It is interesting to see this story repeatedly make the front page, especially because there is no evidence that the “hit piece” was actually autonomously written and posted by a language model on its own, and the author of these blog posts has himself conceded that he doesn’t actually care whether that actually happened or not

>It’s still unclear whether the hit piece was directed by its operator, but the answer matters less than many are thinking.

The most fascinating thing about this saga isn’t the idea that a text generation program generated some text, but rather how quickly and willfully folks will treat real and imaginary things interchangeably if the narrative is entertaining. Did this event actually happen way that it was described? Probably not. Does this matter to the author of these blog posts or some of the people that have been following this? No. Because we can imagine that it could happen.

To quote myself from the other thread:

>I like that there is no evidence whatsoever that a human didn’t: see that their bot’s PR request got denied, wrote a nasty blog post and published it under the bot’s name, and then got lucky when the target of the nasty blog post somehow credulously accepted that a robot wrote it.

>It is like the old “I didn’t write that, I got hacked!” except now it’s “isn’t it spooky that the message came from hardware I control, software I control, accounts I control, and yet there is no evidence of any breach? Why yes it is spooky, because the computer did it itself”