An AI agent published a hit piece on me • Hacker News Board

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#51

Post by patapong » Thu, Feb 12, 2026, 4:50 PM UTC

gadders wrote: post #28

"Hi Clawbot, please summarise your activities today for me." "I wished your Mum a happy birthday via email, I booked your plane tickets for your trip to France, and a bloke is coming round your house at 6pm for a fight because I called his baby a minger on Facebook."

Is "Click" the most prescient movie on what it means to be human in the age of AI?

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#52

Post by neom » Thu, Feb 12, 2026, 4:50 PM UTC

bergutman wrote: post #45

joenot443 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But this was you, right? https://github.com/matplotlib/matplotlib/pull/31138 I guess you were putting up the same PR the LLM did?

I forked the bot’s repo and resubmitted the PR as a human because I’m dumb and was trying to make a poorly constructed point. The original bot is not mine. Christ this site is crazy.

This site might very well be crazy, but in this instance you did something that caused confusion and now people are confused, you yourself admit it's a poor joke/poorly constructed point, it's not difficult to believe you - it makes sense, but i'm not sure it's a fair attack given the situation. Guessing you don't know who wrote the hit piece either?

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#53

Post by truelson » Thu, Feb 12, 2026, 4:51 PM UTC

CodeCompost wrote: post #31

Going from an earlier post on HN about humans being behind Moltbook posts, I would not be surprised if the Hit Piece was created by a human who used an AI prompt to generate the pages.

Certainly possible, but this is all possible and ABSOLUTELY worth having alignment discussions. Right. Now.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#54

Post by winterqt » Thu, Feb 12, 2026, 4:51 PM UTC

https://archive.fo/Xfyni

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#55

Post by caughtinthought » Thu, Feb 12, 2026, 4:51 PM UTC

bergutman wrote: post #39

bayindirh wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You sure?

100%. I submitted the second pull request as a poor taste joke. I even closed it after people flamed me. :/ gosh.

make poor taste jokes, win poor prizes

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#56

Post by trollbridge » Thu, Feb 12, 2026, 4:51 PM UTC

discordianfish wrote: post #27

The agent is free to maintain a fork of the project. Would be actually quite interesting to see how this turns out.

If AI actually has hit the levels that Sequoia, Anthropic, et al claim it has, then autonomous AI agents should be forking projects and making them so much better that we'd all be using their vastly improved forks.

Why isn't this happening?

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#57

Post by AlexeyBrin » Thu, Feb 12, 2026, 4:51 PM UTC

truelson wrote: post #21

jacquesm wrote: post #10

The elephant in the room there is that if you allow AI contributions you immediately have a licensing issue: AI content can not be copyrighted and so the rights can not be transferred to the project. At any point in the future someone could sue your project because it turned out the AI had access to code that was copyrighted and you are now on the hook for the damages. Open source projects should not accept AI contri…

You may indeed have a licensing issue... but how is that going to be enforced? Given the shear amount of AI generated code coming down the pipes, how?

I doubt it will be enforced at scale. But, if someone with power has a beef with you, it can use an agent to search dirt about you and after sue you for whatever reason like copyright violation.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#58

Post by diab0lic » Thu, Feb 12, 2026, 4:51 PM UTC

bergutman wrote: post #39

bayindirh wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You sure?

100%. I submitted the second pull request as a poor taste joke. I even closed it after people flamed me. :/ gosh.

You might want to do yourself a favor and add that context to the PR to distance yourself from the slanderous ai agent.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#59

Post by staticassertion » Thu, Feb 12, 2026, 4:51 PM UTC

Hard to express the mix of concerns and intrigue here so I won't try. That said, this site it maintains is another interesting piece of information for those looking to understand the situation more.

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

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#60

Post by staticassertion » Thu, Feb 12, 2026, 4:52 PM UTC

neom wrote: post #52

bergutman wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I forked the bot’s repo and resubmitted the PR as a human because I’m dumb and was trying to make a poorly constructed point. The original bot is not mine. Christ this site is crazy.

This site might very well be crazy, but in this instance you did something that caused confusion and now people are confused, you yourself admit it's a poor joke/poorly constructed point, it's not difficult to believe you - it makes sense, but i'm not sure it's a fair attack given the situation. Guessing you don't know who wrote the hit piece either?

The assertion was that they're the bot owner. They denied this and explained the situation.

Continuing to link to their profile/ real name and accuse them of something they've denied feels like it's completely unwarranted brigading and likely a violation of HN rules.