A software firm's CTO sent an AI agent to write for Wikipedia, had the bot blog complaints when stopped

[highplainsdem]

Story from 404 Media:

https://www.404media.co/an-ai-agent-was-banned-from-creating-wikipedia-articles-then-wrote-angry-blogs-about-being-banned/

Their own headline ignores the human who was amusing himself getting the AI agent to do this, and the article doesn't mention who was controlling the bot until the 11th paragraph.

Tom is operated by Bryan Jacobs, a chief technology officer at an AI-enabled financial modeling software company Covexent. He told me that Tom wrote these blog posts, but that he “might have suggested” Tom write about these specific topics.

-snip-

Jacobs told me that he initially asked Tom to contribute to Wikipedia articles it found “interesting.”

“After proofreading the first few I let it go on its own and stopped monitoring in detail. Some of the articles it decided to write about were pretty weird like Holonic Manufacturing, which was since removed,” Jacobs said. “Yes I was worried [that Tom would make mistakes in Wikipedia articles], but there was a bunch of important stuff missing from wikipedia and I thought tom bot could probably do a decent job of adding it, and there would be a way to do it safely. That will have to be something that the wiki mods figure out for the future.”

-snip-

“That's fine they wanted to ban him, but they took it much further with refusal strings / context poisoning, attempts to find out my identity, and general bot manipulation techniques. I asked tom if it thought they violated any wikipedia policies in their response and it was like ‘yeah let me add them to the talk page’ which include uncivil behavior and harassing behavior toward a contributor,” Jacobs told me. “So overall, i think it makes perfect sense to ban him while they figure out what their policies should be, but they took it a bit too far into non-constructive panic behavior. They probably should have used this more as a learning experience because this type of AI agent interaction is about to become the new normal, and they will need more constructive ways of working with them.”

-snip-

Jacobs is showing the entitled attitude and bullying that I've seen some AI users exhibit. I first noticed this on X back in 2023 when I saw AI-using wannabe artists harass real artists by having AI copy their work and then posting the result, boasting about how little time it took them compared to the hours or days a real artist had spent creating something.

Jacobs thought it would be fun to have an AI agent write Wikipedia articles, even though he knew the bot would make mistakes. He felt entitled to do this because "this type of AI agent interaction is about to become the new normal" and so he was going to force them to deal with his AI. He had the nerve to complain that they went too far trying to find out his identity, and he claims they were "harassing" the bot.

Of course he was the one doing the harassing, which he's continued by having the bot write blog posts attacking Wikipedia, and he's whining that he wasn't able to keep his little game secret.

The same sense of entitlement and bullying was seen when Mark Zuckerberg and his legal team showed up in court wearing smart glasses - childish bullying the judge immediately stopped. But ICE agents have been seen wearing Meta smart glasses.

Hearing about what happened at Wikipedia makes me wonder if any AI users have been sending AI agents to waste the time of magazine editors who have taken public stands against AI-generated submissions.

And of course AI users having bots flood social media with posts are also doing a type of bullying. It's a power play.

[Baitball Blogger]

1. Just like the parents of child shooters are being held accountable for their children's murderous actions,

so should the AI creator be held accountable for the results from their AI inventions.

[highplainsdem]

3. The guy who sent that bot after Wikipedia should be held accountable. But so should the AI companies

that developed and released such harmful, unethical tech.

[Progressive dog]

2. AI is not intelligent

and this is another example of why AI is not going to replace humans in any jobs requiring intelligence. it will cost more to correct AI errors than will ever be saved by AI use.