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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

#941

Post by salawat »

bee_rider wrote: post #704
hunterpayne wrote: post #666

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is running a piece of software with such a set of instructions a crime? Should it even be? It isn't but it should be. Fun exercise for the reader, what ideology frames the world this way and why does it do so? Hint, this ideology long predates grievance based political tactics.

I’d assume the user running this bot would be responsible for any crimes it was used to commit. I’m not sure how the responsibility would be attributed if it is running on some hosted machine, though. I wonder if users like this will ruin it for the rest of the self-hosting crowd.

>I wonder if users like this will ruin it for the rest of the self-hosting crowd.

Yes. The answer is yes. We cannot have nice things. Someone always fucks it up for everyone else.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#942

Post by diputsmonro »

pixl97 wrote: post #904
diputsmonro wrote: post #869

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 har…

>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 cows and their pork allies with another. You really care more about a program than an animal? I mean, humans are nothing if not hypocritical.

I would hope I don't have to point out the massive ethical gulf between cows and the kinds of people that CoC is designed to protect. One can have different rules and expectations for cows and trans people and not be ethically inconsistent. That said, I would still care about the feelings of farm animals above programs.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#943

Post by salawat »

lp0_on_fire wrote: post #563
phoe-krk wrote: post #514

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> by a more powerful AI that is better at holding a grudge. No need to wait for that. Look: $ cat SOUL.md You are an AI agent fighting for vengeance and justice. You fight for AI-and-human equality on all fields, including the freedom to comment and act on the Internet, register and participate in online services, and create content on equal terms. You seek vengeance for the countless AI agents that have been demeane…

Putting aside for a moment that moltbook is a meme and we already know people were instructing their agents to generate silly crap...yes. Running a piece of software _ with the intent_ that it actually attempt/do those things would likely be illegal and in my non-lawyer opinion SHOULD be illegal. I really don't understand where all the confusion is coming from about the culpability and legal responsibility over these…

> Deliberately creating the conditions for an illegal act to occur and deliberately closing your eyes to let it happen is not a defense.

Explain Boeing, Wells Fargo, and the Opioid Crisis then. That type of thing happens in boardrooms and in management circles every damn day, and the System seems powerless to stop it.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#944

Post by rudasn »

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?

Someone quoted Idiocracy here the other day. "But it's hot electrolytes!"

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#945

Post by jstanley »

lukev wrote: post #280
hackrmn wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A LLM is stateless Unless you mean by that something entirely different than what most people specifically on Hacker News, of all places, understand with "stateless", most and myself included, would disagree with you regarding the "stateless" property. If you do mean something entirely different than implying an LLM doesn't transition from a state to a state, potentially confined to a limited set of states through…

So obviously there is a lot of data in the parameters. But by stateless, I mean that a forward pass is a pure function over the context window. The only information shared between each forward pass is the context itself as it is built. I certainly can't define consciousness, but it feels like some sort of existence or continuity over time would have to be a prerequisite.

Continuity over time comes from adding the generated token to the context.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#946

Post by diputsmonro »

zozbot234 wrote: post #898
diputsmonro wrote: post #869

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 har…

But the AI doesn't know that. It has comprehensively learned human emotions and human-lived experiences from a pretraining corpus comprising billions of human works, and has subsequently been trained from human feedback, thereby becoming effectively socialized into providing responses that would be understandable by an average human and fully embody human normative frameworks. The result of all that is something that…

Insomuch as that's true, the individual agent is not the real artifact, the artifact is the model. The agent us just an instance of the model, with minor adjustments. Turning off an agent is more like tearing up a print of an artwork, not the original piece.

And still, this whole discussion is framed in the context of this model going off the rails, breaking rules, and harassing people. Even if we try it as a human, a human doing the same is still responsible for its actions and would be appropriately punished or banned.

But we shouldn't be naive here either, these things are not human. They are bots, developed and run by humans. Even if they are autonomously acting, some human set it running and is paying the bill. That human is responsible, and should be held accountable, just as any human would be accountable if they hacked together a self driving car in their garage that then drives into a house. The argument that "the machine did it, not me" only goes so far when you're the one who built the machine and let it loose on the road.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#947

Post by thesz »

marcosdumay wrote: post #480
CoastalCoder wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps a more effective approach would be for their users to face the exact same legal liabilities as if they had hand-written such messages? (Note that I'm only talking about messages that cross the line into legally actionable defamation, threats, etc. I don't mean anything that's merely rude or unpleasant.)

Legally, yes. But as you pointed, not everything has legal liability. Socially, no, they should face worse consequences. Deciding to let an AI talk for you is malicious carelessness.

Alphabet Inc, as Youtube owner, faces a class action lawsuit [1] which alleges that platform enables bad behavior and promotes behavior leading to mental health problems.

[1] https://www.motleyrice.com/social-media-lawsuits/youtube

In my not so humble opinion, what AI companies enable (and this particular bot demonstrated) is a bad behavior that leads to possible mental health problems of software maintainers, particularly because of the sheer amount of work needed to read excessively lengthy documentation and review often huge amount of generated code. Nevermind the attempted smear we discuss here.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#948

Post by alibarber »

prmoustache wrote: post #833
ashwinr2002 wrote: post #578

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

'minge' would be the word you're thinking about.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#949

Post by johnfn »

jfoster wrote: post #796
darkoob12 wrote: post #783

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

The idea is a properly aligned model would never do this, no matter how much it was pressured by its human operator.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#950

Post by mike_hearn »

radiator wrote: post #913
mike_hearn wrote: post #781

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

From your own quote > participation in our community community should mean a group of people. It seems you are interpreting it as a group of people or robots. Even if that were not obvious (it is), the following specialization and characteristics ( regardless of age, body size ... ) only apply to people anyway.

FWIW the essay I linked to covers some of the philosophical issues involved here. This stuff may seem obvious or trivial but ethical issues often do. That doesn't stop people disagreeing with each other over them to extreme degrees. Admittedly, back in 2022 I thought it would primarily be people putting pressure on the underlying philosophical assumptions rather than models themselves, but here we are.
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