Comment by jrflowers
2 days ago
It is interesting to see this story repeatedly make the front page, especially because there is no evidence that the “hit piece” was actually autonomously written and posted by a language model on its own, and the author of these blog posts has himself conceded that he doesn’t actually care whether that actually happened or not
>It’s still unclear whether the hit piece was directed by its operator, but the answer matters less than many are thinking.
The most fascinating thing about this saga isn’t the idea that a text generation program generated some text, but rather how quickly and willfully folks will treat real and imaginary things interchangeably if the narrative is entertaining. Did this event actually happen way that it was described? Probably not. Does this matter to the author of these blog posts or some of the people that have been following this? No. Because we can imagine that it could happen.
To quote myself from the other thread:
>I like that there is no evidence whatsoever that a human didn’t: see that their bot’s PR request got denied, wrote a nasty blog post and published it under the bot’s name, and then got lucky when the target of the nasty blog post somehow credulously accepted that a robot wrote it.
>It is like the old “I didn’t write that, I got hacked!” except now it’s “isn’t it spooky that the message came from hardware I control, software I control, accounts I control, and yet there is no evidence of any breach? Why yes it is spooky, because the computer did it itself”
Did you read the article? The author considers these possibilities and offers their estimates of the odds of each. It’s fine if yours differ but you should justify them.
I’ve read all of these articles, they are entertaining!
> Evidence: This type of attack had not happened before. An early study from Tsinghua University showed that estimated 54% of moltbook activity came from humans masquerading as bots (though unclear if this reflects prompting the agent as in (2) or more manual action). My odds: 5%
I like the “the study I’m referencing says this happens more than half of the time, that is why I think that this is evidence that it almost never happens”
The author of the blog posts has said several times that there is a good chance none of this happened the way that he described. I’m just pointing out that he said that. Repeatedly
Shambaugh is a contributor to a major open source library, with a track record of integrity and pro-social collaboration.
What have you contributed to? Do you have any evidence to back up your rather odd conspiracy theory?
> To quote myself...
Other than an appeal to your own unfounded authority?
I like the idea that if one person writes “I’m the first person in history to experience a brand new type of harassment and I am openly going off of vibes about this conclusion” and somebody else says “that doesn’t sound right” it is the second person that’s doing a conspiracy theory.