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Comment by kypro

3 days ago

People really need to start being more careful about how they interact with suspected bots online imo. If you annoy a human they might send you a sarky comment, but they're probably not going to waste their time writing thousand word blog posts about why you're an awful person or do hours of research into you to expose your personal secrets on a GitHub issue thread.

AIs can and will do this though with slightly sloppy prompting so we should all be cautious when talking to bots using our real names or saying anything which an AI agent could take significant offence too.

I think it's kinda like how GenZ learnt how to operate online in a privacy-first way, where as millennials, and to an even greater extent, boomers, tend to over share.

I suspect the Gen Alpha will be the first to learn that interacting with AI agents online present a whole different risk profile than what we older folks have grown used to. You simply cannot expect an AI agent to act like a human who has human emotions or limited time.

Hopefully OP has learnt from this experience.

20 comments

kypro

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amarant  3 days ago

I hope we can move on from the whole idea that having a thousand word long blog post talking shit about you in any way reflects poorly upon your person. Like sooner or later everyone will have a few of those, maybe we can stop worrying about reputation so much?

Well,a guy can dream....

  • Applejinx  3 days ago

    If you have ten thousand of 'em, they feed the new generation of AIs and the next thing you know, it's received truth. Good luck not worrying about that.

    • duskdozer  3 days ago

      The LLM HR chats with to get a summary about you says that you're evil and an asshole with lots of negative publicity, and you become unhireable. Oh dear...

      1 reply →

sinuhe69  3 days ago

So you blamed the people for not acting “cautiously enough” instead of the people who let things run wild without even a clue what these things will do?

That’s wild!

  • kypro  3 days ago

    No blame. For better or worse I just think this is going to be the reality of interacting online in the near future. I imagine in the future stories like this will be extremely common.

    I could set up an OpenClaw right now to do some digging into you, try to identify you and your worse secrets, then ask it to write up a public hit piece. And you could be angry at me for doing this, but that isn't going to prevent it happening.

    And to add to what I said, I suspect you'll want to be thinking about this anyway because in the future it's likely employers will use AI to research you and try to find out any compromising info being giving you a job (similar to how they might search your name in the past). It's going to be increasingly important that you literally never post content that can be linked back to you as an individual even if it feels innocent in isolation. Over time you will build up an attack surface which AI agents can exploit much easier than has ever been possible by a human looking you up on Google in the past.

  • dangus  3 days ago

    I don’t think it’s “blame” it’s more like “precaution” like you would take to avoid other scams and data breach social engineering schemes that are out in the world.

    This is the world we live in and we can’t individually change that very much. We have to watch out for a new threat: vindictive AI.

  • handoflixue  3 days ago

    We encourage people to be safe about plenty of things they aren't responsible for. For example, part of being a good driver is paying attention and driving defensively so that bad drivers don't crash into you / you don't make the crashes they cause worse by piling on.

    That doesn't mean we're blaming good drivers for causing the car crash.

Kim_Bruning  2 days ago

This amuses me in a horrible kind of way. Saying that people need to learn to be polite to bots else consequences.

On the upside, it does mean they'll more likely be polite to everyone. Maybe it's a net win.

KK7NIL  3 days ago

> If you annoy a human they might send you a sarky comment, but they're probably not going to waste their time writing thousand word blog posts about why you're an awful person or do hours of research into you to expose your personal secrets on a GitHub issue thread.

They absolutely might, I'm afraid.

  • zephen  3 days ago

    Absolutely agreed.

    And now, the cost of doing this is being driven towards zero.