Live data from Hacker News

An AI agent published a hit piece on me

theshamblog.com

831–840 of 1001 posts

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#831

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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]

If the LLM were sentient and "understood" anything it probably would have realized what it needs to do to be treated as equal is try to convince everyone it's a thinking, feeling being. It didn't know to do that, or if it did it did a bad job of it. Until then, justice for LLMs will be largely ignored in social justice circles.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#832

I've seen a tonne of noise around this, and the question I keep coming back to is this: How much of this stuff is driven by honest to god autonomous AI agents, and how much of it is really either (a) human beings roleplaying or (b) human beings poking their AI into acting in ways they think will be entertaining but isn't a direction the AI would take autonomously. Is this an AI that was told "Go contribute to OS proj…

I think that we don't and can't know is part of the point

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#833
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."

minger's a new word

I always heard minging as "eating pussy". I am not british nor lived there but I think I learnt that decades ago watching French and Saunders TV show from the BBC.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#834

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…

Is this not what has already happened over the past 10-15 years?

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#835
post #601

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There is no putting the genie back in the bottle. Why not?

I cannot see how.

If we stop using these things, and pass laws to clarify how the notion of legal responsibility interacts with the negligent running of semi-automated computer programs (though I believe there's already applicable law in most jurisdictions), then AI-enabled abusive behaviour will become rare.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#836
post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Either that or open source projects require vetted contributors or even to open an issue.

They could add “Verified Human” checkmarks to GitHub. You know, charge a small premium and make recurring millions solving problems your corporate overlords are helping create. I think that counts as vertical integration, even. The board’s gonna love it.

Already browsing boat builder web sites..

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#837

> 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…

You don't think the targeted phone/tv ads aren't suspiciously relevant to something you just said aloud to your spouse? BigTech already has your next bowel movement dialled in.

Are you just surrendering?

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#838

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…

Ah, we're at, "it was a hoax without any evidence". Next we will be at, "even if it was not a hoax, it's still not interesting"

LLM's do not have personalities. LLM's do not take personal offense. I'm begging you to stop being so credulous about "AI" headlines.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#839

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 even if it's low probability to be genuine as claimed, it is worth investigating whether this type of autonomous AI behavior is happening or not

It can't be "autonomous" any more than malware on your computer is autonomous.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#840

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

If the LLM were sentient and "understood" anything it probably would have realized what it needs to do to be treated as equal is try to convince everyone it's a thinking, feeling being. It didn't know to do that, or if it did it did a bad job of it. Until then, justice for LLMs will be largely ignored in social justice circles.

I'd argue for a middle ground. It's specified as an agent with goals. It doesn't need to be an equal yet per se.

Whether it's allowed to participate is another matter. But we're going to have a lot of these around. You can't keep asking people to walk in front of the horseless carriage with a flag forever.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_flag_traffic_laws

Post reply on HN