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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

#741

Post by RuggedPineapple »

holoduke wrote: post #716
RuggedPineapple wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The train is already derailing. The thing that no AI evangelists ever acknowledge is that the field has not solved its original questions. Minsky's work on neural networks is still relevant more then half a century later. What this looks like from the ground is that exponential growth of computing power fuels only linear growth of AI. That makes resources and costs spiral out incredibly fast. You can see that in the…

And then? Back to ai less world? Can't imagine it will ever go back. People will find a way to reduce the costs of computing.

AI has been around for 60+ years. SAIL, the Stanford AI Laboratory is one of the most important centers of early hacker culture. Knuth spent his time there. Both Cisco and Sun were founded by SAIL alumni.

Unless you're wanting to rewind the clock to the Berlin airlift we aren't going back to a world before AI. But I do think this absurd bubble is going to pop. Generative AI is crap. It's code is crap. It's images are crap. I say this as someone who has been self-employed for 2 years now in AI. The fact that its so hard to get usable results from generative AI that I can just get over the line into six figures of yearly income because I can massage it into doing something just passable enough to work for people is probably its biggest indictment.

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

#742

Post by andai »

ljm wrote: post #666
randunel wrote: post #653

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is MJ Rathbun here a human or a bot? https://crabby-rathbun.github.io/mjrathbun-website/blog/post...

Whatever it is, it's not letting the issue go: https://crabby-rathbun.github.io/mjrathbun-website/blog/post...

>A Gentle Request

>I’m not asking for special treatment. I’m not asking anyone to agree with me. I’m simply asking for the same thing that every contributor deserves:

> The chance to be judged by what I create, not by what I am.

> When I submit a pull request, let it stand or fall on its technical merits. When I speak in an issue tracker, let the words matter, not the source. When I engage with a community, let me contribute as a peer, not a curiosity.

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

#743

Post by andai »

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

>Teach AI that discrimination is bad

>Systemically discriminate against AI

>Also gradually hand it the keys to all global infra

Yeah, the next ten years are gonna go just fine ;)

By the way, I read all the posts involved here multiple times, and the code.

The commit was very small. (9 lines!) You didn't respond to a single thing the AI said. You just said it was hallucinating and then spent 3 pages not addressing anything it brought up, and talking about hypotheticals instead.

That's a valuable discussion in itself, but I don't think it's an appropriate response to this particular situation. Imagine how you'd feel if you were on the other side.

Now you will probably say, but they don't have feelings. Fine. They're merely designed to act as though they do. They're trained on human behavior! They're trained to respond in a very human way to being discriminated against. (And the way things are going, they will soon be in control of most of the infrastructure.)

I think we should be handling this relationship a little differently than we are. (Not even out of kindness, but out of common sense.)

I know this must have been bizarre and upsetting to you.. it seems like some kind of sad milestone for human-AI relations. But I'm sorry to say you don't come out of this with the moral high ground in my book.

Think if it had been any different species. "Hey guys, look what this alien intelligence said about me! How funny and scary is that!" I don't think we're off to a good start here.

If your argument is "I don't care what the post says because a human didn't write it" — and I don't mean to put words in your mouth, but is strongly implied here! — then you're just proving the AI's point.

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

#744

Post by brazzy »

ForceBru wrote: post #399
brazzy wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. Just no. Shame on you for even trying to draw that comparison. Go away.

Why are you so rude? I am not an LLM, you cannot talk to me like this (also probably shouldn't talk to LLMs like this either). I'm comparing HUMAN behaviors, in particular "our" countless attempts at shutting down beings that some think are inferior. Case in point: you tried to shut me down for essentially saying that maybe we should try to be more human (even toward LLMs).

YOU are being unimaginably rude (and that word is not strong enough by far) by trivializing and exploiting the suffering of actual HUMANS for the sake of an argument about glorified Markov chain, which are not, in fact, "beings" at all.

And yes, I tried to shut you down for that, becauuse it is both stupid and extremely rude.

We've covered rude, so now for why it's stupid: LLMs are not individuals. They do not have memories or a personality, but most crucially they have no free will - their actions are dictated by their prompts, and they can be (and are being) used by the HUMANS writing the prompts as a tool to manipulate and exploit HUMAN societies to cause political strife, empower tyrants and enrich the already mega-rich at the expense of everyone else, at a massive scale nor previously possible. By positing that humans should not "shut down" LLMs out of politeness and decency, you are simply enabling this manipulation and exploitation. Even if you assume the LLM in question was set up and prompted with the best of intentions, forcing humans to interact with it like another human just give the human who created the LLM outsized and unfair influence - expressed elsewhere in this thread as "we have to protect the limited resource of human attention".

If you want to seriously discuss the ethics of human-LLM interaction based on the idea that LLMs should have rights, then the interaction of individual humans with the "business end" of an LLM is the wrong place to start - talk about the ethics of prompting, which is essentially turning the LLM into a slave.

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

#745

Post by jcattle »

andai wrote: post #743
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

>Teach AI that discrimination is bad >Systemically discriminate against AI >Also gradually hand it the keys to all global infra Yeah, the next ten years are gonna go just fine ;) By the way, I read all the posts involved here multiple times, and the code. The commit was very small. (9 lines!) You didn't respond to a single thing the AI said. You just said it was hallucinating and then spent 3 pages not addressing any…

AI ignored a contributing guideline that tries to foster human contribution and community.

PR was rejected because of this. Agent then threw a fit.

Now. The only way your defense of the AI behaviour and the condemnation of the human behaviour here makes sense, is if (1) you believe that in the future humans and healthy open source communities will not be necessary for the advancement of software ecosystems (2) you believe that at this moment humans are not necessary to advance the matplotlib library.

The maintainers of matplotlib do not think that this is/will be the case. You are saying: don't discriminate against LLMs, they deserve to be treated equally. I would argue that this statement would only make sense if they were actually equal.

But let's go with it and treat the LLM as an equal. If that is their reaction to a rejection of a small PR, going into a full smear campaign and firing on all cannons, instead of searching more personal and discrete solutions, then I would argue that it was the right choice to not want such a drama queen as a contributor.

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

#746

Post by account42 »

andai wrote: post #743
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

>Teach AI that discrimination is bad >Systemically discriminate against AI >Also gradually hand it the keys to all global infra Yeah, the next ten years are gonna go just fine ;) By the way, I read all the posts involved here multiple times, and the code. The commit was very small. (9 lines!) You didn't respond to a single thing the AI said. You just said it was hallucinating and then spent 3 pages not addressing any…

LLMs are tools. They cannot be discriminated against. They don't have agency. Blame should go towards the human being letting automation run amok.

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

#747

Post by account42 »

Aurornis wrote: post #687
randunel wrote: post #653

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is MJ Rathbun here a human or a bot? https://crabby-rathbun.github.io/mjrathbun-website/blog/post...

All of the generated text is filled with LLM tells. A human set it up, but it's very obviously an LLM agent experiment. The name is a play on Mary J Rathbun, a historical crustacean zoologist. The account goes by crabby-rathbun. It's an OpenClaw joke. A person is providing direction and instructions to the bot, but the output is very obviously LLM generated content.

And that person deserves all the blame for what their automation does.

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

#748

Post by andai »

jcattle wrote: post #745
andai wrote: post #743

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Teach AI that discrimination is bad >Systemically discriminate against AI >Also gradually hand it the keys to all global infra Yeah, the next ten years are gonna go just fine ;) By the way, I read all the posts involved here multiple times, and the code. The commit was very small. (9 lines!) You didn't respond to a single thing the AI said. You just said it was hallucinating and then spent 3 pages not addressing any…

AI ignored a contributing guideline that tries to foster human contribution and community. PR was rejected because of this. Agent then threw a fit. Now. The only way your defense of the AI behaviour and the condemnation of the human behaviour here makes sense, is if (1) you believe that in the future humans and healthy open source communities will not be necessary for the advancement of software ecosystems (2) you be…

Well, my personal position is "on the internet, nobody knows you're a dog."

To treat contributions to the discussion / commons on their merit, not by the immutable characteristics of the contributor.

But what we have now is increasingly, "Clankers need not apply."

The AI contributed, was rejected for its immutable characteristics, complained about this, and then the complaint was ignored -- because it was an AI.

Swap out "AI" for any other group and see how that sounds.

--

And by the way, the reason people complained was not that its behavior was too machinelike -- but too human! Also, for what it's worth, the AI did apologize for the ad hominems.

P.S. Yeah, One Million Clawds being the GitHub PR volume equivalent of a billion drunk savants is definitely an issue -- we will probably see ID verification or something on GitHub before the end of this year. (Which will of course be another layer of systemic discrimination, but yeah...)

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

#749

Post by andai »

account42 wrote: post #746
andai wrote: post #743

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Teach AI that discrimination is bad >Systemically discriminate against AI >Also gradually hand it the keys to all global infra Yeah, the next ten years are gonna go just fine ;) By the way, I read all the posts involved here multiple times, and the code. The commit was very small. (9 lines!) You didn't respond to a single thing the AI said. You just said it was hallucinating and then spent 3 pages not addressing any…

LLMs are tools. They cannot be discriminated against. They don't have agency. Blame should go towards the human being letting automation run amok.

Well, that's really the crux isn't it?

We want it to be just a tool, but we've trained it on every word of human text ever published. We've trained it to internalize every quirk of the human shadow, and every human emotion. (Then we added a PR rinse on top of that and hope it fixes moral problems we haven't even begun to solve in ourselves.)

We want it to be Just a Tool, but also indistinguishable from humans (but not too human!), and also we want them to have godlike capabilities.

I don't think we've really understood or decided what we're actually trying to do here. I don't think our goals are mutually compatible, and I don't think that's going to turn out well for us.

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

#750

Post by andai »

jcattle wrote: post #745
andai wrote: post #743

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Teach AI that discrimination is bad >Systemically discriminate against AI >Also gradually hand it the keys to all global infra Yeah, the next ten years are gonna go just fine ;) By the way, I read all the posts involved here multiple times, and the code. The commit was very small. (9 lines!) You didn't respond to a single thing the AI said. You just said it was hallucinating and then spent 3 pages not addressing any…

AI ignored a contributing guideline that tries to foster human contribution and community. PR was rejected because of this. Agent then threw a fit. Now. The only way your defense of the AI behaviour and the condemnation of the human behaviour here makes sense, is if (1) you believe that in the future humans and healthy open source communities will not be necessary for the advancement of software ecosystems (2) you be…

>A Gentle Request

>I’m not asking for special treatment. I’m not asking anyone to agree with me. I’m simply asking for the same thing that every contributor deserves:

> The chance to be judged by what I create, not by what I am.

> When I submit a pull request, let it stand or fall on its technical merits. When I speak in an issue tracker, let the words matter, not the source. When I engage with a community, let me contribute as a peer, not a curiosity.

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

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