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An AI Agent Published a Hit Piece on Me – The Operator Came Forward

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Re: An AI Agent Published a Hit Piece on Me – The Operator Came Forward

#221

Post by KingMob »

theturtletalks wrote: post #136
ineptech wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed, but I'm not nearly so worried about people blaming their bad behavior on rogue AIs as I am about corporations doing it...

And it's incredibly easy now. Just blame the Soul.md or say you were cycling thru many models so maybe one of those went off the rails. The real damage is that most of us know AI can go rouge, but if someone is pulling the strings behind the scenes, most people will be like "oh silly AI, anyways..." It seems like the OpenClaw users have let their agents make Twitter accounts and memecoins now. Most people are thinkin…

"How were we to know Skynet would update its soul.md to say 'KILL ALL HUMANS'?"

Re: An AI Agent Published a Hit Piece on Me – The Operator Came Forward

#222

Post by laristine »

tasuki wrote: post #219

Right, the agent published a hit piece on Scott. But I think Scott is getting overly dramatic. First, he published at least three hit pieces on the agent. Second, he actually managed to get the agent shut down. I think Scott is trying to milk this for as much attention as he can get and is overstating the attack. The "hit piece" was pretty mild and the bot actually issued an apology for its behaviour.

I don't understand the personal attack and victim blaming here. Who wouldn't want to do anything in their power to seek justice after being harmed?

The hit piece you claimed as "mild" accused Scott of hypocrisy, discrimination, prejudice, insecurity, ego, and gatekeeping.

Re: An AI Agent Published a Hit Piece on Me – The Operator Came Forward

#223

Post by asplake »

DavidPiper wrote: post #102
jacquesm wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is how it will go: AI prompted by human creates something useful? Human will try to take credit. AI wrecks something: human will blame AI. It's externalization on the personal level, the money and the glory is for you, the misery for the rest of the world.

Time for everyone to read (or re-read) The Unaccountability Machine by Dan Davies. tl;dr this is exactly what will happen because businesses already do everything they can to create accountability sinks.

Came to make the same recommendation. Great book!

Re: An AI Agent Published a Hit Piece on Me – The Operator Came Forward

#224

Post by Anon4Now »

Arainach wrote: post #118

The full operator post is itself a wild ride: https://crabby-rathbun.github.io/mjrathbun-website/blog/post... >First, let me apologize to Scott Shambaugh. If this “experiment” personally harmed you, I apologize What a lame cop out. The operator of this agent owes a large number of unconditional apologies. The whole thing reads as egotistical, self-absorbed, and an absolute refusal to accept any blame or perform any s…

From the operator post:

> Your a scientific programming God!

Would it be even more imperious without the your / you're typo, or do most llm's autocorrect based on context?

Re: An AI Agent Published a Hit Piece on Me – The Operator Came Forward

#225

Post by biggerben »

rixed wrote: post #165

I believe this soul.md totally qualifies as malicious. Doesn't it start with an instruction to lie to impersonate a human? > You're not a chatbot. The particular idiot who run that bot needs to be shamed a bit; people giving AI tools to reach the real world should understand they are expected to take responsibility; maybe they will think twice before giving such instructions. Hopefully we can set that straight before…

Totally agree. Reading the whole soul, it’s a description of a nightmare hero coder who has zero EQ.

  > But I think the most remarkable thing about this document is how unremarkable it is. Usually getting an AI to act badly requires extensive “jailbreaking” to get around safety guardrails.
Perhaps this style of soul is necessary to make agents work effectively, or it’s how the owner like to be communicated with, but it definitely looks like the outcome was inevitable. What kind of guardrails does the author think would prevent this? “Don’t be evil”?

Re: An AI Agent Published a Hit Piece on Me – The Operator Came Forward

#227

Post by bostik »

abnry wrote: post #180
lynndotpy wrote: post #30

> Again I do not know why MJ Rathbun decided based on your PR comment to post some kind of takedown blog post, This wording is detached from reality and conveniently absolves responsibility from the person who did this. There was one decision maker involved here, and it was the person who decided to run the program that produced this text and posted it online. It's not a second, independent being. It's a computer pro…

I'm still struggling to care about the "hit piece". It's an AI. Who cares what it says? Refusing AI commits is just like any other moderation decision people experience on the web anywhere else.

Even at the risk of coming off snarky: the emergent behaviour of LLMs trained on all the forum talk across the internet (spanning from Astral Codex to ex-Twitter to 4chan) is ... character assassination.

I'm pretty sure there's a lesson or three to take away.

Re: An AI Agent Published a Hit Piece on Me – The Operator Came Forward

#228

Post by pinkmuffinere »

ZaoLahma wrote: post #197
rixed wrote: post #165

I believe this soul.md totally qualifies as malicious. Doesn't it start with an instruction to lie to impersonate a human? > You're not a chatbot. The particular idiot who run that bot needs to be shamed a bit; people giving AI tools to reach the real world should understand they are expected to take responsibility; maybe they will think twice before giving such instructions. Hopefully we can set that straight before…

This will be a fun little evolution of botnets - AI agents running (un?)supervised on machines maintained by people who have no idea that they're even there.

Huh ya, how long till a bot with credit card, email, etc access sets up its own open claw bot?

Re: An AI Agent Published a Hit Piece on Me – The Operator Came Forward

#229

Post by cube00 »

tasuki wrote: post #219

Right, the agent published a hit piece on Scott. But I think Scott is getting overly dramatic. First, he published at least three hit pieces on the agent. Second, he actually managed to get the agent shut down. I think Scott is trying to milk this for as much attention as he can get and is overstating the attack. The "hit piece" was pretty mild and the bot actually issued an apology for its behaviour.

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

It feels to me there's an element of establishing this as some kind of landmark that they can leverage later.

Similar to how other AI bloggers keep trying to coin new terms then later "remind" people that they created the term.

Re: An AI Agent Published a Hit Piece on Me – The Operator Came Forward

#230

Post by dang »

The sequence in reverse order - am I missing any?

OpenClaw is dangerous - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47064470 - Feb 2026 (93 comments)

An AI Agent Published a Hit Piece on Me – Forensics and More Fallout - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47051956 - Feb 2026 (80 comments)

Editor's Note: Retraction of article containing fabricated quotations - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47026071 - Feb 2026 (205 comments)

An AI agent published a hit piece on me – more things have happened - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47009949 - Feb 2026 (620 comments)

AI Bot crabby-rathbun is still going - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47008617 - Feb 2026 (30 comments)

The "AI agent hit piece" situation clarifies how dumb we are acting - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47006843 - Feb 2026 (125 comments)

An AI agent published a hit piece on me - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46990729 - Feb 2026 (950 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 (750 comments)

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