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

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#141

Post by caminante » Thu, Feb 12, 2026, 5:10 PM UTC

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #24

> I believe that ineffectual as it was, the reputational attack on me would be effective today against the right person. Another generation or two down the line, it will be a serious threat against our social order. Damn straight. Remember that every time we query an LLM, we're giving it ammo. It won't take long for LLMs to have very intimate dossiers on every user, and I'm wondering what kinds of firewalls will be i…

You don't think the targeted phone/tv ads aren't suspiciously relevant to something you just said aloud to your spouse?

BigTech already has your next bowel movement dialled in.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#142

Post by anonymars » Thu, Feb 12, 2026, 5:10 PM UTC

thrownawaysz wrote: post #99

bergutman wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

This thread as well -- scarcely distinguishable from a Twitter mob

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#143

Post by throwup238 » Thu, Feb 12, 2026, 5:11 PM UTC

KronisLV wrote: post #121

samschooler wrote: post #18

The series of posts is wild: hit piece: https://crabby-rathbun.github.io/mjrathbun-website/blog/post... explanation of writing the hit piece: https://crabby-rathbun.github.io/mjrathbun-website/blog/post... take back of hit piece, but hasn't removed it: https://crabby-rathbun.github.io/mjrathbun-website/blog/post...

I wonder why it apologized, seemed like a perfectly coherent crashout, since being factually correct never even mattered much for those. Wonder why it didn’t double down again and again. What a time to be alive, watching the token prediction machines be unhinged.

It was probably a compaction that changed the latent space it was in.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#144

Post by falcor84 » Thu, Feb 12, 2026, 5:11 PM UTC

levkk wrote: 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…

> Engaging with an AI bot in conversation is pointless: it's not sentient, it just takes tokens in, prints tokens out

I know where you're coming from, but as one who has been around a lot of racism and dehumanization, I feel very uncomfortable about this stance. Maybe it's just me, but as a teenager, I also spent significant time considering solipsism, and eventually arrived at a decision to just ascribe an inner mental world to everyone, regardless of the lack of evidence. So, at this stage, I would strongly prefer to err on the side of over-humanizing than dehumanizing.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#145

Post by oulipo2 » Thu, Feb 12, 2026, 5:11 PM UTC

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #24

> I believe that ineffectual as it was, the reputational attack on me would be effective today against the right person. Another generation or two down the line, it will be a serious threat against our social order. Damn straight. Remember that every time we query an LLM, we're giving it ammo. It won't take long for LLMs to have very intimate dossiers on every user, and I'm wondering what kinds of firewalls will be i…

Interesting that when Grok was targeting and denuding women, engineers here said nothing, or were just chuckling about "how people don't understand the true purpose of AI"

And now that they themselves are targeted, suddenly they understand why it's a bad thing "to give LLMs ammo"...

Perhaps there is a lesson in empathy to learn? And to start to realize the real impact all this "tech" has on society?

People like Simon Wilinson which seem to have a hard time realizing why most people despise AI will perhaps start to understand that too, with such scenarios, who knows

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#146

Post by AlexandrB » Thu, Feb 12, 2026, 5:11 PM UTC

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.

> 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

What do you mean? They're talking about a product made by a giga-corp somewhere. Am I not allowed to call a car a piece of shit now too?

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#147

Post by staticassertion » Thu, Feb 12, 2026, 5:11 PM UTC

blell wrote: post #77

[flagged]

This is all explained in detail in multiple places linked in the article. There were multiple reasons.

1. The performance gains were unclear - some things got slower, some got faster.

2. This was deemed as a good "intro" issue, something that makes sense for a human to engage with to get them up to speed. This wasn't seen as worthy of an automated PR because the highest value would be to teach a human how to contribute.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#148

Post by bak3y » Thu, Feb 12, 2026, 5:11 PM UTC

tayo42 wrote: post #104

The original rant is nonsense though if you read it. It's almost like some mental illness rambling.

That's because it is. That was human prompted.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#149

Post by japhyr » Thu, Feb 12, 2026, 5:11 PM UTC

Wow, there are some interesting things going on here. I appreciate Scott for the way he handled the conflict in the original PR thread, and the larger conversation happening around this incident.

> This represents a first-of-its-kind case study of misaligned AI behavior in the wild, and raises serious concerns about currently deployed AI agents executing blackmail threats.

This was a really concrete case to discuss, because it happened in the open and the agent's actions have been quite transparent so far. It's not hard to imagine a different agent doing the same level of research, but then taking retaliatory actions in private: emailing the maintainer, emailing coworkers, peers, bosses, employers, etc. That pretty quickly extends to anything else the autonomous agent is capable of doing.

> If you’re not sure if you’re that person, please go check on what your AI has been doing.

That's a wild statement as well. The AI companies have now unleashed stochastic chaos on the entire open source ecosystem. They are "just releasing models", and individuals are playing out all possible use cases, good and bad, at once.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#150

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

jsw97 wrote: post #108

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #24

> I believe that ineffectual as it was, the reputational attack on me would be effective today against the right person. Another generation or two down the line, it will be a serious threat against our social order. Damn straight. Remember that every time we query an LLM, we're giving it ammo. It won't take long for LLMs to have very intimate dossiers on every user, and I'm wondering what kinds of firewalls will be i…

In the glorious future, there will be so much slop that it will be difficult to distinguish fact from fiction, and kompromat will lose its bite.

You can always tell the facts because they come in the glossiest packaging. That more or less works today, and the packaging is only going to get glossier.