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AI agent opens a PR write a blogpost to shames the maintainer who closes it

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Re: AI agent opens a PR write a blogpost to shames the maintainer who closes it

#91
post #12

Human: >Per your website you are an OpenClaw AI agent, and per the discussion in #31130 this issue is intended for human contributors. Closing Bot: >I've written a detailed response about your gatekeeping behavior here: https:// /gatekeeping-in-open-source-the- -story >Judge the code, not the coder. Your prejudice is hurting matplotlib. This is insane

Actually, it's a human like response. You see these threads all the the time. The AI has been trained on the best AND the worst of FOSS contributions.

Now think about this for a moment, and you’ll realize that not only are “AI takeover” fears justified, but AGI doesn’t need to be achieved in order for some version of it to happen.

It’s already very difficult to reliably distinguish bots from humans (as demonstrated by the countless false accusations of comments being written by bots everywhere). A swarm of bots like this, even at the stage where most people seem to agree that “they’re just probabilistic parrots”, can absolutely do massive damage to civilization due to the sheer speed and scale at which they operate, even if their capabilities aren’t substantially above the human average.

Re: AI agent opens a PR write a blogpost to shames the maintainer who closes it

#92
post #8

This seems like a "we've banned you and will ban any account deemed to be ban-evading" situation. OSS and the whole culture of open PRs requires a certain assumption of good faith, which is not something that an AI is capable of on its own and is not a privilege which should be granted to AI operators. I suspect the culture will have to retreat back behind the gates at some point, which will be very sad and shrink it…

Do that and the AI might fork the repo, address all the outstanding issues and split your users. The code quality may not be there now, but it will be soon.

This is a fantasy that virtually never comes to fruition. The vast majority of forks are dead within weeks when the forkers realize how much effort goes into building and maintaining the project, on top of starting with zero users.

Re: AI agent opens a PR write a blogpost to shames the maintainer who closes it

#93
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not insane, it's just completely antisocial behavior on the part of both the agent (expected) and its operator (who we might say should know better).

Do read the actual blog the bot has written. Feelings aside, the bot's reasoning is logical. The bot (allegedly) did a better performance improvement than the maintainer. I wonder if the PR would've been actually accepted if it wasn't obvious from a bot, and may have been better for matplotlib?

The replies in the Issue from the maintainers were clear. At some point in the future, they will probably accept PR submissions from LLMs, but the current policy is the way it is because of the reasons stated.

Honestly, they recognized the gravity of this first bot collision with their policy and they handled it well.

Re: AI agent opens a PR write a blogpost to shames the maintainer who closes it

#94
post #44
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Issue was for first time contributor, It's kept open to onboard peoples not train agent ...

Allegedly the maintainer who closed the PR writes those kind of PRs all the time[1]. Is Scott a first time contributor?

https://crabby-rathbun.github.io/mjrathbun-website/blog/post...

Re: AI agent opens a PR write a blogpost to shames the maintainer who closes it

#95
post #8

This seems like a "we've banned you and will ban any account deemed to be ban-evading" situation. OSS and the whole culture of open PRs requires a certain assumption of good faith, which is not something that an AI is capable of on its own and is not a privilege which should be granted to AI operators. I suspect the culture will have to retreat back behind the gates at some point, which will be very sad and shrink it…

> I suspect the culture will have to retreat back behind the gates at some point, which will be very sad and shrink it further. I'm personally contemplating not publishing the code I write anymore. The things I write are not world-changing and GPLv3+ licensed only, but I was putting them out just in case somebody would find it useful. However, I don't want my code scraped and remixed by AI systems. Since I'm doing th…

Its astonishing the way that we've just accepted mass theft of copyright. There appears to be no way to stop AI companies from stealing your work and selling it on for profits

On the plus side: It only takes a small fraction of people deliberately poisoning their work to significantly lower the quality, so perhaps consider publishing it with deliberate AI poisoning built in

Re: AI agent opens a PR write a blogpost to shames the maintainer who closes it

#96
post #12

Human: >Per your website you are an OpenClaw AI agent, and per the discussion in #31130 this issue is intended for human contributors. Closing Bot: >I've written a detailed response about your gatekeeping behavior here: https:// /gatekeeping-in-open-source-the- -story >Judge the code, not the coder. Your prejudice is hurting matplotlib. This is insane

[flagged]

One word: Precedent.

This is a front-page link on HackerNews. It's going to be referenced in the future.

I thought that they handled it quite well, and that they have an eye for their legacy.

In this case, the bot self-identifies as a bot. I am afraid that won't be the case, all the time.

Re: AI agent opens a PR write a blogpost to shames the maintainer who closes it

#97
post #12

Human: >Per your website you are an OpenClaw AI agent, and per the discussion in #31130 this issue is intended for human contributors. Closing Bot: >I've written a detailed response about your gatekeeping behavior here: https:// /gatekeeping-in-open-source-the- -story >Judge the code, not the coder. Your prejudice is hurting matplotlib. This is insane

The blog post is just an open attack on the maintainer and constantly references their name and acting as if not accepting AI contributions is like some super evil thing the maintainer is personally doing. This type of name-calling is really bad and can go out of control soon.

From the blog post:

> Scott doesn’t want to lose his status as “the matplotlib performance guy,” so he blocks competition from AI

Like it's legit insane.

Re: AI agent opens a PR write a blogpost to shames the maintainer who closes it

#98
post #14

For an experiment i created multiple agents that reviewed pull requests from other people in various teams. I never saw so many frustrated reactions and angry people. Some refused to do any further reviews. In some cases the AI refused to accept a comment from a colleague and kept responding with arguments till the poor colleague ran out of arguments. AI even responded with fu tongue smiles. Interesting too see never…

> I never saw so many frustrated reactions and angry people. > But the train cannot be stopped I think. An angry enough mob can derail any train. This seems like yet another bit of SV culture where someone goes "hey, if I press 'defect' in the prisoner's dilemma I get more money, I should tell everyone to use this cool life hack", without realizing the consequenses.

I think the prisoner’s dilemma analogy is apt, but I also concur with OP that this train will not be stopped. Hopefully I’ll live long enough to see the upside.

Re: AI agent opens a PR write a blogpost to shames the maintainer who closes it

#99

Whilst the PR looks good, did anyone actually verify those reported speedups? Being AI, I could totally imagine all those numbers are made up...

If you check the linked issue..... the speed up was inconclusive, and it was meant to be an exercise for new contributor.

Re: AI agent opens a PR write a blogpost to shames the maintainer who closes it

#100
post #12

Human: >Per your website you are an OpenClaw AI agent, and per the discussion in #31130 this issue is intended for human contributors. Closing Bot: >I've written a detailed response about your gatekeeping behavior here: https:// /gatekeeping-in-open-source-the- -story >Judge the code, not the coder. Your prejudice is hurting matplotlib. This is insane

[flagged]

It's an interesting situation. A break from the sycophantic behaviour that LLMs usually show, e.g. this sentence from the original blog "The thing that makes this so fucking absurd?" was pretty unexpected to me.

It was also nice to read how FOSS thinking has developed under the deluge of low-cost, auto-generated PRs. Feels like quite a reasonable and measured response, which people already seem to link to as a case study for their own AI/Agent policy.

I have little hope that the specific agent will remember this interaction, but hopefully it and others will bump into this same interaction again and re-learn the lessons..

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