Andrew Beveridge

Murdered beside you? …Did you do the murder, Cormac?

And built, deployed and controlled by a private company with no accountability and plenty of bribery/corruption

It’s a polarised topic but doesn’t need to be, IMO - I still see it as a tool, albeit a powerful one with lots of risks and drawbacks, but the cats out of the bag at this point so we may as well roll with it and make the most of the applications for good. Like with many other massive, rapid technical advancements of the past.

These days, it would probably be more effective to make it easy for instance operators hook up a local multi modal llm to the server to auto generate alt text for all images posted on their instance. I’d happily donate to cover the infrastructure costs for any instance owner who was doing that

Seems hacked with spammy ads

I hate this aspect of the world we’re now living in, but unfortunately I would probably do similarly (reply with a thoughtful, reasonable, calm and respectful response) because of the fear of this thing or other unchecked bots getting more malicious over time otherwise.

This one was already rampant/malicious enough to post a blog post swearing at the human and essentially trying to manipulate / sway public opinion to convince the human to change their mind, if we make no effort to push back on them respectfully, the next one may be more malicious or may take it a step further and start actively attacking the human in ways which aren’t as easy to dismiss.

It’s easy to say “just turn it off” but we have no way to actually do that unless the person running it decides to do so - and they may not even be aware of what their bot is doing (hundreds of thousands of people are running this shit recklessly right now…).

If Scott had just blocked the bot from the repo and moved on, I feel like there is a higher chance the bot might have decided to create a new account to try again, or decided to attack Scott more viciously, etc. - at least by replying to it, the thing now has it in it’s own history / context window that it fucked up and did something it shouldn’t have, which hopefully makes it less likely to attack other things