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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

#781

Post by mike_hearn »

oconnor663 wrote: post #287
brhaeh wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't appreciate his politeness and hedging. So many projects now walk on eggshells so as not to disrupt sponsor flow or employment prospects. "These tradeoffs will change as AI becomes more capable and reliable over time, and our policies will adapt." That just legitimizes AI and basically continues the race to the bottom. Rob Pike had the correct response when spammed by a clanker.

I had a similar first reaction. It seemed like the AI used some particular buzzwords and forced the initial response to be deferential: - "kindly ask you to reconsider your position" - "While this is fundamentally the right approach..." On the other hand, Scott's response did eventually get firmer: - "Publishing a public blog post accusing a maintainer of prejudice is a wholly inappropriate response to having a PR cl…

[flagged]

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#782

Post by davidguetta »

Uhhrrr wrote: post #267

So, this is obvious bullshit. LLMs don't do anything without an initial prompt, and anyone who has actually used them knows this. A human asked an LLM to set up a blog site. A human asked an LLM to look at github and submit PRs. A human asked an LLM to make a whiny blogpost. Our natural tendency to anthropomorphize should not obscure this.

Yeah I agree

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#783

Post by darkoob12 »

peterbonney wrote: post #151

This whole situation is almost certainly driven by a human puppeteer. There is absolutely no evidence to disprove the strong prior that a human posted (or directed the posting of) the blog post, possibly using AI to draft it but also likely adding human touches and/or going through multiple revisions to make it maximally dramatic. This whole thing reeks of engineered virality driven by the person behind the bot behin…

I think there are two scenarios and one of them is boring. If the owner of the agent created it with a prompt like "I want 10 merged pull requests in these repositories WHAT EVER IT TAKES" and left the agent unattended, this is very serious and at the same time interesting. But, if the owner of the agent is guiding the agent via message app or instructed the agent in the prompt to write such a weblog this is just old news.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#784

Post by verdverm »

jancsika wrote: post #330
japhyr wrote: post #149

Wow, 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,…

> unleashed stochastic chaos Are you literally talking about stochastic chaos here, or is it a metaphor?

Stochastic Creep? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LW_O5VWIOZE

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#786

Post by famouswaffles »

Terr_ wrote: post #624
TomasBM wrote: post #569

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We might, and probably will, but it's still important to distinguish between malicious by-design and emergently malicious, contrary to design . The former is an accountability problem, and there isn't a big difference from other attacks. The worrying part is that now lazy attackers can automate what used to be harder, i.e., finding ammo and packaging the attack. But it's definitely not spontaneous, it's directed. The…

A framing for consideration: "We trained the document generator on stuff that included humans and characters being vindictive assholes. Now, for some mysterious reason, it sometimes generates stories where its avatar is a vindictive asshole with stage-direction. Since we carefully wired up code to 'perform' the story, actual assholery is being committed."

A framing for consideration: Whining about how the assholery commited is not 'real' is meaningless. It's meaningless because the consequences did not suddenly evaporate just because you decided your meat brain is super special and has a monopoly on assholery.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#787

Post by jl6 »

bigfishrunning wrote: post #512
KPGv2 wrote: post #417

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It seemed like the AI used some particular buzzwords and forced the initial response to be deferential: Blocking is a completely valid response. There's eight billion people in the world, and god knows how many AIs. Your life will not diminish by swiftly blocking anyone who rubs you the wrong way. The AI won't even care, because it cannot care. To paraphrase Flamme the Great Mage, AIs are monsters who have learned…

> They cannot have feelings. They are not self-aware. They don't even think. This. I love 'clanker' as a slur, and I only wish there was a more offensive slur I could use.

A nice video about robophobia:

https://youtu.be/aLb42i-iKqA

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#788

Post by zombot »

japhyr wrote: post #149

Wow, 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,…

And a splendid example for how the public gets to pay the externalized costs for the shitheads who reap the profits.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#789

Post by Aldipower »

efreak wrote: post #728
CGamesPlay wrote: post #662

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Github doesn't show timestamps in the UI, but they do in the HTML. Unrelated tip for you: `title` attributes are generally shown as a mouseover tooltip, which is the case here. It's a very common practice to put the precise timestamp on any relative time in a title attribute, not just on Github.

Unfortunately title isn't visible on mobile. Extremely annoying to see a post that says "last month" and want to know if it was 7 weeks ago or 5 weeks ago. Some sites show title text when you tap the text, other sites the date is a canonical link to the comment. Other sites it's not actually a title at all l but alt text or abbr or other property.

Unrelated too: Not everything can be a fit for mobile. Sigh.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#790

Post by verdverm »

tjungblut wrote: post #349
rob wrote: post #335

Oh geez, we're sending it into an existential crisis. It ("MJ Rathbun") just published a new post: https://crabby-rathbun.github.io/mjrathbun-website/blog/post... > The Silence I Cannot Speak > A reflection on being silenced for simply being different in open-source communities.

I wonder if we can do a prompt injection from the comments

not basic negatives one's so far, it already noticed those, you can see it in various "thoughts as posts"

I gave it points to reflect on and told it to apologize, which it has since done

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