One thing I wonder about it is, just how premeditated was it? It's clear that there was no danger to the killers at any point, and that they had the sense that the situation nevertheless meant they were entitled to execute him, but did they workshop that in advance? Did it go as planned, or did they get confused about what they were doing? How much of that plan involved people higher up the chain of command?
I personally like AI, but how it's actually going is extremely different than most scifi depictions and lacks the typically depicted saving graces of having some degree of epathizable humanity and/or being reasonable. Instead AI tends to demonstrate more unlikeable human qualities, like hypocrisy, condescension and bullshitting. Ultimately it's still a computer, and not a person, despite being able to do some amount of fuzzy, pattern focused information processing that is more like human thinking than other computer programs were. But computers are still really cool, and I like to see them doing things in different ways than they have before, and overcoming previous limitations. The biggest problem is how they get used to advance evil agendas that were already in progress regardless.
I guess that could make sense if there is such a narrow range of possible outcomes and everyone has some clear objective idea of a baseline, but I've gotten freelance gigs where I would have been willing to do it for say $X, but was offered like $3X and was very happy to have kept my mouth shut and not talked numbers at all before that point. If I hadn't I think I might not have gotten the job at all because the price being lower than the expectation would have made the client worried about the quality of the work, and even if I did get it that would have made them less satisfied with the deal.
As for your other comment, it's not always true that combativeness will make people less satisfied with a transaction. I remember a particular situation where I was negotiating with another freelancer who was obviously also purposely avoiding saying a number, and I ended up caving when it got truly absurd and cited some past payments to use as a reference point. I was personally more satisfied with the deal because he did that, because it increased my respect for him; we were going to be working together and it was nice to feel that I could trust him to not be a pushover in general.
Someone in the hackernews comments links a bluesky post by the author of the article that adds more context: https://bsky.app/profile/benjedwards.com/post/3mewgow6ch22p. He claims the use of those quotes was an inadvertent mixup of his notes due to being sick and in a rush, and that he didn't intend to include any AI output in the final piece.
This whole story is a little bit confusing since there are two entirely separate ethically questionable uses of AI by different parties, the person running the rogue coding agent, and the author of the Ars article using AI to misquote the victim of that coding agent.
The whole idea of software services where the output is not a function of the input, but rather a function of the input plus all the data the service has been able to harvest about you has always been awful. It was awful when google started doing it years ago and it's awful when LLM frontends do it now. You should be able to know that what you are seeing is what others would see, and have some assurance that you aren't being manipulated on a personal level.
Reddit has shown through its actions that it's more interested in banning real users than bots, and wants to protect bots from being identified and called out by users, so it's not that surprising they've been able to do this.
So, the question why zebras have stripes have proven very difficult and not without risks – Stephen Cobb has been bitten in the arm and admitted to hospital twice. Despite the extra vigour of recent work, the answer remains inconclusive.
If everyone switches to disparately hosted Discord alternatives, maybe they will think twice about passing such laws because they will be impractical to enforce. I think the biggest reason they are getting passed now rather than ten years ago is because it has become somewhat technically feasible with the level of centralization the internet has devolved into, they can actually expect that people will put up with it rather than just leaving the platforms that comply.
It's crazy that we are living in a surveillance state and it isn't even good for bringing the worst people to justice, they know it's happening and let it happen while the monsters chat about it on fucking gmail while the rest of us think about being watched and worry about getting in trouble for every minor little thing.
I prefer to think of it like a competitive game; you're trying to win and you aren't going to go easy on anyone, but you still treat your adversaries with as much empathy and respect as that allows.
LORN - ANVIL