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Comment by dvt | Hacker News Reader

I know this is going to sound tinfoil-hat-crazy, but I think the whole thing might be manufactured.

Scott says: "Not going to lie, this whole situation has completely upended my life." Um, what? Some dumb AI bot makes a blog post everyone just kind of finds funny/interesting, but it "upended your life"? Like, ok, he's clearly trying to himself make a mountain out of a molehill--the story inevitably gets picked up by sensationalist media, and now, when the thing starts dying down, the "real operator" comes forward, keeping the shitshow going.

Honestly, the whole thing reeks of manufactured outrage. Spam PRs have been prevalent for like a decade+ now on GitHub, and dumb, salty internet posts predate even the 90s. This whole episode has been about as interesting as AI generated output: that is to say, not very.

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Not everyone is you. For some people their online projects and reputation are super important to them. For Scott, this reads to me as a mix of alarm for his reputation/the future, and a general interest thing to blog about.

I don't think it sounds crazy at all.

To me this feels as made-up as many reddit stories are.

Either by the so-called 'operator' of the bot, or by the author.

I’m not so sure. The story here isn’t a molehill, it’s a canary. This is one doofus troll with his robot.

What happens when it’s not transparently ridiculous?

Exactly what I thought. Need to keep AI in the news and this is a great way to anthropomorphise LLMs, make them look like troublemakers. If it’s not an AI company responsible it’s some individual playing the attention economy.

Most people would have seen the “hit piece” and just laughed about it. Outrage sells a lot better though.

It's dishonest from the start. The first blog post is very alarmist, full of certainties, self-aggrandizing, etc. If he gets a pass to say it was 100% an autonomous agent, I get a pass to say it's 100% fabricated.

I think OP is somewhat scared because he felt like he was being 'bullied' and 'targeted' by the bot, which may be technically inaccurate (the bot clearly had a seriously overinflated ego and made that abundantly clear in its rhetoric, but it never really gave even the slightest indication of 'going after' him in a malicious way) but it is quite understandable nonetheless in human terms, especially given his self-described background as a reader of SF with its narrative of "evil AI robots rising up against mankind". That's not dishonesty, and it's unfair to portray it as such.

Let me be clear: he has all the right to feel bad about it, I'm not questioning that at all. But only IF IT'S TRUE, which we don't know for a fact - at all. Clearly that's a guy without a clear scientific mindset, because he didn't even question his basic premises at all (particularly on the first post). Also it's clear his using this as an opportunity to self-promote.

People get “overstimulated” from receiving one text message these days

straw that broke the camel's back. the amount of attention-leeching tech behavior has been increasing dramatically in recent years

In this case I can imagine their emails and messages started flowing in fast once the news broke, from both news outles, tech bros, AI companies and would-be AI cult leaders. But that's all in my head.

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