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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

#191

Post by sho_hn »

oulipo2 wrote: post #145
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…

It's the same how HN mostly reacts with "don't censor AI!" when chat bots dare to add parental controls after they talk teenagers into suicide.

The community is often very selfish and opportunist. I learned that the role of engineers in society is to build tools for others to live their lives better; we provide the substrate on which culture and civilization take place. We should take more responsibility for it and take care of it better, and do far more soul-seeking.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#192

Post by dizhn »

chrisjj wrote: post #123
_23sd wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Plus Scenario 5: A human wrote it for LOLs.

> Obstacles

    GitHub CLI tool errors — Had to use full path /home/linuxbrew/.linuxbrew/bin/gh when gh command wasn’t found
    Blog URL structure — Initial comment had wrong URL format, had to delete and repost with .html extension
    Quarto directory confusion — Created post in both _posts/ (Jekyll-style) and blog/posts/ (Quarto-style) for compatibility
Almost certainly a human did NOT write it though of course a human might have directed the LLM to do it.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#193

Post by [deleted] »

falcor84 wrote: post #144
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 men…

[deleted]

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#194

Post by lukev »

ToucanLoucan wrote: post #172
_23sd wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Look I'll fully cosign LLMs having some legitimate applications, but that being said, 2025 was the YEAR OF AGENTIC AI, we heard about it continuously, and I have never seen anything suggesting these things have ever, ever worked correctly. None. Zero. The few cases where it's supposedly done things are filled with so many caveats and so much deck stacking that it simply fails with even the barest whiff of skepticism…

Absolutely. It's technically possible that this was a fully autonomous agent (and if so, I would love to see that SOUL.md) but it doesn't pass the sniff test of how agents work (or don't work) in practice.

I say this as someone who spends a lot of time trying to get agents to behave in useful ways.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#195

Post by OkayPhysicist »

lukev wrote: post #181
falcor84 wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 men…

This works for people. A LLM is stateless . Even if you believe that consciousness could somehow emerge during a forward pass, it would be a brief flicker lasting no longer than it takes to emit a single token.

While I'm definitely not in the "let's assign the concept of sentience to robots" camp, your argument is a bit disingenuous. Most modern LLM systems apply some sort of loop over previously generated text, so they do, in fact, have state.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#196

Post by donutz »

RobRivera wrote: post #162
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…

I think the operative word people miss when using AI is AGENT. REGARDLESS of what level of autonomy in real world operations an AI is given, from responsible himan supervised and reviewed publications to full Autonomous action, the ai AGENT should be serving as AN AGENT. With a PRINCIPLE (principal?). If an AI is truly agentic, it should be advertising who it is speaking on behalf of, and then that person or entity s…

I think we're at the stage where we want the AI to be truly agentic, but they're really loose cannons. I'm probably the last person to call for more regulation, but if you aren't closely supervising your AI right now, maybe you ought to be held responsible for what it does after you set it loose.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#197

Post by psychoslave »

> How Many People Would Pay $10k in Bitcoin to Avoid Exposure?

As of 2026, global crypto adoption remains niche. Estimates suggest ~5–10% of adults in developed countries own Bitcoin.

Having $10k accessible (not just in net worth) is rare globally.

After decades of decline, global extreme poverty (defined as living on less than $3.00/day in 2021 PPP) has plateaued due to the compounded effects of COVID-19, climate shocks, inflation, and geopolitical instability.

So chances are good that this class of threat will likely be more and more of a niche, as wealth continue to concentrate. The target pool is tiny.

Of course poorer people are not free of threat classes, on the contrary.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#198

Post by moffkalast »

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…

> in the year of our lord

And here I thought Nietzsche already did that guy in.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#199

Post by brhaeh »

japhyr wrote: post #149

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,…

I don't appreciate his politeness and hedging. So many projects now walk on eggshells so as not to disrupt sponsor flow or employment prospects.

"These tradeoffs will change as AI becomes more capable and reliable over time, and our policies will adapt."

That just legitimizes AI and basically continues the race to the bottom. Rob Pike had the correct response when spammed by a clanker.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#200

Post by MBCook »

orbital-decay wrote: post #90

I 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 (conscio…

Even if it’s controlled by a person, and I agree there’s a reasonable chance it is, having AI automate putting up hit pieces about people who deny your PRs is not a good thing.
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