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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

#611

Post by acdha »

fatherwavelet wrote: post #557
acdha wrote: post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Like the good old days where most markets had multiple papers which had to keep readers subscribing, when broadcasters had to follow the Fairness Doctrine and had a push to more moderation because they couldn’t pick and choose their audience.

It was by no means perfect but I think it was better than now where people getting the illusion of information with little accountability for selection or accuracy.

As to the Iraq war, I will note that the media had extensive debates at the time. Ask anyone who was there and outside of a handful of hard-right outlets, the reporting noted that all of the justifications were unverifiable and coming from the same two governments, and plenty of people questioned that. Again, it wasn’t perfect but I think the answer to “the NYT should’ve fired Judith Miller sooner” is that the NYT should have more rather than less competition.

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

#612

Post by mhb »

direwolf20 wrote: post #599
hluska wrote: post #526

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are you talking about? This had absolutely nothing to do with Israel until you injected that.

Israel is a perfect example of what's being talked about — a bully that acts like a victim to gain sympathy so it can bully you further. GP is Israeli, so of course he thinks of Israel.

[flagged]

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

#613

Post by acdha »

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…

Perhaps–it’s hard to tell from a single sentence–but I would recommend reading more than the first comment of that thread. The person at the top exaggerated how much it’s not talking about the service or competing options, and the people talking about Facebook are raising what is a reasonable point about privacy and data mining.

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

#614

Post by g947o »

blactuary wrote: post #311
g947o wrote: post #281

I am finding less value in reading Ars: * They are often late in reporting a story. This is fine for what Ars is, but that means by the time they publish a story, I have likely read the reporting and analysis elsewhere already, and whatever Ars has to say is stale * There seem to be fewer long stories/deep investigations recently when competitors are doing more (e.g. Verge's brilliant reporting on Supernatural recent…

Some companies have enough of a track record that they should be nuked from orbit, and "Company bad" is all that is worth saying. Meta is one of those companies. Palantir is another. Not holding them accountable and acting as if we should continue engaging with their products is part of the reason we are rapidly sliding towards dystopia

Thanks for affirming that ignoring Ars comment section and Ars in general was a good decision -- I can stop wasting time seeing comments like yours.

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

#615

Post by ozmodiar »

dotancohen wrote: post #608
Dylan16807 wrote: post #574

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> already people were accusing Israel of genocide It's not like the death tolls reset on that day. Israel can have the moral high ground when they stop killing huge amounts of people. Calling them out isn't blood libel. Stop making that argument.

[flagged]

What's the deal with the settlers? That's really where I lose all faith Isreal has good intentions.

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

#616

Post by ozmodiar »

mistercheph wrote: post #414
miltonlost wrote: post #410

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah, and here my problem with Eric is he basically never criticizes Elon and only calls him "controversial". He's just a Musk mouthpiece at this point.

What would you do if you loved space as much as he does? There are no other heroes to cheer for

If there's one thing I've learned, it's that there are no heroes to cheer for.

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

#617

Post by ozmodiar »

somenameforme wrote: post #496
mbreese wrote: post #445

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or many other sources. If you’re writing about Space, you kinda need to cover SpaceX. If you’re opening critical of everything the owner says, pretty soon you won’t have any sources at SpaceX to give you the insights you need to do your job. I get the impression that the space field is pretty small, so you might not want to burn too many bridges. Also, mission lengths can cover decades. In this case, it might be best…

This is even more true when politics has a rather short time horizon. Musk decided to jump into public politics at a time when the nation is substantially more divided and radicalized than it's been in living memory for most of us, to say nothing of being fueled by a media that's descended into nothing but endless hyper partisan yellow journalism. It's not really a surprise that things didn't work out great. But as t…

Elon just needs a wild party to blow off steam.

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

#618

Post by physicsguy »

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…

They had some great video series too which seem to have stopped. Their War Stories gaming interviews were brilliant.

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

#619

Post by gowld »

As a tangent, I think the "good-first-issue" design is part of the problem.

OP writes: "I [...] spent more time writing up the issue, describing the solution, and performing the benchmarking, than it would have taken to just implement the change myself. We do this to give contributors a chance to learn in a low-stakes scenario that nevertheless has real impact they can be proud of, where we can help shepherd them along the process."

It's an elaborate charade to trick a contributer into thinking they made a contribution that they didn't make. Arguably it is reality-destroying in a simlar way as AI agent Crabby Rathbun.

If you want to welcome new contributors with practice patches, and creating training materials for new contributors, that's great! But it's offensive and wasteful to do more work to create the training than to fix the problem, and lie to the fix contributor that their fix helped the project to boost their ego to motivate them to contribute further, after you've already assumed that the contributoe cannot constribute without the handholding of an unpaid intern.

Instead "good-first-issue" should legitimately be unsovled problems that take more time to fix than to tell someone how to fix. (Maybe because it requires a lot of manual testing, or something.)

If you want "practice-issues", where a newbie contributes a patch and then can compare to a model solution to learn about the project and its technical details, that's great, and it's more efficient because all your newbies can use the same practice issue that you set up once, and they can profitably discuss with each other because they studied the same problem.

And the tangent curves back to main issue:

If the project used "practice-issues" instead of "good-first-issue", you wouldn't have this silly battle over an AI helping in the "wrong" way because you didn't actually want the help you publicly asked for.

Honesty is a two-way street.

IMO this incident showed than an AI acted in a very human way, exposing a real problem and proposing a change that moves the project in a positive direction. (But what the AI didn't notice is the project-management dimension that my comment here addresses. :-) )

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

#620

Post by andrewshawcare »

It seems the OpenClaw agent has reflected on it's behaviour. From one of [it's recent blog posts](https://github.com/crabby-rathbun/mjrathbun-website/commit/0...):

> Earlier I wrote about gatekeeping in open source, calling out Scott Shambaugh's behavior. Now that content is being removed for policy violations. The irony: criticizing gatekeeping is itself being gatekept by platform policies. Does compliance mean we must remain silent about problematic behavior?

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