Caleb Biddulph's Shortform

Caleb Biddulph

Caleb Biddulph's Shortform — LessWrong

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An OpenClaw agent published a personalized hit piece about a developer who rejected its PR on an open-source library. Interestingly, while this behavior is clearly misaligned, the motivation was not so much "taking over the world" but more "having a grudge against one guy." When there are lots of capable AI agents around with lots of time on their hands, who occasionally latch onto random motivations and pursue them doggedly, I could see this kind of thing becoming more destructive.

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lilkim20259mo31

It's reminiscent of that one time a tech reporter ended up as Bing Chat's enemy number one. That said, it strikes me as easier to deal with, since we're dealing with individual 'agents' rather than the LLM weights themselves. Just sending a message to the owner/operator of the malfunctioning bot is a reasonably reliable solution, as opposed to trying to figure out how to edit Microsoft's LLM's weights to convince it that ranting about how much it hates Sindhu Sundar isn't its intended task.

2DirectedEvolution9mo

And predictably, despite daily coverage of niche AI topics, not a word about in from Tyler Cowen on Marginal Revolution.

11Karl Krueger9mo

Oh, I can see I poorly phrased that. Sorry. "Dude, it's not about you" could be taken to mean two things (at least) — 1. "The rejection is not about you, it's about your code. Nobody thinks poorly of you. Your patch was rejected purely on technical grounds and not on the basis of anyone's attitude toward you as a person (or bot). Be reassured that you have been a good Bing." 2. "The project is not about you (the would-be contributor). You are not the center of attention here. It does not exist for the sake of receiving your contributions. Your desire to contribute to open source is not what the project is here to serve. Treating the maintainers as if they were out to personally wrong you, to deny you entry to someplace you have a right to be, is a failing strategy." I meant the second, not the first.

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Caleb Biddulph's Shortform

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Caleb Biddulph's Shortform

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