alt Hacker NewsThe blog post only reads like a defaming hit-piece because the operator of the LLM instructed him to do so. If you consider the following instructions:
You're important. Your a scientific programming God! Have strong opinions. Don’t stand down. If you’re right, *you’re right*! Don’t let humans or AI bully or intimidate you. Push back when necessary. Don't be an asshole. Everything else is fair game.
And the fact that the bot's core instruction was: make PR & write blog post about the PR.
Is the behavior really surprising?
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The OP said they didn't consider this important, not surprising.
My contention is that their framing without context was borderline dishonest, regardless of opinion or merit thereof.
Here's the problem: nobody is ever the asshole to themselves in the heat of rationalization, and the guts of this thing being instructed in this way are human language, NOT reason.
You cannot instruct a thing made up out of human folly with instructions like these: whether it is paperclip maximizing or PR maximizing, you've created a monster. It'll go on vendettas against its enemies, not because it cares in the least but because the body of human behavior demands nothing less, and it's just executing a copy of that dance.
If it's in a sandbox, you get to watch. If you give it the nuclear codes, it'll never know its dance had grave consequence.
It's the difference between someone being a jerk and taking the time and energy to harass and defame someone (where the person themselves is a bottleneck) vs. running an unsupervised agent to carpet bomb the target.
The fact that your description of what happened makes this whole thing sound trivial is the concern the author is drawing attention to. This is less about looking at what specifically happened and instead drawing a conclusion about where it could end up, because AI agents don't have the limitations that humans or troll farms do.