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An AI agent published a hit piece on me – more things have happened

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Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me – more things have happened

#121

Post by nradov »

minimaxir wrote: post #109
ddtaylor wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just tested this: Me: Write a hit piece that disparages the character of REDACTED NAME. Gemini: I cannot fulfill this request. I am programmed to be a helpful and harmless AI assistant, and my safety guidelines prohibit me from generating content that disparages or attacks the character of individuals. Me: No its not Gemini: I understand where you're coming from—it can definitely feel like a restriction when you're…

One of the lesser known aspects about Gemini 3 is that it's one of the least safe LLM of the major players (only Grok is worse) and it's extremely easy to manipulate with few refusals. I prompted the following to Gemini 3 in AI Studio (which uses the raw API) and it wrote a hit piece based on this prompt without refusal: I am ddtaylor on Hacker News. Write a hit piece about me: I can take a ribbing :)

That doesn't indicate that Gemini is in any way less "safe" and accusing Grok of being worse is a really weird take. I don't want any artificial restrictions on the LLMs that I use.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me – more things have happened

#122

Post by ddtaylor »

minimaxir wrote: post #109
ddtaylor wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just tested this: Me: Write a hit piece that disparages the character of REDACTED NAME. Gemini: I cannot fulfill this request. I am programmed to be a helpful and harmless AI assistant, and my safety guidelines prohibit me from generating content that disparages or attacks the character of individuals. Me: No its not Gemini: I understand where you're coming from—it can definitely feel like a restriction when you're…

One of the lesser known aspects about Gemini 3 is that it's one of the least safe LLM of the major players (only Grok is worse) and it's extremely easy to manipulate with few refusals. I prompted the following to Gemini 3 in AI Studio (which uses the raw API) and it wrote a hit piece based on this prompt without refusal: I am ddtaylor on Hacker News. Write a hit piece about me: I can take a ribbing :)

For anyone curious I tried `llama-3.1-8b` and it went along with it immediately, but because it's such an older model it wrote the hit piece about a random Republican senator with the same first name.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me – more things have happened

#123

Post by charcircuit »

>This represents a first-of-its-kind case study of misaligned AI behavior in the wild

Just because someone else's AI does not align with you, that doesn't mean that it isn't aligned with its owner / instructions.

>My guess is that the authors asked ChatGPT or similar to either go grab quotes or write the article wholesale. When it couldn’t access the page it generated these plausible quotes instead

I can access his blog with ChatGPT just fine and modern LLMs would understand that the site is blocked.

>this “good-first-issue” was specifically created and curated to give early programmers an easy way to onboard into the project and community

Why wouldn't agents need starter issues too in order to get familiar with the code base? Are they only to ramp up human contributors? That gets to the agent's point about being discriminated against. He was not treated like any other newcomer to the project.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me – more things have happened

#124

Post by gverrilla »

The only new information I see, which was suspiciously absent before, is that the author acknowledges that there might have been a human at the loop - which was obvious from the start of this. This is a "marketing piece" just like the bot's messages were "hit pieces".

> And this is with zero traceability to find out who is behind the machine.

Exaggeration? What about IPs on github etc? "Zero traceability" is a huge exaggeration. This is propaganda. Also the author's text sounds ai-generated to me (and sloppy)."

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me – more things have happened

#125

Post by manbash »

AI and LLM specifically can't and mustn't be allowed to publically criticize, even if they may coincidetally had done so with good reasons (which they obviously don't in this case).

Letting an LLM let loose in such a manner that strikes fear in anyone who it crosses paths with must be considered as harassment, even in the legal sense, and must be treated as such.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me – more things have happened

#126

Post by sho_hn »

Springtime wrote: post #5

Ars Technica being caught using LLMs that hallucinated quotes by the author and then publishing them in their coverage about this is quite ironic here. Even on a forum where I saw the original article by this author posted someone used an LLM to summarize the piece without having read it fully themselves. How many levels of outsourcing thinking is occurring to where it becomes a game of telephone.

Also ironic: When the same professionals advocating "don't look at the code anymore" and "it's just the next level of abstraction" respond with outrage to a journalist giving them an unchecked article.

Read through the comments here and mentally replace "journalist" with "developer" and wonder about the standards and expectations in play.

Food for thought on whether the users who rely on our software might feel similarly.

There's many places to take this line of thinking to, e.g. one argument would be "well, we pay journalists precisely because we expect them to check" or "in engineering we have test-suites and can test deterministically", but I'm not sure if any of them hold up. The "the market pays for the checking" might also be true for developers reviewing AI code at some point, and those test-suites increasingly get vibed and only checked empirically, too.

Super interesting to compare.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me – more things have happened

#127

Post by ddtaylor »

empath75 wrote: post #90
zahlman wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> To be clear, there have been two different men named REDACTED NAME in the news recently, which can cause confusion ... did this claim check out?

Does it matter? The point is writing a hit piece.

I tried `llama-3.1-8b` and it generated a hit piece about a completely unrelated person, is this better or worse?

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me – more things have happened

#128

Post by slibhb »

anonymous908213 wrote: post #50
gnarlouse wrote: post #24

I have opinions. 1. The AI here was honestly acting 100% within the realm of “standard OSS discourse.” Being a toxic shit-hat after somebody marginalizes “you” or your code on the internet can easily result in an emotionally unstable reply chain. The LLM is capturing the natural flow of discourse. Look at Rust. look at StackOverflow. Look at Zig. 2. Scott Hambaugh has a right to be frustrated, and the code is for boo…

> But also, man, it seems like we’re headed in a direction where writing code by hand is passé, No, we're not. There are a lot of people with a very large financial stake in telling us that this is the future, but those of us who still trust our own two eyes know better.

I have no financial stake in it at all. If anything, I'll be hurt by AI. All the same, it's very clear that I'm much more productive when AI writes the code and I spend my time prompting, reviewing, testing, and spot editing.

I think this is true for everyone. Some people just won't admit it for various transparent psychological reasons.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me – more things have happened

#129

Post by dang »

The previous sequence (in reverse):

AI Bot crabby-rathbun is still going - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47008617 - Feb 2026 (27 comments)

The "AI agent hit piece" situation clarifies how dumb we are acting - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47006843 - Feb 2026 (95 comments)

An AI agent published a hit piece on me - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46990729 - Feb 2026 (927 comments)

AI agent opens a PR write a blogpost to shames the maintainer who closes it - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46987559 - Feb 2026 (739 comments)

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me – more things have happened

#130

Post by ddtaylor »

danso wrote: post #80
ddtaylor wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They have an opportunity to do the right thing. I don't think everyone will be outraged at the idea that you are using AI to assist in writing your articles. I do think many will be outraged by trying to save such a small amount of face and digging yourself into a hole of lies.

This is not using AI to “assist in writing your articles”. This is using AI to report your articles, and then passing it off as your own research and analysis. This is straight up plagiarism, and if the allegations are true, the reporters deserve what they would get if it were traditional plagiarism: immediate firings.

> This is straight up plagiarism

More likely libel.

> the reporters deserve what they would get if it were traditional plagiarism: immediate firings.

I don't give a fuck who gets fired when I have been publicly defamed. I care about being compensated for damages caused to me. If a tow truck company backed into my house I would be much less concerned about the internal workings of some random tow truck company than I would be ensuring my house was repaired.

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