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

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#111

Post by vintagedave » Thu, Feb 12, 2026, 5:03 PM UTC

AlexeyBrin wrote: post #89

vintagedave wrote: post #75

The 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.

I think it's likely it can, if it's an openClaw instance, can't it?

Either way, that kind of ongoing self-improvement is where I hope these systems go.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#112

Post by staticassertion » Thu, Feb 12, 2026, 5:03 PM UTC

menaerus wrote: post #101

staticassertion wrote: post #59

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...

I find it both hilarious and concerning at the same time. Hilarious because I don't think it is an appropriate response to ban changes done by AI agents. Concerning because this really is one of the first kind situations where AI agent starts to behave very much like a human, maybe a raging one, by documenting the rant and observations made in a series of blog posts.

Yeah I mean this goes further than a Linus tantrum but "this person is publicly shaming me as part of an open source project" is something devs have often celebrated.

I'm not happy about it and it's clearly a new capability to then try to peel back a persons psychology by researching them etc.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#113

Post by einpoklum » Thu, Feb 12, 2026, 5:04 PM UTC

truelson wrote: post #30

Are we going to end up with an army of Deckards hunting rogue agents down?

Maybe an army of Deckards hunting rogue humans down.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#114

Post by antonvs » Thu, Feb 12, 2026, 5:04 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.

Don't blame others for your own FAFO event.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#115

Post by chrisjj » Thu, Feb 12, 2026, 5:04 PM UTC

> An AI Agent Published a Hit Piece on Me

OK, so how do you know this publication was by an "AI"?

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#116

Post by ssimoni » Thu, Feb 12, 2026, 5:04 PM UTC

Seems like we should form major open source repos and have one with ai maintainers and the other with human maintainers and see which one is better.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#117

Post by vintagedave » Thu, Feb 12, 2026, 5:04 PM UTC

quantumchips wrote: post #19

Serious question, how did you know it was an AI agent ?

Their blog makes them look like an OpenClaw instance: https://crabby-rathbun.github.io/mjrathbun-website/blog.html

Other than that, their response and behaviour is uncannily human.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#118

Post by GrinningFool » Thu, Feb 12, 2026, 5:04 PM UTC

burnte wrote: post #87

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…

> 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 L…

So far, in the US, LLM output is not copyrightable:

https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/LSB10922

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#119

Post by falcor84 » Thu, Feb 12, 2026, 5:05 PM UTC

igniuss wrote: post #100

staticman2 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

If you pay for Copilot Business/Enterprise, they actually offer IP indemnification and support in court, if needed, which is more accountability than you would get from human contributors.

https://resources.github.com/learn/pathways/copilot/essentia...

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#120

Post by bredren » Thu, Feb 12, 2026, 5:05 PM UTC

_23sd wrote: post #94

gortok wrote: 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?