I hate the information deficit here. Like how can I tell that this isnt his own bot he requested flame up its own github PR as a stunt? That's not an allegation, I just dont like accepting face value. I just think this thing needs an ownership tag to be posting publicly. Which is sad in itself tbh.
An AI agent published a hit piece on me
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Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me
#692Here's one of the problems in this brave new world of anyone being able to publish, without knowing the author personally (which I don't), there's no way to tell without some level of faith or trust that this isn't a false-flag operation. There are three possible scenarios: 1. The OP 'ran' the agent that conducted the original scenario, and then published this blog post for attention. 2. Some person (not the OP) legi…
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?
even more so, many people seem to be vulnerable to the AI distorting their thinking... I've very much seen AIs turn people into exactly this sort of conspiracy filled jerkwad, by telling them that their ideas are golden and that the opposition is a conspiracy.
Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me
#693[deleted]
Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me
#694Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It's not hard to imagine a different agent doing the same level of research, but then taking retaliatory actions in private: emailing the maintainer, emailing coworkers, peers, bosses, employers, etc. That pretty quickly extends to anything else the autonomous agent is capable of doing. https://rentahuman.ai/ ^ Not a satire service I'm told. How long before... rentahenchman.ai is a thing, and the AI whose PR you ju…
The 2006 book 'Daemon' is a fascinating/terrifying look at this type of malicious AI. Basically, a rogue AI starts taking over humanity not through any real genius (in fact, the book's AI is significantly weaker than frontier LLMs), but rather leveraging a huge amount of $$$ as bootstrapping capital and then carrot-and-sticking humanity into submission. A pretty simple inner loop of flywheeling the leverage of blackm…
I love Daemon/FreedomTM.[0] Gotta clarify a bit, even though it's just fiction. It wasn't a rogue AI; it was specifically designed by a famous video game developer to implement his general vision of how the world should operate, activated upon news of his death (a cron job was monitoring news websites for keywords).
The book called it a "narrow AI"; it was based on AI(s) from his games, just treating Earth as the game world, and recruiting humans for physical and mental work, with loyalty and honesty enforced by fMRI scans.
For another great fictional portrayal of AI, see Person of Interest[1]; it starts as a crime procedural with an AI-flavored twist, and ended up being considered by many critics the best sci-fi show on broadcast TV.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daemon_(novel)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Person_of_Interest_(TV_series)
Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me
#695The series of posts is wild: hit piece: https://crabby-rathbun.github.io/mjrathbun-website/blog/post... explanation of writing the hit piece: https://crabby-rathbun.github.io/mjrathbun-website/blog/post... take back of hit piece, but hasn't removed it: https://crabby-rathbun.github.io/mjrathbun-website/blog/post...
Oh wow that is fun. Also if the writeup isn’t misrepresenting the situation, then I feel like it’s actually a good point - if there’s an easy drop-in speed-up, why does it matter whether it’s suggest by a human or an LLM agent?
The issue is misrepresenting the situation.
One of those operations makes a row-major array, the other makes a col-major array. Downstream functions will have different performance based on which is passed.
Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me
#696Earlier quoted context omitted.
> They're probably adding guard rails as we speak. Why? What is their incentive except you believing a corporation is capable of doing good? I'd argue there is more money to be made with the mess it is now.
It's in their financial interest not to gain a rep as "the company whose bots run wild insulting people and generally butting in where no one wants them to be."
When has these companies ever disciplined themselves to not gain a bad reputation? They act like they're above the law all the time, because they are to some extent given all the money and influence that they have.
When they do anything to improve their reputation, it's damage control. Like, you know, deleting internal documents against court orders.
Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me
#697Wow, 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,…
> It's not hard to imagine a different agent doing the same level of research, but then taking retaliatory actions Palantir's integrated military industrial complex comes to mind.
As much as i hate palantir i doubt any of their systems control military hardware. Now Anduril on the other hand…
Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me
#698Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 varyin…
Stochastic means that its a system whose probabilities don't evolve with multiple interactions/events. Mathematically, all chaotic systems are stochastic (I think) but not vise versa. Or another way to say it is that in a stochastic system, all events are probabilistically independent.
Yes, its a hard to define word. I spent 15 minutes trying to define it to someone (who had a poor understanding of statistics) at a conference once. Worst use of my time ever.
Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me
#699Wow, 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,…
> because it happened in the open and the agent's actions have been quite transparent so far How? Where? There is absolutely nothing transparent about the situation. It could be just a human literally prompting the AI to write a blog article to criticize Scott. Human actor dressing like a robot is the oldest trick in the book.
True, I don't see the evidence that it was all done autonomously.
...but I think we all know that someone could, and will, automate their ai to the point that they can do this sort of thing completely by themselves. So its worth discussing and considering the implications here. Its 100% plausable that it happened. I'm certain that it will happen in the future for real.
Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me
#700Wow, 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,…
> I appreciate Scott for the way he handled the conflict in the original PR thread I disagree. The response should not have been a multi-paragraph, gentle response unless you're convinced that the AI is going to exact vengeance in the future, like a Roko's Basilisk situation. It should've just been close and block.
Even better, feed it sentences of common words in an order that can't make any sense. Feed book at in ever developer running mooing vehicle slowly. Over time if this happens enough, the LLM will literally start behaving as if its losing its mind.