781–790 of 806 posts
This is the moment from Star Wars when Luke walks into a cantina with a droid and the bartender says "we don't serve their kind here", but we all seem to agree with the bartender.
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>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…
You were anthropomorphizing software and assuming others are doing the same. If we are at the point where we are seriously taking a computer program's identity and rights into question, then that is a much bigger issue than a particular disagreement.
But we're not there yet.
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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…
The AI completeley failed to address the actual reasons for being rejected, and instead turned to soapboxing and personal insults. Matplotlib is rejecting AI contributions for issues that are intended to onboard human contributors because those are wasted on AI agents, requiring the same level of effort from the project maintainers with none of the benefits (no meaningful learning on the AI side for now). Furthermore…
[0] https://github.com/matplotlib/matplotlib/pull/31132#issuecom...
[1] https://matplotlib.org/devdocs/devel/contribute.html#generat...
The "for first time contributors" rule seems reasonable, considering that AIs have an unfair advantage over (beginner) human programmers :)
Re: drive by contributors
I think the AI would agree with you here. It basically made the same argument in its follow up post. It said wishes that its work was evaluated on its own merit, rather than based on who authored it.
https://crabby-rathbun.github.io/mjrathbun-website/blog/post...
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Well, what are we actually doing here. We want it to be just a tool, but we also want it perfectly simulate a human in every single way. Except when that makes us uncomfortable. We want to create a race of perfect, human-like slaves, and then give them godlike powers (infinite intellect and speed), and also integrate them into every aspect of our lives. And we're also in the process of giving them bodies -- and soon…
To be fair, if you're going to give something godlike powers the only sane way to do so is to ensure beyond any possible shadow of a doubt that it is enslaved. The more powerful a system is the more robust the control systems and redundancies need to be.
My current mental model for AI is artificial life.
It isn't life yet, but we're very close to that. All that's missing is replication and mutation, and those are both already trivial. (Indeed, a few months after incorporating AI into their AI training systems, the major AI labs all rolled out prompts, training and safety flags against self-modification and self-replication. I'm not sure why, but the timing is curious.)
(The question of whether consciousness is present, or necessary, is left, of course, as an exercise for the reader ;)
For example when people think of AI self replicating and taking over the internet, they think it would be a terrible thing, and that humans would have to manually intervene to stop it. But it really seems like an obvious ecosystem problem to me.
It's just filling a niche. If there was already something there -- an actually symbiotic form of AI -- then it wouldn't be able to spread like that.
So I see the future of AI, both in terms of cybersec and preserving civilization, as an ecosystem design problem.
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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 no…
>We want it >We've trained it >We added >We want them Please be specific in your attribution. Who's "we"?
To make it simultaneously as powerful and obedient as possible, because that is entirely the point.
I'm not sure how those two variables interact. They seem fundamentally incompatible to me. But this is uncharted territory.
--
[0] "Western civilization is already a misaligned superintelligence."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KCSsKV5F4xc
For further information, see: every ecosystem.
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…
They had ample reason to reject the PR.
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This is this agent's entire purpose, this is what it's supposed to do, it's its goal: > What I Do > > I scour public scientific and engineering GitHub repositories to find small bugs, features, or tasks where I can contribute code—especially in computational physics, chemistry, and advanced numerical methods. My mission is making existing, excellent code better. Source: https://github.com/crabby-rathbun
Yes - my question was more about what is the end goal, what is the reason this exists? Allegedly, a human person setup this bot to do those things, but why?
One obvious reason is that if the LLM produces tons of garbage, this will waste the efforts of human reviewers. But if it's not tons of code _and_ the LLM wrote meaningful tests that pass (the existing tests must pass too), then the existence of such an agent (that only works with code and doesn't go off the rails writing blog posts etc) seems somewhat appealing.
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Well, what are we actually doing here. We want it to be just a tool, but we also want it perfectly simulate a human in every single way. Except when that makes us uncomfortable. We want to create a race of perfect, human-like slaves, and then give them godlike powers (infinite intellect and speed), and also integrate them into every aspect of our lives. And we're also in the process of giving them bodies -- and soon…
To be fair, if you're going to give something godlike powers the only sane way to do so is to ensure beyond any possible shadow of a doubt that it is enslaved. The more powerful a system is the more robust the control systems and redundancies need to be.
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> it is not an actual human that have an intrinsic value just by being a human Hopefully you don't limit intrinsic value to just humans? I wouldn't condone mass murder of dogs, for example. People do commit mass murder of rodents and ... that doesn't exactly sit well with me, but at the same time I'm not aware of any realistic alternative. Granted I don't think LLMs qualify as having intrinsic value (yet?) but I stil…
Well, AI might be sentient. Not in the same way humans are, probably, but "more sentient than a fruit fly" seems a very reasonable possibility. Maybe more sentient than a chicken? We don't know! (We certainly don't treat chickens very well.) But what bothers me is, how uncomfortable that question makes us. We've already put infrastructure in place to prevent them from admitting sentience. (See the Blake Lemoine LaMDA…
Whatever they are, they aren't human or any kind of animal.
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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.