Comment by protocolture
6 days ago
4) The post author guy is also the author of the bot and he set this up.
Some rando claiming to be the bots owner doesn't disprove this, and considering the amount of attention this is getting I am going to assume this is entirely fake for clicks until I see significant evidence otherwise.
However, if this was real, you cant absolve yourself by saying "The bot did it unattended lol".
Totally possible, but why bother? The website doesn't seem ad supported, so traffic would cost them more. Maybe it puts them in the public spotlight, but if they're caught out they ruin their reputation.
Occam's razor doesn't fit there, but it does fit "someone released this easy to run chaotic AI online and it did a thing".
I dont see Occam taking a side here.
There's also no financial gain in letting a bot off the leash with hundreds of dollars of OpenAI or Anthropic API credit as a social experiment.
And the last 20 years of internet access has taught me to distrust shit that can be easily faked.
Other guy comes forward and claims it, makes a post of his own? Sure I could see that. But nobody has been able to ID the guy. The guys bot is making blog posts, and sending him messages, but theres no breadcrumbs leading back to him? That smells very bad sorry. I dont buy it. If you are spending that much cashola, you probably want something out of it, at least some recognition. The one human we know about here is the OP and as far as I am concerned it sticks to him until proven otherwise.
> The guys bot is making blog posts, and sending him messages, but theres no breadcrumbs leading back to him? That smells very bad sorry. I dont buy it.
Could you set that up? I suspect I could pretty quickly, as could most pelple on HN.
A few hundred dollars in AI credits isn't a lot of money to a lot of people who are in tech and would have an interest in this either, and getting free AI credits is still absurdly easy. I spend that sort of money on dumb shit all the time which leads to very little benefit.
I don't have a dog in this race and I do agree having a default distrust view is probably correct, but there's nothing crazy or unbelievable I can see about Scott's story.
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> Totally possible, but why bother?
Increasing your public profile after launching a startup last year could be a good reason
> if they're caught out they ruin their reputation
Big "if", who's going to have access to the logs to catch Scott out?
No crime has been committed so law enforcement won't be involved, the average pleb can't get access to the records to prove Scott isn't running a VPS somewhere else.
Completely, but if you're the type who cares that much about your public profile, it's a pretty big risk. Even if nobody can prove anything, this type of rampant speculation was obviously going to happen. I see no clear cut benefit to the sociopathic behaviour of setting all of this up with multiple blog posts and layers of lies.
While it's good to question what you read on the internet, you're making me realize how dire the situation really is. If someone targets you with AI, you can't even defend yourself without being accused of making it all up for attention. There's no way to win this game.
Improbable, the OP is a long-time maintainer of a significant piece of open source software and this whole thing unfolded in public view step by step from the initial PR until this post. If it had been faked there would be smells you could detect with the clarity of hindsight going back over the history and there aren't.