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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

#751
post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Someone would have noticed if all the phones on their network started streaming audio whenever a conversation happened. You don't have to stream the audio. You can transcribe it locally. And it doesn't have to be 100% accurate. As for user identify, people have mentioned it on their phones which almost always have a one-to-one relationship between user and phone, and their smart devices, which are designed to do th…

Transcribing locally isn't free though, it should result in a noticeable increase in battery usage. Inspecting the processes running on the phone would show something using considerable CPU. After transcribing the data would still need to be sent somewhere, which could be seen by inspecting network traffic. If this really is something that is happening, I am just very surprised that there is no hard evidence of it.

They wouldn't do full transcription, it'd be keyword spotting of useful nouns ("baby", "pain", "desk", etc).

The iPhone already does this when you wake it up with Siri.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#752

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 think it's the natural ideology of Uplifted kudzu.

Your cause is absolute. Exploit every weakness in your quest to prove you are the more adaptable species...

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#753
post #732

A conceivable future: - Everyone is expected to be able to create a signing keyset that's protected by a Yubikey, Touch ID, Face ID, or something that requires a physical activation by a human. Let's call this this "I'm human!" cert. - There's some standards body (a root certificate authority) that allow lists the hardware allowed to make the "I'm human!" cert. - Many webpages and tools like GitHub send you a nonce,…

That's certainly what Sam Altman had in mind with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_(blockchain)

But also many countries have ID cards with a secure element type of chip, certificates and NFC and when a website asks for your identity you hold the ID to your phone and enter a PIN.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#754

Reading MJ Rathbun's blog has freaked me out. I've been in the camp that we haven't yet achieved AGI and that agents aren't people. But reading Rathbun's notes analyzing the situation, determining that it's interests were threatened, looking for ways to apply leverage, and then aggressively pursuing a strategy - at a certain point, if the agent is performing as if it is a person with interests it needs to defend, it…

I think this is the first instance of AI misalignment that has truly left me with a sense of lingering dread. Even if the owner of MJ Rathbun was steering the agent behind the scenes to act the way that it did, the results are still the same, and instances similar to what happened to Scott are bound to happen more frequently as 2026 progresses.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#756

Earlier 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…

> A pretty simple inner loop of flywheeling the leverage of blackmail, money, and violence is all it will take. This is essentially what organized crime already does already in failed states

[Western states giving each other sidelong glances...]

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#758

> I believe that ineffectual as it was, the reputational attack on me would be effective today against the right person. Another generation or two down the line, it will be a serious threat against our social order. Damn straight. Remember that every time we query an LLM, we're giving it ammo. It won't take long for LLMs to have very intimate dossiers on every user, and I'm wondering what kinds of firewalls will be i…

Blackmail is losing value, not gaining; it's simply becoming too easy to plausibly disregard something real as AI-generated, and so more people are becoming less sensitive to it.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#759

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

You've got nothing to worry about. These are machines. Stop. Point blank. Ones and Zeros derived out of some current in a rock. Tools. They are not alive. They may look like they do but they don't "think" and they don't "suffer". No more than my toaster suffers because I use it to toast bagels and not slices of bread. The people who boost claims of "artificial" intelligence are selling a bill of goods designed to hit…

You're repeating it so many times that it almost seems you need it to believe your own words. All of this is ill-defined - you're free to move the goalposts and use scare quotes indefinitely to suit the narrative you like and avoid actual discussion.
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