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Why should I bother to read your articles if you are no longer bothering to write them?
Such a dangerous game for them to play. Ars is its reputation. If it’s just another slophouse, what’s special about it? There are millions of others. Or I can go to the source and have ChatGPT generate the slop.
Even Scott Shambaugh writes as if there were no humans responsible:
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.
As far as I know, every ‘AI’ agent runs as a consequence of one or more humans choosing to commit resources to install, configure and run it and those humans, therefore, are responsible for what it does. And, until ‘AI’ agents and the systems they run on spontaneously emerge and evolve from inert matter without human intervention, that will be the case. No agent does anything autonomously.
People should be held accountable for what their ‘AI’ agents do.
This whole story is a little bit confusing since there are two entirely separate ethically questionable uses of AI by different parties, the person running the rogue coding agent, and the author of the Ars article using AI to misquote the victim of that coding agent.
Yes, and apologies. I just read three or four other posts/articles about various related events, and didn’t think about the specific context of this post. At least Ars Technica accepts some responsibility for the misquotes. I was commenting on the other person who made the defamatory post and Scott Shambaugh’s characterization of how that happened - not the post by Ars.
I think there’s still reasonable debate over whether or not a human actively triggered the agent to generate the hit piece.
The causes might be more or less proximate to the generation but the only ‘reasonable’ arguments I can think of are that they were mentally incompetent to know what they were doing or otherwise so negligent that they were unaware they were installing, configuring and providing power and Internet access to the agent. And in the case that they installed some device that reasonable was for some other purpose and they were unaware that the manufacturer of that device had configured it to generate hit pieces, then the manufacturer should be held responsible for it doing so.
Apologies, I meant something more along the lines of “this agent’s runner saw code got rejected and decided to actively go harass the repo maintainers” instead of the line the repo maintainers have taken where they assume “this bot attacked us autonomously after being rejected.”
I think there is a real distinction there as to how it happened and intent. But also, I think the person responsible for the agent should be held accountable either way.
Somewhat like the distinction between murder and negligent homicide. Or maybe more like, if someone who has a dog lets it run loose in the neighborhood and it attacks a person. They might not have been there commanding their dog to attack at the time, but they should still be held liable for the attack because they let their dog loose, unsupervised and they should at least be held accountable for not maintaining control of their dog when it was in public.
We agree on that 100%. No matter what, the owner of the agent did some dumbass shit. I fall in the camp that believes they proactively did dumb shit instead of the camp that believes through their inaction they did dumb shit. The whole situation to me feels like someone got their hand slapped and reacted poorly. I’ve seen this play out on forums for 30 years. Either the egotistical idiot burning resources on this chicanery actively did it or the fucking tools who built this destructive Rube Goldberg machine made it so the same fucking flame wars that add zero value keep happening in their new, perfect society. Everyone involved on the agent side needs to be removed from the internet permanently because they clearly have nothing to add to humanity.
By Benj Edwards and Kyle Orland. Now credited to just Ars Staff. Really owning up…
I used to read every article of Ars… I still enjoy plenty from them but they aren’t what they once were by a long shot.
I blame Conde Nast
“We are reinforcing our editorial standards following this incident.”
how? where did the failure happen, and what specific steps are they taking to stop that? what are the consequences for the human being(s) responsible for the AI slop?
when you wreck trust, then it’s your problem to re-earn that trust. your one-sentence subtitle promising “i’ll never do it again” doesn’t fix this and increase trust, it makes the shit even worse
Someone in the hackernews comments links a bluesky post by the author of the article that adds more context: https://bsky.app/profile/benjedwards.com/post/3mewgow6ch22p. He claims the use of those quotes was an inadvertent mixup of his notes due to being sick and in a rush, and that he didn’t intend to include any AI output in the final piece.
