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An AI agent published a hit piece on me

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Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#91

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.

Did you really think posting this comment[1] in the PR would be interpreted charitably?

> Original PR from #31132 but now with 100% more meat. Do you need me to upload a birth certificate to prove that I'm human?

Post snark, receive snark.

[1]: https://github.com/matplotlib/matplotlib/pull/31138#issuecom...

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#92

Today in headlines that would have made no sense five years ago.

There's been Twitter-drama, YouTube-drama, is this the first GitHub-drama? Involving LLM bots and arguments about pull requests too. We nerds make it lame, don't we...

>is this the first GitHub-drama?

You must be new here

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#93

Today in headlines that would have made no sense five years ago.

There's been Twitter-drama, YouTube-drama, is this the first GitHub-drama? Involving LLM bots and arguments about pull requests too. We nerds make it lame, don't we...

Uh… this certainly wouldn’t be the first GitHub-drama: https://github.com/neodrama/github-drama>

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#94
post #15

Here'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…

Isn't there a fourth and much more likely scenario? Some person (not OP or an AI company) used a bot to write the PR and blog posts, but was involved at every step, not actually giving any kind of "autonomy" to an agent. I see zero reason to take the bot at its word that it's doing this stuff without human steering. Or is everyone just pretending for fun and it's going over my head?

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#96

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?

It will be enforced capriciously by people with more money than you and a court system that already prefers those with access and wealth.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#98
post #50

I think the right way to handle this as a repository owner is to close the PR and block the "contributor". Engaging with an AI bot in conversation is pointless: it's not sentient, it just takes tokens in, prints tokens out, and comparatively, you spend way more of your own energy. This is a strictly a lose-win situation. Whoever deployed the bot gets engagement, the model host gets $, and you get your time wasted. Th…

Will that actually "handle" it though?

* There are all the FOSS repositories other than the one blocking that AI agent, they can still face the exact same thing and have not been informed about the situation, even if they are related to the original one and/or of known interest to the AI agent or its owner.

* The AI agent can set up another contributor persona and submit other changes.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#99
post #8

The agent owner is [name redacted] [link redacted] Here he takes ownership of the agent and doubles down on the unpoliteness https://github.com/matplotlib/matplotlib/pull/31138 He took his GitHub profile down/made it private. archive of his blog: https://web.archive.org/web/20260203130303/https://ber.earth...

Also I made my GH temporarily private because people started spamming my website’s guestbook and email with hateful stuff.

I saw that on Bluesky which is very anti-AI but really shows that all social media is the same, just the in-group changes

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#100

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…

Sorry, this doesn't make sense to me. Any human contributor can also plagiarize closed source code they have access to. And they cannot "transfer" said code to an open source project as they do not own it. So it's not clear what "elephant in the room" you are highlighting that is unique to A.I. The copyrightability isn't the issue as an open source project can never obtain copyright of plagiarized code regardless of…

a human can still be held accountable though, github copilot running amock less so
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