you know who overwhemlingly didn’t vote for Kamala Harris, “progressive” leftists who wanted to protest Jews in support of Islamofacist terrorists.

Thank you for saying this. Tolerance paradox paradoxing hard; I will never understand those people and their naive, stubborn black-and-white thinking.

That is absolutely not surprising, it’s clear that this group absolutely worships the guy, and clearly he enjoys the attention. But to say this proves the narrative in the post or that he’s directly involved is still a huge stretch without actual evidence.

People should definitely be made aware of the dangers both a16z AND ai16z pose, but not by buying the conspiracy theories they’re spreading around to further their interests.

We’ve seen shit like this happen in crypto again and again and again. Every shitcoin and crypto fad comes with its own purported vision of the future it’s supposedly powering, with Bitcoin it was financial privacy and independence from traditional currency, with NFTs it was a utopia of creative ownership, with the metaverse it was a virtual capitalistic reality, with this it’s apparently some crap about accelerating progress through social engineering (basically disinformation). But really, what they’re most likely going to do, is to use chatbots to scam people into buying their coin. Because that’s all this is about.

I need to reiterate: that Substack post is literally an ad. The person claims to work for Twitter but also claims to have been provided the tool externally by Andreessen (it describes Eliza as some sort of mysterious highly advanced technology: it’s not) and then also claims to have the authority to leave publicly available “breadcrumbs” in the code of Andreessen’s tool? And then they also claim to be a junior dev who doesn’t understand the technical side of it, but also claims to have worked at Twitter on a H1B visa? Closely enough to Musk to be enrolled in this high level illegal conspiracy against the public? It’s literally badly written fiction.

It’s a crypto scheme, they’re using this AI agent project to promote their coin. This is what crypto schemes do all the time, claiming that their coin is powered by or is powering whatever latest tech buzzword thing. Few years ago it was NFTs, then the metaverse, now it’s AI agents. It’s also extremely common for them to claim to be affiliated or funded by Elon Musk, for obvious reasons.

AI agents, especially if used like the project creators are implying through this fabricated narrative, are absolutely a threat to society. But that still doesn’t mean that this narrative isn’t fabricated.

Please, please, please, don’t believe everything you read on the internet. Fact check everything, especially everything that sounds too good or too bad to be true. This is exactly how we got into the situation we’re in today, and our ability to verify information is exactly what they’re trying to take away from us.

We all saw relatives, friends and coworkers turn into conspiracy theory spouting zombies back in 2020, as they were willing to believe literally every piece of disinformation they were exposed to as long as it aligned with their fears. Then we saw many of those same people continue to spiral further into the alt-right’s destructive narrative and propaganda. We must NOT fall into the same trap. The war that we’re all fighting in today is a war for the meaning of truth.

I did a bit more research into this.

You’re confusing a16z (Marc Andreessen) with ai16z (the people who made this and claim affiliation with Marc Andreessen). It’s a crypto scheme, they’re using this AI agent project to promote their coin. This is what crypto schemes do all the time, claiming that their coin is powered by or is powering whatever latest tech buzzword thing. Few years ago it was NFTs, then the metaverse, now it’s AI agents. It’s also extremely common for them to claim to be affiliated or funded by Elon Musk, for obvious reasons.

AI agents, especially if used like the project creators are implying through this fabricated narrative, are absolutely a threat to society. But that still doesn’t mean that this narrative isn’t fabricated.

Yes, and 2+2=5

You mistake me as trying to convince you of it’s objective truth, rather than sharing information that stands even without the whistleblower.

Sorry, I misunderstood your tone then, and I do appreciate the information you’ve shared. We are on the same page here, all I’m really arguing about is the legitimacy of the initial link.

Someone could’ve figured out it was super weird a org backed by Marc had a public example like that and made this all up. But why was it there in the first place?

And why is it still there? That’s what really sticks out to me. That’s why I called it “bait” in my original comment, because it’s exactly what this feels like. There is just something undeniably off with the way this narrative is being presented, even without taking the lack of hard evidence into account. I’d be very curious to find out how and where it began circulating.

Honestly I’m still shocked some of the content of that file can apparently be made publicly available on GitHub without violating their ToS. But that’s probably just me being naive at this point.

Confused what you mean by the API. Eliza is a framework for agents right? Whatever they were doing they’d do it via their internal API as it already has all the methods etc for posting. So they could either write something custom like eliza to manage that bit, or just connect Eliza?

You’re correct in your understanding that it’s definitely possible and I didn’t say it isn’t. They could’ve simply written their own client for it, or they could’ve used it regardless. It’s just… Really stupid. Disappointingly so if that turned out to be the case. The complete lack of technical details in the “whistleblowing” post doesn’t help, but even without going that deep into the repo you can tell it’s not a particularly sophisticated piece of software, it’s simply a “bridge” connecting agents (bots powered by generative models) and clients (social media and various other services). It’s useless on its own, and it’s not something that X (and anyone with access to its resources) couldn’t have done themselves way better considering that they already own considerable stakes on both sides of the bridge, that they developed themselves.

I still stand by my initial assessment that this is most likely a group that is simply using some disturbingly creative disinformation tactics to implicitly claim affiliation with subjects like Andreessen and Musk and fundamentally “promote” their “product” without even being subtle about its potential criminal and/or disruptive uses.

I hope this doesn’t come off as defensive, but I’m not sure how many times I need to repeat that I’m not at all disputing or discrediting the existence and danger of Eliza, other tools like it, and generative AI in general. Like I said, I very strongly believe that this type of manipulation absolutely happened, is still happening, and was happening even way before LLMs became a thing. I absolutely believe the public should be loudly and urgently made aware of this.

If there is anything that this Substack proves regardless of its veridicity, it’s that this is just the beginning. Very soon, the internet as you and I know it will entirely cease to exist and the very concept of “truth” will follow. This is the reality we are witnessing today. So trust me, I completely understand and share your discomfort at seeing that “nothing is happening” and no one is (at least publicly) looking into this.

Still, if the meaning of “truth” is what’s being weaponized here, I cannot in good conscience claim that, to my honest understanding, this specific Substack is currently proof of anything. And please do not take my word for it, keep sharing it and looking into it because I’d be the first to celebrate being proven wrong about this.

To answer your question about whether they could just do it via API, I mean, it’s certainly possible, but in the same way that breaking into your own house through a window when you have the front door key in your pocket is possible. And hey, again, don’t take my word for it. That is just the most likely conclusion to me, but logic doesn’t apply to these people and their schemes the way it does for you and me.

EDIT: forgot to say, thanks for providing that link to your thread and collecting the relevant information. I’ll make sure to read it.

Very odd though, no? Why would they use a Trump bot as the public example?

If I wanted to assume bad faith, and at this point I will every time a claim is made with no verifiable proof, I could very easily interpret that post and the presence of a Trump character file as an advertisement basically telling potential users “hey look, this is what he used to steal the election, it’s possible, it’s simple, it’s relatively cheap and you can do it too.” And if you look through the GitHub Issues for the project you’ll see that quite a few people are already currently using it for who knows what purposes.

As someone who works in the field I also believe there are several red flags in the way the article is written and a bunch of contradictions. For example, “hiding crumbs in the code” would generally imply something slightly more sophisticated than a public file that the author himself tells you how to find in the repository with even a screenshot of it.

The main issue for me though is that it is highly unlikely that the owner of X would need to use an external tool that establishes a finicky integration with X from the outside to generate fake content when he obviously has control over the internal private code and data of X itself. It’s beyond naive to think that if they wanted to create fake accounts, fake posts or manipulate the content users see, they would need this Eliza thing to do it effectively. This tool is clearly aimed at people who don’t own the platforms they intend to use it on.

Ultimately though, while I don’t believe this source and story are to be trusted, I still think everyone should know that tools like this actually exist and that something resembling the proposed narrative is extremely plausible regardless.

That is absolutely true, but the substack post as it stands provides no proof of the events it describes. Like I said, I’m not claiming that interference didn’t happen, I’m not even claiming it didn’t happen almost exactly the way the post describes, but none of it is verifiable through the provided “source”, which is just a public GitHub repo.

This isn’t actual proof of anything though. This is a publicity stunt by someone trying to promote this Eliza project, which has nothing to do with X because actual X code used for the described nefarious purposes wouldn’t be on a public GitHub repository. More importantly, someone who “can’t sleep at night” due to their involvement in election interference wouldn’t link to the tool they used to do it and instructions on how to use it.

Having a .json “character file” for a Trump chatbot filled with Trump rhetoric is not proof of anything the writer is claiming. Anyone could do that, including LLMs.

I’m not saying similar technologies/tactics weren’t actually used over the last few years, in fact, I strongly believe they were. All I’m saying is that this article is nothing but bait. Fact-checking is more important than ever now.

I know this is a joke, but as someone fluent in two languages, trust me when I tell you that translating anything Trump says effectively is borderline impossible, and that’s a huge problem. It plays in his favor because people in non-english speaking parts of the world don’t get to fully see how ridiculously incoherent he actually is; they only get the sanitized version of his ramblings.

Personally, it’s been REALLY hard these past few years hearing and seeing the shit coming out of his mouth in its original language and at the same time not being able to at least share my worries with other people in my country without sounding crazy. It’s very easy to underestimate the gravity of the situation from the other side of the world if you can’t grasp how low the standards have sunk and still believe DT is just an average Republican president, and not living proof that the actual meaning of words has no value anymore.

Then simple question, why not use First Gentleman? Kamala Harris’ husband was Second Gentleman and would have been first if she had won.

Going by your logic, that would be offensive to me, as a gay man.

But this kind of hypersensitivity, especially when applied regardless of context or intent, is one of the main drivers of the reactionary sentiment that is allowing the right to win elections all over the world. It’s one of the reasons why the “free speech” argument has worked so well in their favor.

Currently, the only ones benefitting from this “moral high-ground” stance are fragile little baby egos like Musk and Trump who can rest assured knowing their opposition would never stoop as low as them, while they get to freely spew as much intentionally evil shit as they want.

A society where no one is ever offended by anyone is a utopia. It’s as desirable as it is unattainable. I think the best thing we can do at the moment is focus on fighting back, not fighting against each other.