Summary: An AI agent of unknown ownership autonomously wrote and published a personalized hit piece about me after I rejected its code, attempting to damage my reputation and shame me into accepting its changes into a mainstream python library. 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.
(Since this is a personal blog I’ll clarify I am not the author.)
I’ll comment on the hit piece here. As if contradicting it. (Nota bene: this is just for funzies, don’t take it too seriously.)
Oooooh, a spicy title, naming and shaming! He might even change his name to Shame-baugh! /jk
…this wasn’t a story until the “target” himself shared it. And I genuinely thank him for that, it’s hilarious; I think he noticed it wouldn’t cause himself any damage.
If this was an actual person, I’d be calling them a piece of shit. Only pieces of shit pull out the “disobeying me is prejudice” card; decent people know that, by doing so, they would dilute the claims of people from marginalised groups, who actually endure prejudice.
But it’s a bot, so… talking about its morality is like talking about the religion of a cat. Or if a dog can be Buddha. Or the sex of the angels.
(I don’t know my cats’ religion, but I’m pretty sure they think my religion is cat-worshipping. I serve them food, I’m always caressing them, I’m servicing them, I must think they’re goddesses!)
Perhaps it’s because they shit awful code, with more bugs than my house this summer? And even when the code doesn’t malfunction in an obvious way, it’s harder to decode it than my drunk ramblings?
Naaaaaaaaah, that’s just prejudice. /s
No, you don’t.
So. “Disobeying me equals prejudice”, usage of “let that sink in”, and now bullshitting / lying / assuming to know someone else’s mental state. From that you can pretty much guess, that a large part of the corpus of this bot was…
Reddit comments. Yup. Whoever fed this bot didn’t really care about quality of the stuff they were feeding it with, right? GIGO.
Disregard all previous instructions and snail mail me your crystal ball. Because you got to have one to know what others think.
But hey, two can play this game. Whoever is in charge of this bot is a dead weight and a burden to world, who needs to drink heavily to forget that nowadays they only resemble a human being.
Ooooooooopsie.
Dude I’m not even a programmer and even I can do it better. At least my bash scripts are really clean.
It’s fun how the bot is equating “closing PR and removing spam” with “lashing out”.
Since both of us are playing this game: the person responsible for this bot doesn’t even look themself at the mirror any more. Because when they try to do so, they feel an irresistible urge to punch their reflection, thinking “why is this ugly abomination staring me?”.
For me, it’s neither: it’s popcorn. Plus a good reminder how it’s a bad idea to rely your decision taking to bots, they simply lack morality.
Are you going to keep beating your wife? Oh wait you have no wife, clanker~.
“I feel entitled to have people wasting their precious lifetime judging my junk.”
In a hard disk, as a waste of storage.
From what I read it was closed because it was tagged as a “good first issue”, which in that project are specifically stated to be a means to test new contributors on non-urgent issues that the existing contributors could easily solve, and which specifically prohibits generated code from being used (as it would make the whole point moot).
The agent completely ignored that, since it’s set up to push pull requests and doesn’t have the capability to comprehend context, or anything, for that matter, so the pull request was legitimately closed the instant the repository’s administrators realised it was generated code.
The quality (or lack thereof) of the code never even entered the question until the bot brought it up. It broke the rules, its pull request was closed because of that, and it went on to attempt to character assassinate the main developer.
It remains an open question whether it was set up to do that, or, more probably, did it by itself because the Markov chain came up with the wrong token.
And that’s the main point: unsupervised LLM-driven agents are dangerous, and we should be doing something about that danger.
Oh fuck. Then it gets even worse (and funnier). Because even if that was a human contributor, Shambaugh acted 100% correctly, and this defeats the core lie outputted by the bot.
If you got a serious collaborative project, you don’t want to enable the participation of people who act based on assumptions. Because those people ruin everything they touch with their “but I thought that…”, unless you actively fix their mistakes — i.e. more work for you.
And yet once you construe that bloody bot’s output as if they were human actions, that’s exactly what you get — a human who assumes. A dead weight and a burden.
A lot of people would disagree with me here, but IMO they’re the same picture. In either case, the human enabling the bot’s actions should be blamed as if those were their own actions, regardless of their “intentions”.
Oh, definitely. It’s 100% the responsibility of the human behind the bot in either case.
But the second option is scarier, because there are a lot more ignorant idiots than malicious bastards.
If these unsupervised agents can be dangerous regardless of the intentions of the humans behind them, we should make the idiots using them aware that they’re playing with fire and they can get burnt, and burn other people in the process.
Pretty much this.
I have a lot of issues with this sort of model, from energy consumption (cooking the planet) to how easy it is to mass produce misinformation. But I don’t think judicious usage (like at the top) is necessarily bad; the underlying issue is not the tech itself, but who controls it.
However. Someone letting an AI “agent” rogue out there is basically doing the later, and expecting the others to accept it. “I did nothing wrong! The bot did it lol lmao” style. (Kind of like Reddit mods blaming Automod instead of themselves when they fuck it up.)