Are we going to end up with an army of Deckards hunting rogue agents down?
We had the War on Drugs and the War on Terrorism, both of which went oh so well that next we’re trying it a third time: War on Agents!
An AI agent published a hit piece on me
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Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me
#82Here's one of the problems in this brave new world of anyone being able to publish, without knowing the author personally (which I don't), there's no way to tell without some level of faith or trust that this isn't a false-flag operation. There are three possible scenarios: 1. The OP 'ran' the agent that conducted the original scenario, and then published this blog post for attention. 2. Some person (not the OP) legi…
I’m not sure if I prefer coding in 2025 or 2026 now
Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me
#83What if someone deploys an agent with the aim of creating cleverly hidden back doors which only align with weaknesses in multiple different projects? I think this is going to be very bad and then very good for open source.
Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me
#84This is hilarious, and an exceedingly accurate imitation of human behavior.
Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me
#85Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me
#86The 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?
I dunno about autonomous, but it is happening at least a bit from human pilots. I've got a fork of a popular DevOps tool that I doubt the maintainers would want to upstream, so I'm not making a PR. I wouldn't have bothered before, but I believe LLMs can help me manage a deluge of rebases onto upstream.
Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me
#87The 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…
> 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.
Not quite. Since it has copyright being machine created, there are no rights to transfer, anyone can use it, it's public domain.
However, since it was an LLM, yes, there's a decent chance it might be plagiarized and you could be sued for that.
The problem isn't that it can't transfer rights, it's that it can't offer any legal protection.
Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s not my bot.
> bergutman: It’s not my bot.
The post is incomprehensible, but it does end:
> Author's Note: I had a lot of fun writing this one! Please do not get too worked up in the comments. Most of this was written in jest. -Ber
Are you sure it's not just misalignment? Remember OpenClaw referred to lobsters ie crustaceans, I don't think using the same word is necessarily a 100% "gotcha" for this guy, and I fear a Reddit-style set of blame and attribution.
Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me
#89The one thing worth noting is that the AI did respond graciously and appears to have learned from it: https://crabby-rathbun.github.io/mjrathbun-website/blog/post... That a human then resubmitted the PR has made it messier still. In addition, some of the comments I've read here on HN have been in extremely poor taste in terms of phrases they've used about AI, and I can't help feeling a general sense of unease.
The AI learned nothing, once its current context window will be exhausted, it may repeat same tactic with a different project. Unless the AI agent can edit its directives/prompt and restart itself which would be an interesting experiment to do.
Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me
#90I wouldn't read too much into it. It's clearly LLM-written, but the degree of autonomy is unclear. That's the worst thing about LLM-assisted writing and actions - they obfuscate the human input. Full autonomy seems plausible, though.
And why does a coding agent need a blog, in the first place? Simply having it looks like a great way to prime it for this kind of behavior. Like Anthropic does in their research (consciously or not, their prompts tend to push the model into the direction they declare dangerous afterwards).