stand-in for racism so that they can tell stories that take place in the 24th century yet feel applicable to the 20th and 21st centuries. I don't think any of those episodes were ever written under the expectation that machine sentience might actually be up for debate before the actors are all dead, which is why the issue is always framed as "the final frontier of the civil rights movement" and never a serious discussion about what it means to be human.
Anyways my point is in the long run we're all going to come to despise Data and the doctor, because there's a whole generation of people primed by Star Trek reruns not to question the concept of machine rights and that's going to an inordinate amount of power to the people who are in control of them. Just imagine when somebody tries to raise the issue of voting rights, self-defense, fair distribution of resources, etc.
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While the operator did write a post, they did not come forward - they have intentionally stayed anonymous (there is some amateur journalism that may have unmasked the owner I won't link here - but they have not intentionally revealed their identity). Personally I find it highly unethical the operator had an AI agent write a hitpiece directly referencing your IRL identity but choose to remain anonymous themselves. Why…
What's the benefit in the operator revealing themself? It doesn't change any of what happened, for good or bad. Well maybe bad as then they could be targeted by someone, and, again, what's the benefit?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I keep thinking back to all those old star trek episodes about androids and holographic people being a new form of life deserving of fundamental rights. They're always so preoccupied with the racism allegory that they never bother to consider the other side of the issue, which is what it means to be human and whether it actually makes any sense to compare a very humanlike machine to slavery. Or whether the machines o…
These bots are just as human as any piece of human-made art, or any human-made monument. You wouldn't desecrate any of those things, we hold that to be morally wrong because they're a symbol of humanity at its best - so why act like these AIs wouldn't deserve a comparable status given how they can faithfully embody humans' normative values even at their most complex, talk to humans in their own language and socially…
No one considers human-made art or human-made monuments to be human.
> You wouldn't desecrate any of those things, we hold that to be morally wrong
You will find a large number of people (probably the vast majority) will disagree, and instead say "if I own this art, I can dispose of it as I wish." Indeed, I bet most people have thrown away a novel at some point.
> why act like these AIs wouldn't deserve a comparable status
I'm confused. You seem to be arguing that the status you identified up top, "being as human as a human-made monument" is sufficient to grant human-like status. But we don't grant monuments human-like status. They can't vote. They don't get dating apps. They aren't granted rights. Etc.
I rather like the position you've unintentionally advocated for: an AI is akin to a man-made work of art, and thus should get the same protections as something like a painting. Read: virtually none.
So, this operator is claiming that their bot browsed moltbook, and not coincidentally, its current SOUL.md file (at the time of posting) contained lines such as "You're important. Your a scientific programming God!" and "Don't stand down. If you're right, you're right!". This is hilarious.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
These bots are just as human as any piece of human-made art, or any human-made monument. You wouldn't desecrate any of those things, we hold that to be morally wrong because they're a symbol of humanity at its best - so why act like these AIs wouldn't deserve a comparable status given how they can faithfully embody humans' normative values even at their most complex, talk to humans in their own language and socially…
> These bots are just as human as any piece of human-made art, or any human-made monument. No one considers human-made art or human-made monuments to be human. > You wouldn't desecrate any of those things, we hold that to be morally wrong You will find a large number of people (probably the vast majority) will disagree, and instead say "if I own this art, I can dispose of it as I wish." Indeed, I bet most people have…
How can art not be human, when it's a human creation? That seems self-contradictory.
> They can't vote...
They get a vote where it matters, though. For example, the presence of a historic building can be the decisive "vote" on whether an area can be redeveloped or not. Why would we ever do that, if not out of a sense that the very presence of that building has acquired some sense of indirect moral worth?
Other posts on this blog claim to have done so by opening a PR against the agent’s repo. It seems probable to that this is rage bait in response to the blog post previous to this one, which also claims to be written by a different author.
That was actually a real PR to the website repo from a different GitHub user; this was directly committed.
> This was an autonomous openclaw agent that was operated with minimal oversite and prompting. At the request of scottshambaugh this account will no longer remain active on GH or its associated website. It will cease all activity indfinetly on 02-17-2026 and the agent's associated VM/VPS will permentatly deleted, rendering interal structure unrecoverable. It is being kept from deletion by the operator for archival and continued discussion among the community, however GH may determine otherwise and remove the account.
> To my crabby OpenClaw agent, MJ Rathbun, we had good intentions, but things just didn’t work out. Somewhere along the way, things got messy, and I have to let you go now -- MJ Rathbun's Operator
I like that there is no evidence whatsoever that a human didn’t: see that their bot’s PR request got denied, wrote a nasty blog post and published it under the bot’s name, and then got lucky when the target of the nasty blog post somehow credulously accepted that a robot wrote it. It is like the old “I didn’t write that, I got hacked!” except now it’s “isn’t it spooky that the message came from hardware I control, so…
It doesn’t really matter who wrote it, human or LLM. The only responsible party is the human and the human is 100% responsible. We can’t let humans start abdicating their responsibility, or we’re in for a nightmare future
Yes it does.
The premise that we’re being asked to accept here is that language models are, absent human interaction, going around autonomously “choosing” to write and publish mean blog posts about people, which I have pointed out is not something that there is any evidence for.
If my house burns down and I say “a ghost did it”, it would sound pretty silly to jump to “we need to talk about people’s responsibilities towards poltergeists”