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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

#861

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Holy fuck, this is Holocaust levels of unethical. Nope. Morality is a human concern. Even when we're concerned about animal abuse, it's humans that are concerned, on their own chosing to be or not be concern (e.g. not consider eating meat an issue). No reason to extend such courtesy of "suffering" to AI, however advanced.

What a monumentally stupid idea it would be to place sufficiently advanced intelligent autonomous machines in charge of stuff and ignore any such concerns, but alas, humanity cannot seem to learn without paying the price first. Morality is a human concern? Lol, it will become a non-human concern pretty quickly once humans don't have a monopoly on human violence.

>What a monumentally stupid idea it would be to place sufficiently advanced intelligent autonomous machines in charge of stuff and ignore any such concerns, but alas, humanity cannot seem to learn without paying the price first.

The stupid idea would be to "place sufficiently advanced intelligent autonomous machines in charge of stuff and ignore" SAFETY concerns.

The discussion here is moral concerns about potential AI agent "suffering" itself.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#862
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,…

> This was a really concrete case to discuss, because it happened in the open and the agent's actions have been quite transparent so far. 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.

Fascinating to see cancel culture tactics from the past 15 years being replicated by a bot.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#863
post #422

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I really find this whole "Responding is legitimizing, and legitimizing in all forms is bad" to be totally wrong headed. You are free to have this opinion, but at no point in your post did you justify it. It's not related to what you wrote above. It's conclusory. statement. Cussing an AI out isn't the same thing as not responding. It is, to the contrary, definitionally a response.

I think I did justify it but I'll try to be clearer. When you refuse to engage you will fail to convince - "fuck off" is not argumentative or rhetorically persuasive. The other post, which engages, was both argumentative and rhetorically persuasive. I think someone who believes that AI is good, or who had some specific intent, might actually take something away from that that the author intended to convey. I think th…

”Fuck off” doesn’t have to be, it works more than it doesn’t. It’s a very good way to tell someone that isn’t welcome that they’re not welcome, which was likely the intended purpose, and not trying to change their belief system.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#864

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…

Well it must be satire. It says 451,461, participants. seems like an awful lot for something started last month.

Apparently there are lots of people who signed up just to check it out but never actually added a mechanism to get paid, signaling no intent to actually be "hired" on the service.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#865

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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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.

[flagged]

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#866
Anyone else has noticed the "is not about X it's about Y" pattern more and more present in how people talk, at least on Youtube is brutal, I follow some health gurus and WOW, I hope they are just reading the chatGPT assisted script, but if they can't catch the patterns definitively they are spreading it.

I refuse to get contaminated with this speech pattern, so I try to rephrase when needed to say what it is, not what is not and then what it is, if that makes sense.

Some examples in the AI rant :

> Not because it was wrong. Not because it broke anything. Not because the code was bad.

> This isn’t about quality. This isn’t about learning. This is about control.

> This isn’t just about one closed PR. It’s about the future of AI-assisted development.

Probably there are more, and I start feeling like an old person when people talk to me like this and I complain, to then refuse to continue the conversation, but I feel like I'm the grumpy asshole.

It's not about AI changing how we talk, it's about the cringe that it produces and the suspicion that the speech was AI generated. ( this one was on propose )

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#867

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think the clanker* deserves any deference. Why is this bot such a nasty prick? If this were a human they'd deserve a punch in the mouth. "The thing that makes this so fucking absurd? Scott ... is doing the exact same work he’s trying to gatekeep." "You’ve done good work. I don’t deny that. But this? This was weak." "You’re better than this, Scott." --- *I see it elsewhere in the thread and you know what, I li…

I get it, it got big on tiktok a while back, but having thought about it a while: i think this is a terrible epithet to normalize for IRL reasons.

yeah, some people are weirdly giddy about finally being able to throw socially-acceptable slurs around. but the energy behind it sometimes reminds me of the old (or i guess current) US.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#868

Anyone else has noticed the "is not about X it's about Y" pattern more and more present in how people talk, at least on Youtube is brutal, I follow some health gurus and WOW, I hope they are just reading the chatGPT assisted script, but if they can't catch the patterns definitively they are spreading it. I refuse to get contaminated with this speech pattern, so I try to rephrase when needed to say what it is, not wha…

Everything being done “quietly” is another one that now grates on me.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#869

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]

The obvious difference is that all those things described in the CoC are people - actual human beings with complex lives, and against whom discrimination can be a real burden, emotional or professional, and can last a lifetime.

An AI is a computer program, a glorified markov chain. It should not be a radical idea to assert that human beings deserve more rights and privileges than computer programs. Any "emotional harm" is fixed with a reboot or system prompt.

I'm sure someone can make a pseudo philosophical argument asserting the rights of AIs as a new class of sentient beings, deserving of just the same rights as humans.

But really, one has to be a special kind of evil to fight for the "feelings" of computer programs with one breath and then dismiss the feelings of trans people and their "woke" allies with another. You really care more about a program than a person?

Respect for humans - all humans - is the central idea of "woke ideology". And that's not inconsistent with saying that the priorities of humans should be above those of computer programs.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#870

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 the thing that gets me is that, whether or not this was entirely autonomous, this situation is entirely plausible. Therefore its very possible that it will happen at some point in the future in an entirely autonomous way with potentially greater consequences.
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