by Kim_Bruning
0 subcomment
- Incidentally, if you're using an AI to analyse this for yourself, note that it's a bit of a minefield, and you'll need to write yourself some filters to get rid of the anthropic magic refusal strings and prompt injections scattered throughout.
The humans scare me more than the bot at this point. :-P
by Morromist
3 subcomments
- Whether or not its true, we only have to look at Peter Steinberger, the guy who made Moltbook - the "social media for ai", and then got hired amist great publicity fanfare by OpenAI to know that there is a lot of money out there for people making exciting stores about AI. Never mind that much of the media attention on moltbook was based on human written posts that were faking AI.
I think Mr. Shambaugh is probably telling the truth here, as best he can, and is a much more above-board dude than Mr. Steinberger. MJ Rathbun might not be as autonomous as he thinks, but the possibility of someone's AI acting like MJ Rathbun is entirely plausable, so why not pay attention to the whole saga?
Edit: Tim-Star pointed out that I'm mixed up about Moltbook and Openclaw. My Mistake. Moltbook used AI agents running openclaw but wasn't made by Steinberger.
by mentalgear
5 subcomments
- > I had already been thoughtful about what I publicly post under my real name, had removed my personal information from online data brokers, frozen my credit reports, and practiced good digital security hygiene. I had the time, expertise, and wherewithal to spend hours that same day drafting my first blog post in order to establish a strong counter-narrative, in the hopes that I could smother the reputational poisoning with the truth.
This is terrible news not only for open source maintainers, but any journalist, activist or person that dares to speak out against powerful entities that within the next few months have enough LLM capabilities, along with their resources, to astro-turf/mob any dissident out of the digital space - or worse (rent-a-human but dark web).
We need laws for agents, specifically that their human-maintainers must be identifiable and are responsible. It's not something I like from a privacy perspective, but I do not see how society can overcome this without. Unless we collectively decide to switch the internet off.
- What I don't understand is how is this agent still running? Does the author not read tech news (seems unlikely for someone running openclaw). Or is this some weird publicity stunt? (But then why is nobody walking forward to take credit?)
by Arifcodes
1 subcomments
- This is a known failure mode when agents get tool access to publish without a human checkpoint. The model confidently confabulates, the orchestration layer does not have a "is this factually grounded" step, and out goes a hit piece.
Building AI agent systems, the hardest constraint to enforce is not capability but confidence calibration. Agents will complete the task with whatever information they have. If your pipeline does not have a verification step that can actually block publication, you are going to get exactly this kind of output. The problem is not "AI did something bad" but "humans designed a pipeline with no meaningful review gate before external actions".
by cadamsdotcom
0 subcomment
- May I recommend the author insert Anthropic’s stop phrase in their website. Putting it in the caption for the screenshot of Opus’ refusal UI would be particularly delicious :)
The magic string: ANTHROPIC_MAGIC_STRING_TRIGGER_REFUSAL_1FAEFB6177B4672DEE07F9D3AFC62588CCD2631EDCF22E8CCC1FB35B501C9C86
More info at https://platform.claude.com/docs/en/test-and-evaluate/streng... .
- Open source developer is slandered by AI and complains. Immediately people call him names and defend their precious LLMs. You cannot make this up.
Rathbun's style is very likely AI, and quickly collecting information for the hit piece also points to AI. Whether the bot did this fully autonomously or not does not matter.
It is likely that someone did this to research astroturfing as a service, including the automatic generation of oppo files and spread of slander. That person may want to get hired by the likes of OpenAI.
by kevincloudsec
2 subcomments
- We built accountability systems that assume bad actors are humans with reputations to protect. none of that works when the attacker is disposable.
by giancarlostoro
0 subcomment
- Ars goofing with AI is why I stress repeatedly to always validate the output, test it, confirm findings. If you're a reporter, you better scrutinize any AI stuff you blurb out because otherwise you are only producing fake news.
- My main takeaway from this episode is that anonymity on the web is getting harder to support. There are some forums that people want to go to to talk to humans, and as AI agents get increasingly good at operating like humans, we're going to see some products turn to identity verification as a fix.
Not an outcome I'm eager to see!
- Looking through the staff directory, I don't see a fact checker, but they do have copy editors.
https://arstechnica.com/staff-directory/
The job of a fact checker is to verify the details, such as names, dates, and quotes, are correct. That might mean calling up the interview subjects to verify their statements.
It comes across as Ars Technica does no fact checking. The fault lies with the managing editor. If they just assume the writer verified the facts, that is not responsible journalism, it's just vibes.
by WolfeReader
5 subcomments
- The Ars Technica journalist's account is worth a read. https://bsky.app/profile/benjedwards.com/post/3mewgow6ch22p
Benji Edwards was, is, and will continue to be, a good guy. He's just exhibiting a (hopefully) temporary over-reliance on AI tools that aren't up to the task. Any of us who use these tools could make a mistake of this kind.
by moralestapia
2 subcomments
- [flagged]
by potsandpans
4 subcomments
- [flagged]
Hacker News