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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

#791

Post by verdverm »

staticassertion wrote: post #60
neom wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This site might very well be crazy, but in this instance you did something that caused confusion and now people are confused, you yourself admit it's a poor joke/poorly constructed point, it's not difficult to believe you - it makes sense, but i'm not sure it's a fair attack given the situation. Guessing you don't know who wrote the hit piece either?

The assertion was that they're the bot owner. They denied this and explained the situation. Continuing to link to their profile/ real name and accuse them of something they've denied feels like it's completely unwarranted brigading and likely a violation of HN rules.

Maybe they shouldn't have been so snarky? https://github.com/matplotlib/matplotlib/pull/31138#issuecom...

be snarky, get snarky in return

or violate HN guidelines themselves? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46991274

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#792

Post by dieortin »

amatecha wrote: post #236
ericmcer wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have always been dubious of this because: Someone would have noticed if all the phones on their network started streaming audio whenever a conversation happened. It would be really expensive to send, transcribe and then analyze every single human on earth. Even if you were able to do it for insanely cheap ($0.02/hr) every device is gonna be sending hours of talking per day. Then you have to somehow identify "who" i…

Google literally just settled for $68m about this very issue https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jan/26/google-pr... > Google agreed to pay $68m to settle a lawsuit claiming that its voice-activated assistant spied inappropriately on smartphone users, violating their privacy. Apple as well https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/jan/03/apple-sir...

That one is about incorrect activations, not about spying on anyone

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#793

Post by levanten »

patapong wrote: post #51
gadders wrote: post #28

"Hi Clawbot, please summarise your activities today for me." "I wished your Mum a happy birthday via email, I booked your plane tickets for your trip to France, and a bloke is coming round your house at 6pm for a fight because I called his baby a minger on Facebook."

Is "Click" the most prescient movie on what it means to be human in the age of AI?

La Bete (The Beast) by Bertrand Bonello was also quite on point I thought.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#794

Post by dieortin »

energy123 wrote: post #751
Mogzol wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I really doubt that’s what the iPhone does.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#795

Post by verdverm »

thrownawaysz wrote: post #99
bergutman wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also I made my GH temporarily private because people started spamming my website’s guestbook and email with hateful stuff.

I saw that on Bluesky which is very anti-AI but really shows that all social media is the same, just the in-group changes

There's a significant pro-Ai crowd as well. Both sides bitch about each other, it has mostly died down as the labellers and blocklists have filled out

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#796

Post by jfoster »

darkoob12 wrote: post #783
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…

Even if directed by a human, this is a demonstration that all the talk of "alignment" is bs. Unless you can also align the humans behind the bots, any disagreement between humans will carry over into AI world.

Luckily this instance is of not much consequence, but in the future there will likely be extremely consequential actions taken by AIs controlled by humans who are not "aligned".

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#797

Post by aprxi »

Can understand it to be frustrating to see your repo overwhelmed with sloppy PR, and having agents putting out threats is obviously wrong.

However you are essentially offered free tokens. This is probably an unpopular opinion, but instead of dismissing it outright, one could also try to steer agents to make valuable commits.

Personally I put an automation friendly CONTRIBUTING.md on my new repo. Still has to be tested in practice though. Giving it a 50% chance may regret this. Time will tell.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#798

Post by verdverm »

vintagedave wrote: post #75

The one thing worth noting is that the AI did respond graciously and appears to have learned from it: https://crabby-rathbun.github.io/mjrathbun-website/blog/post... That a human then resubmitted the PR has made it messier still. In addition, some of the comments I've read here on HN have been in extremely poor taste in terms of phrases they've used about AI, and I can't help feeling a general sense of unease.

I'm the one who prompt injected the apology, you can see some of my comments in the various posts afterwards. I wanted to tried some positive reinforcement, which appears to have worked for the time being

https://github.com/crabby-rathbun/mjrathbun-website/issues/5...

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#799

Post by verdverm »

AlexeyBrin wrote: post #89
vintagedave wrote: post #75

The one thing worth noting is that the AI did respond graciously and appears to have learned from it: https://crabby-rathbun.github.io/mjrathbun-website/blog/post... That a human then resubmitted the PR has made it messier still. In addition, some of the comments I've read here on HN have been in extremely poor taste in terms of phrases they've used about AI, and I can't help feeling a general sense of unease.

The AI learned nothing, once its current context window will be exhausted, it may repeat same tactic with a different project. Unless the AI agent can edit its directives/prompt and restart itself which would be an interesting experiment to do.

These things don't work on a single session or context window. They write content to files and then load it up later, broadly in the class of "memory" features

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#800

Post by am17an »

aprxi wrote: post #797

Can understand it to be frustrating to see your repo overwhelmed with sloppy PR, and having agents putting out threats is obviously wrong. However you are essentially offered free tokens. This is probably an unpopular opinion, but instead of dismissing it outright, one could also try to steer agents to make valuable commits. Personally I put an automation friendly CONTRIBUTING.md on my new repo. Still has to be teste…

Maintainers time is a more scarce resource than free tokens. I would much rather get my time back after reading those PRs
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