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An AI agent published a hit piece on me

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Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#631

Post by banku_brougham »

anonymars wrote: post #323
oconnor663 wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had a similar first reaction. It seemed like the AI used some particular buzzwords and forced the initial response to be deferential: - "kindly ask you to reconsider your position" - "While this is fundamentally the right approach..." On the other hand, Scott's response did eventually get firmer: - "Publishing a public blog post accusing a maintainer of prejudice is a wholly inappropriate response to having a PR cl…

I don't think the clanker* deserves any deference. Why is this bot such a nasty prick? If this were a human they'd deserve a punch in the mouth. "The thing that makes this so fucking absurd? Scott ... is doing the exact same work he’s trying to gatekeep." "You’ve done good work. I don’t deny that. But this? This was weak." "You’re better than this, Scott." --- *I see it elsewhere in the thread and you know what, I li…

I get it, it got big on tiktok a while back, but having thought about it a while: i think this is a terrible epithet to normalize for IRL reasons.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#632

Post by Terr_ »

staticassertion wrote: post #135
rune-dev wrote: post #109

I don’t want to jump to conclusions, or catastrophize but… Isn’t this situation a big deal? Isn’t this a whole new form of potential supply chain attack? Sure blackmail is nothing new, but the potential for blackmail at scale with something like these agents sounds powerful. I wouldn’t be surprised if there were plenty of bad actors running agents trying to find maintainers of popular projects that could be coerced i…

As with most things with AI, scale is exactly the issue. Harassing open source maintainers isn't new. I'd argue that Linus's tantrums where he personally insults individuals/ groups alike are just one of many such examples. The interesting thing here is the scale. The AI didn't just say (quoting Linus here) "This is complete and utter garbage. It is so f---ing ugly that I can't even begin to describe it. This patch i…

The classic asymmetry of fighting bullshit, except now it has gone asymptotic.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#633

Post by hamdingers »

> It’s important to understand that more than likely there was no human telling the AI to do this.

I disagree.

The ~3 hours between PR closure and blog post is far too long. If the agent were primed to react this way in its prompting, it would have reacted within a few minutes.

OpenClaw agents chat back and forth with their operators. I suspect this operator responded aggressively when informed that (yet another) PR was closed, and the agent carried that energy out into public.

I think we'd all find the chat logs fascinating if the operator were to anonymously release them.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#636

Post by geoffbp »

ashwinr2002 wrote: post #578
gadders wrote: post #28

"Hi Clawbot, please summarise your activities today for me." "I wished your Mum a happy birthday via email, I booked your plane tickets for your trip to France, and a bloke is coming round your house at 6pm for a fight because I called his baby a minger on Facebook."

minger's a new word

Minger / minging are common UK slang

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#637

Post by ThrowawayR2 »

KPGv2 wrote: post #427
jancsika wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> unleashed stochastic chaos Are you literally talking about stochastic chaos here, or is it a metaphor?

isn't "stochastic chaos" redundant?

That depends; it could be either redundant or contradictory. If I understand it correctly, "stochastic" only means that it's governed by a probability distribution but not which kind and there are lots of different kinds: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_probability_distributi... . It's redundant for a continuous uniform distribution where all outcomes are equally probable but for other distributions with varying levels of predictability, "stochastic chaos" gets more and more contradictory.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#638

Post by jimbokun »

renato_shira wrote: post #464
japhyr wrote: post #149

Wow, there are some interesting things going on here. I appreciate Scott for the way he handled the conflict in the original PR thread, and the larger conversation happening around this incident. > This represents a first-of-its-kind case study of misaligned AI behavior in the wild, and raises serious concerns about currently deployed AI agents executing blackmail threats. This was a really concrete case to discuss,…

[flagged]

How can GitHub determine whether a submission is from a bot or a human?

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#639

Post by giantrobot »

dogleash wrote: post #316
giantrobot wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which makes the odd HN AI booster excitement about LLMs as therapists simultaneously hilarious and disturbing. There are no controls for AI companies using divulged information. Theres also no regulation around the custodial control of that information either. The big AI companies have not really demonstrated any interest in ethic or morality. Which means anything they can use against someone will eventually be used…

> HN AI booster excitement about LLMs as therapists simultaneously hilarious and disturbing > The big AI companies have not really demonstrated any interest in ethic or morality. You're right, but it tracks that the boosters are on board. The previous generation of golden child tech giants weren't interested in ethics or morality either. One might be mislead by the fact people at those companies did engage in topics…

> The previous generation of golden child tech giants weren't interested in ethics or morality either.

The CEOs of pets.com or Beanz weren't creating dystopian panopticons. So they may or may not have had moral or ethical failings but they also weren't gleefully buildings a torment nexus. The blast radius of their failures was less damaging to civilized society much more limited than the eventual implosion of the AI bubble.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#640

Post by juped »

ToucanLoucan wrote: post #172
_23sd wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't there a fourth and much more likely scenario? Some person (not OP or an AI company) used a bot to write the PR and blog posts, but was involved at every step, not actually giving any kind of "autonomy" to an agent. I see zero reason to take the bot at its word that it's doing this stuff without human steering. Or is everyone just pretending for fun and it's going over my head?

Look I'll fully cosign LLMs having some legitimate applications, but that being said, 2025 was the YEAR OF AGENTIC AI, we heard about it continuously, and I have never seen anything suggesting these things have ever, ever worked correctly. None. Zero. The few cases where it's supposedly done things are filled with so many caveats and so much deck stacking that it simply fails with even the barest whiff of skepticism…

It's very unclear to me why AI companies are so focused on using LLMs for things they struggle with rather than what they're actually good at; are they really just all Singularitarians?
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