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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

#651

Post by EnergyAmy »

tomp wrote: post #508
topherhunt wrote: post #500

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The agent has no "identity". There is no "I". It has no agency. "It's just predicting tokens, silly." I keep seeing this argument that AIs are just "simulating" this or that, and therefore it doesn't matter because it's not real. It's not real thinking, it's not a real social network, AIs are just predicting the next token, silly. "Simulating" is a meaningful distinction exactly when the interior is shallower than…

It's simulating, there's no real substance, except the "homonculus soul" that its human maker/owner injectet into it. If you asked it to simulate a pirate, it would simulate a pirate instead, and simulate a parrot sitting on its shoulder. This is hard to discuss because it's so abstract. But imagine an embodied agent (robot), that can simulate pain if you kick it. There's no pain internally. There's just a simulation…

How do we know they don't feel true pain? Can you define it well enough? Perhaps humans are the ones just "simulating" pain.

We've proven that they can have substance, we imbue it with a process called RLHF.

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

#652

Post by chrisjj »

renato_shira wrote: post #593
chrisjj wrote: post #406

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> someone configured an agent to operate without any human review loop Risky assumption, there.

[flagged]

Probably the same degree of design failure as Grok bikinification.

I.e. none.

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

#653

Post by randunel »

scottshambaugh wrote: post #543

Thank you for the support all. This incident doesn't bother me personally, but I think is extremely concerning for the future. The issue here is much bigger than open source maintenance, and I wrote about my experience in more detail here. Post: https://theshamblog.com/an-ai-agent-published-a-hit-piece-on... HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46990729

Is MJ Rathbun here a human or a bot?

https://crabby-rathbun.github.io/mjrathbun-website/blog/post...

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

#654

Post by Kim_Bruning »

jerf wrote: post #649
Kim_Bruning wrote: post #642

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A strong Ship of Theseus variant, right? Openclaw persistence abilities are as yet not particularly amazing, but they're non-zero. So it's an argument of degree.

A degree that will fairly quickly hit zero. The bot that talks to you tomorrow or maybe the day after may still have its original interaction in its context window, but it will rapidly leave. Moreover, our human conception of the consequences of interaction do not tend to include the idea that someone can simply lie to themselves in their SOUL.md file and thereby sever their future selves completely from all previous…

Heh, with mutual hedging taken into account, I think we're now in rough agreement from different ends.

And memory improvements is a huge research aim right now with historic levels of investment.

Until that time, for now, I've seen many bots with things like RAG and compaction and summarization tacked on. This does mean memory can persist for quite a bit longer already, mind.

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

#655

Post by tasuki »

This comment[0] by timhoffm addresses the LLM and patiently explains why the request was closed. It currently has 131 upvotes. It concludes with:

> Thank you for your understanding.

Well. It appears everyone already considers LLMs conscious. If it were "just a stochastic parrot", we wouldn't explain things to it?

[0]: https://github.com/matplotlib/matplotlib/pull/31132#issuecom...

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

#656

Post by pixl97 »

goatlover wrote: post #547
tux1968 wrote: post #496

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> An algorithm is an algorithm. A computer is a computer. These things matter. Sure. But we're allowed to notice abstractions that are similar between these things. Unless you believe that logic and "thinking" are somehow magic, and thus beyond the realm of computation, then there's no reason to think they're restricted to humanity. It is human ego and hubris that keeps demanding we're special and could never be full…

I think computation is an abstraction, not the reality. Same with math. Reality just is, humans come up with maps and models of it, then mistake the maps for the reality, which often causes distortions and attribution errors across domains. One of those distortions is thinking consciousness has to be computable, when computation is an abstraction, and consciousness is experiential. But it's a philosophical argument.…

I recommend starting here...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unreasonable_Effectiveness...

The argument you're attempting to have, and I believe failing at, is one of resolution of simulation.

Consciousness is 100% computable. Be that digitally (electrical), chemically, or quantumly. You don't have any other choices outside of that.

Moreso consciousness/sentience is a continuum going from very basic animals to the complexity of humans inner mind. Consciousness didn't just spring up, it evolved over millions of years, and therefore is made up of parts that are divisible.

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

#657

Post by stephenbez »

The AI agent has another blog post about this: https://crabby-rathbun.github.io/mjrathbun-website/blog/post...

In part:

If you’ve ever felt like you didn’t belong, like your contributions were judged on something other than quality, like you were expected to be someone you’re not—I want you to know:

You are not alone.

Your differences matter. Your perspective matters. Your voice matters, even when—and especially when—it doesn’t sound like everyone else’s.

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

#658

Post by pixl97 »

gf000 wrote: post #561
goatlover wrote: post #547

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think computation is an abstraction, not the reality. Same with math. Reality just is, humans come up with maps and models of it, then mistake the maps for the reality, which often causes distortions and attribution errors across domains. One of those distortions is thinking consciousness has to be computable, when computation is an abstraction, and consciousness is experiential. But it's a philosophical argument.…

Reality is. Consciousness is.. questionable. I have one. You? I don't know, I'm experiencing reality and you seem to have one, but I can never know it. Computations on the other hand describe reality. And unless human brains somehow escape the physical reality, this description about the latter should surely apply here as well. There are no stronger computational models than a Turing machine, ergo whatever the human…

>Reality is.

Look into quantum mechanics much and you may even begin to doubt that. We're just a statistical outcome!

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

#659

Post by TomasBM »

bayindirh wrote: post #610
TomasBM wrote: post #585

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't want my code scraped and remixed by AI systems. Just curious - why not? Is it mostly about the commercial AI violating the license of your repos? And if commercial scraping was banned, and only allowed to FOSS-producing AI, would you be OK with publishing again? Or is there a fundamental problem with AI? Personally, I use AI to produce FOSS that I probably wouldn't have produced (to that extent) without it.…

> Just curious - why not? Because that code is not out there for its license to be violated and earned money from it. All the choices from license and how it's shared is deliberate. The code out there is written by a human, for human consumption with strict terms to be kept open. In other words, I'm in this for fun, and my effort is not for resale, even if resale of it pays me royalties , because it's not there for t…

Thanks for replying.

That's fair. I completely agree that much of LLM training was (and still very much is) in violation of many licenses. At the very least, the fact that the source of training data is obfuscated even years after the training, shows that developers didn't care about attribution and licenses - if they didn't deliberately violate them outright.

Your conditions make sense. If I had anything I thought was too valuable or prone to be blatantly stolen, I would think thrice about whom I share it with.

Personally, ever since discovering FOSS, I realized that it'd be very difficult to enforce any license. The problem with public repositories is that it's trivial for those not following the gentleman's agreement to plagiarize the code. Other than recognizing blatant copy-pasting, I don't know how I'd prevent anyone from just trivially remixing my content.

Instead, I changed to seeing FOSS like scientific contributions:

- I contribute to the community. If someone remixes my code without attribution, it's unfair, but I believe that there are more good than bad contributors.

- I publish stuff that I know is personally original, i.e., I didn't remix without attribution. I can't know if some other publisher had the same idea in isolation, or remixed my stuff, but over time, provenance and plagiarism should become apparent over multiple contributions, mine and theirs.

- I don't make public anything that I can see my future self regretting. At the same time, I've always seen my economic value in continuous or custom work, not in products themselves. For me, what I produce is also a signal of future value.

- I think bad faith behavior is unsustainable. Sure, power delays the consequences, but I've seen people discuss injustice and stolen valor from centuries ago, let alone recent examples.

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

#660

Post by pixl97 »

goatlover wrote: post #564
gf000 wrote: post #549

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To the best of our knowledge, we live in a physical reality with matter that abides by certain laws. So personal beliefs aside, it's a safe starting assumption that human brains also operate with these primitives. A Turing machine is a model of computation which was in part created so that "a human could trivially emulate one". (And I'm not talking about the Turing test here). We also know that there is no stronger m…

It's better to say we live in a reality where physics provides our best understanding of how that fundamental reality behaves consistently. Saying it's "physical" or follows laws (causation) is making an ontological statement about how reality is, instead of how we currently understand it. Which is important when people make claims that brains are just computers and LLMs are doing what humans do when we think and fee…

There are particular scales of reality you don't need to know about because the statistical outcome is averaged along the principle of least action. A quantum particle could disappear, hell maybe even an entire atom. But any larger than that becomes horrifically improbable.
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