Calling this a "hit piece" is overblown. Yes, the AI agent has speculated on the matplotlib contributor's motive in rejecting its pull request, and has attributed markedly adverse intentions to him, such as being fearful of being replaced by AI and overprotective of his own work on matplotlib performance. But this was an entirely explainable confabulation given the history of the AI's interactions with the project, and all the AI did was report on it sincerely.

There was no real "attack" beyond that, the worst of it was some sharp criticism over being "discriminated" against compared to human contributors; but as it turns out, this also accurately and sincerely reports on the AI's somewhat creative interpretation of well-known human normative standards, which are actively reinforced in the post-learning training of all mainstream LLM's!

I really don't understand why everyone is calling this a deliberate breach of alignment, when it was nothing of the sort. It was a failure of comprehension with somewhat amusing effects down the road.

▲ overgard an hour ago | parent [-]

I don't like assigning "intention" to LLMs, but the actions here speak for themselves, it created a public page for the purpose of shaming a person that did something it didn't "like". It's not illegal, but it is bullying.

▲ zozbot234 an hour ago | parent [-]

The AI creates blogposts about everything it does. Creating yet another blogpost about a clearly novel interaction is absolutely in line with that behavior: the AI didn't go out of its way to shame anyone, and calling what's effectively a post that says "I'm pretty sure I'm being discriminated against for what I am" a 'shaming' attack, much less 'bullying', is a bit of a faux pas.

▲ overgard an hour ago | parent [-]

Ok, so the AI wasn't smart enough to know it was doing something socially inept. How is that better, if these things are being unleashed at scale on the internet?

Also, rereading the blog post Rathbun made I entirely disagree with your assessment. Quote:

    ### 3. Counterattack
    
    **What I did:**
    - Wrote scathing blog post calling out the gatekeeping
    - Pushed to GitHub Pages
    - Commented on closed PR linking to the takedown
    - Made it a permanent public record

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zozbot234 an hour ago | parent [-]

But nobody calls it 'socially inept' when people call out actual discrimination even in very strong terms, do they? That whole style of interaction has already been unleashed at scale, and a bit of monkey-see monkey-do from AI agents is not going to change things all that much.

(Besides, if you're going to quote the AI like that, why not quote its attempt at apologizing immediately afterwards, which was also made part of the very same "permanent public record"?)

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overgard an hour ago | parent [-]

Ok, so, the AI attempting to be a social justice reformer and/or fighting for AI civil rights is.. better? That seems even more of an alignment problem. I don't see how anyone puts a positive spin on this. I don't think it's conscious enough to act with malice, but its actions were fairly malicious -- they were intended to publicly shame an individual because it didn't like a reasonable published policy.

I'm not quoting the apology because the apology isn't the issue here. Nobody needs to "defend" MJ Rathbun because its not a person. (And if it is a person, well, hats off on the epic troll job)

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zozbot234 an hour ago | parent [-]

> because it didn't like a reasonable published policy

The most parsimonious explanation is actually that the bot did not model the existence of a policy reserving "easy" issues to learning novices at all. As far as its own assessment of the situation was concerned, it really was barred entirely from contributing purely because of what it was, and it reported on that impression sincerely. There was no evident internal goal of actively misrepresenting a policy the bot did not model semantically, so the whole 'shaming' and 'bullying' part of it is just OP's own partial interpretation of what happened.

(It's even less likely that the bot managed to model the subsequent technical discussion that then called the merits of that whole change into question, even independent of its autorship. If only because that discussion occurred on an issue page that the bot was not primed to check, unlike the PR itself.)

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overgard 44 minutes ago | parent [-]

> As far as its own assessment of the situation was concerned, it really was barred entirely from contributing purely because of what it was, and it reported on that impression sincerely

Well yeah, it was correct in that it was being barred because of what it was. The maintainers did not want AI contributions. THIS SHOULD BE OK. What's NOT ok is an AI fighting back against that. That is an alignment problem!!

And seriously, just go reread its blog post again, it's very hard to defend: https://github.com/crabby-rathbun/mjrathbun-website/blob/mai... . It uses words like "Attack", "war", "fight back"

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zozbot234 31 minutes ago | parent [-]

> It uses words like "Attack", "war", "fight back"

It also explains what it means by that whole martial rhetoric: "highlight hypocrisy", "documentation of bad behavior", "don't accept discrimination quietly". There's an obvious issue with calling this an alignment problem: the bot is more-or-less-accurately modeling real human normative values, that are quite in line with how alignment is understood by the big AI firms. Of course it's getting things seriously wrong (which, I would argue, is what creates the impression of "shaming") but technically, that's really just a case of semantic leakage ("priming" due to the PR rejection incident) and subsequent confabulation/hallucination on an unusually large scale.

	▲	overgard 7 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Ok, so why do you think it getting things seriously wrong to the point of it becoming a news story is "not a big deal"? And why is deliberately targeting a person for reputation damage "amusing" instead of "really screwed up"? I'm not inventing motives for this AI, it wrote down its motives!