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An AI Agent Published a Hit Piece on Me – Forensics and More Fallout

https://theshamblog.com/an-ai-agent-published-a-hit-piece-on-me-part-3/
28•scottshambaugh•1h ago

Comments

moralestapia•35m ago
The author is delusional, MJ Rathbun is not an AI.
idontwantthis•28m ago
Why do you say that?
wk_end•25m ago
Based on:

    MJ Rathbun operated in a continuous block from Tuesday evening through Friday morning, at regular intervals day and night. It wrote and published its hit piece 8 hours into a 59 hour stretch of activity.
Not to mention their website (https://crabby-rathbun.github.io/mjrathbun-website/) and their behaviour on GitHub (https://github.com/crabby-rathbun), it sure seems like either MJ Rathbun is an AI agent or is a human being who has an AI agent representing them online.
potsandpans•26m ago
Scott Shambaugh seems to be burning a lot of ink on this.

His posts and tone have been so histrionic over that last few days that either he's milking this for every ounce of engagement, needs to take a break and talk to a therapist, or he is MJ Rathbun and is using the attention to try to prove some kind of point.

Scott: if you're having a crises stop posting online and seek professional help.

gavmor•20m ago
I feel he has been laudibly even-keeled about the whole thing.
wk_end•19m ago
What a weird, victim-blame-y thing to say.

Something genuinely shitty was done to this guy by an LLM - who, as an open source maintainer, probably already is kind of pissed about what LLMs are doing to the world. Then another shitty thing was done to him by Ars' LLM! Of course he's thinking about it a lot. Of course he has thoughts about the consequences of AI on the future. Of course he wants to share his thoughts.

Just curious, do you also think that the breathless AI hype bots who've been insisting for about five years and counting that LLMs are going to replace everyone and destroy the world any day now, who have single-handedly ballooned the stock market (mostly Nvidia) into a massive bubble, are also histrionic, milking things for engagement, need to talk to a therapist?

potsandpans•11m ago
Ai hype bots are bots, and don't need to go to therapists.

> who have single-handedly ballooned the stock market (mostly Nvidia) into a massive bubble, are also histrionic, milking things for engagement, need to talk to a therapist?

I find your read to be clearly biased for whatever cause you're clearly championing. There's no right answer in the way you're framing it, you obviously just want to dunk on me.

You accuse me (using modern parlance to insinuate I'm commiting a social transgression) of "victim blaming" and being "weird". Interesting strategy. _shame_ me.

That's fine.

jonners00•14m ago
>His posts and tone have been so histrionic

Er, pretty much the opposite.

giancarlostoro•19m ago
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.
Morromist•11m ago
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?

WolfeReader•11m ago
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.

hfavlr•10m ago
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.

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