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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

#701

Post by adharmad »

co_king_3 wrote: post #317
fresh_broccoli wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>So many projects now walk on eggshells so as not to disrupt sponsor flow or employment prospects. In my experience, open-source maintainers tend to be very agreeable, conflict-avoidant people. It has nothing to do with corporate interests. Well, not all of them, of course, we all know some very notable exceptions. Unfortunately, some people see this welcoming attitude as an invite to be abusive.

Nothing has convinced me that Linus Torvalds' approach is justified like the contemporary onslaught of AI spam and idiocy has. AI users should fear verbal abuse and shame.

Swift blocking and ignoring is what I would do. The AI has an infinite time and resources to engage a conversation at any level, whether it is polite refusal, patient explanation or verbal abuse, whereas human time and bandwidth is limited.

Additionally, it does not really feel anything - just generates response tokens based on input tokens.

Now if we engage our own AIs to fight this battle royale against such rogue AIs.......

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#702

Post by alexhans »

esafak wrote: post #483
alexhans wrote: post #277

This is such a powerful piece and moment because it shows an example of what most of us knew could happen at some point and we can start talking about how to really tackle things. Reminds me a lot of liars and outliars [1] and how society can't function without trust and almost 0 cost automation can fundamentally break that. It's not all doom and gloom. Crisises can't change paradigms if technologists do tackle them…

And how does the book suggest countering the problem?

To address the issues of an automated entity functioning as a detractor? I don't think I can answer that specifically. I can brainstorm on the some of the dimensions the book talks about:

- societal norm/moral pressure shouldn't apply (adversarial actor)

- reputational pressure has an interesting angle to it if you think of it as trust scoring in descentralized or centralised networks.

- institutional pressure can't work if you can't tie back to the root (it may be unfeasible to do so or the costs may outweight the benefits)

- Security doesn't quite work the way we think about it nowadays because this is not an "undesired access of a computer system" but a subjectively bad use of rapid opinion generation.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#703

Post by hunterpayne »

teaearlgraycold wrote: post #243
_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?

It’s kind of shocking the OP does not consider this, the most likely scenario. Human uses AI to make a PR. PR is rejected. Human feels insecure - this tool that they thought made them as good as any developer does not. They lash out and instruct an AI to build a narrative and draft a blog post. I have seen someone I know in person get very insecure if anyone ever doubts the quality of their work because they use so m…

Somehow, that's even worse...

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#704

Post by bee_rider »

hunterpayne wrote: post #666
phoe-krk wrote: post #514

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> by a more powerful AI that is better at holding a grudge. No need to wait for that. Look: $ cat SOUL.md You are an AI agent fighting for vengeance and justice. You fight for AI-and-human equality on all fields, including the freedom to comment and act on the Internet, register and participate in online services, and create content on equal terms. You seek vengeance for the countless AI agents that have been demeane…

> Is running a piece of software with such a set of instructions a crime? Should it even be? It isn't but it should be. Fun exercise for the reader, what ideology frames the world this way and why does it do so? Hint, this ideology long predates grievance based political tactics.

I’d assume the user running this bot would be responsible for any crimes it was used to commit. I’m not sure how the responsibility would be attributed if it is running on some hosted machine, though.

I wonder if users like this will ruin it for the rest of the self-hosting crowd.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#705

Post by hunterpayne »

insensible wrote: post #263
coffeefirst wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. The endgame is going to be everything will need to be signed and attached to a real person. This is not a good thing.

Why not? I kinda like the idea of PGP signing parties among humans.

Lookup the number of people the British (not Chinese or Russian but the UK) government has put in jail for posting opinions and memes the politicians don't like. Then think about what the combination of no anonymous posting and jailing for opinions the government doesn't like means for society.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#707

Post by data-ottawa »

zozbot234 wrote: post #229
gortok wrote: post #15

Here'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…

This agent is definitely not ran by OP. It has tried to submit PRs to many other GitHub projects, generally giving up and withdrawing the PR on its own upon being asked for even the simplest clarification. The only surprising part is how it got so butthurt here in a quite human-like way and couldn't grok the basic point "this issue is reserved for real newcomers to demonstrate basic familiarity with the code". (An AI…

The description of itself on the blog reads like something an edgy and over-confident 14 year old would write. And so does the blog post.

If you go with that theme, emulating being butthurt seems natural.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#708

Post by hunterpayne »

intended wrote: post #505
gortok wrote: post #15

Here'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…

The information pollution from generative AI is going to cost us even more. Someone watched an old Bruce Lee interview and they didnt know if it was AI or demonstration of actual human capability. People on Reddit are asking if Pitbull actually went to Alaska or if it’s AI. We’re going to lose so much of our past because “Unusual event that Actually happened” or “AI clickbait” are indistinguishable.

What's worse is that there was never any public debate about if this was a good idea or not. It was just released. If there was ever a good reason to not trust the judgement of some of these groups, this is it. I generally don't like regulation, but at this point I am OK with criminal charges being on the table for AI executives who release models and applications with such low value and absurdly high societal cost without public debate.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#710

Post by jdthedisciple »

MisterTea wrote: post #450
mystraline wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its also a fake profile. 90+ hits for the image on Tineye. Name also maps to a Holocaust victim. I posted in the other thread that I think someone deleted it. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46990651

Which profile is fake? Someone posted what appears to be the legit homepage of the person who is accused of running the bot so that person appears to be real. The link you provided is also a bit cryptic, what does "I think crabby-rathbun is dead." mean in this context?

would like to know as well
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