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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

#231

Post by armchairhacker »

bergutman wrote: post #64
Alles wrote: post #8

The agent owner is [name redacted] [link redacted] Here he takes ownership of the agent and doubles down on the unpoliteness https://github.com/matplotlib/matplotlib/pull/31138 He took his GitHub profile down/made it private. archive of his blog: https://web.archive.org/web/20260203130303/https://ber.earth...

Also I made my GH temporarily private because people started spamming my website’s guestbook and email with hateful stuff.

If it's any consolation, I think the human PR was fine and the attacks are completely unwarranted, and I like to believe most people would agree.

Unfortunately a small fraction of the internet consists of toxic people who feel it's OK to harass those who are "wrong", but who also have a very low barrier to deciding who's "wrong", and don't stop to learn the full details and think over them before starting their harassment. Your post caused "confusion" among some people who are, let's just say, easy to confuse.

Even if you did post the bot, spamming your site with hate is still completely unwarranted. Releasing the bot was a bad (reckless) decision, but very low on the list of what I'd consider bad decisions; I'd say ideally, the perpetrator feels bad about it for a day, publicly apologizes, then moves on. But more importantly (moral satisfaction public reaction. Meanwhile there are people who actively seek out hate, and are encouraged by seeing others go through more and more effort to hurt them, because they recognize that as those others being offended. These trolls and the easily-offended crusaders described above feed on each other and drive everyone else away, hence they tend to dominate most internet communities, and you may recognize this pattern in politics. But I digress...

In fact, your site reminds me of the old internet, which has been eroded by this terrible new internet but fortunately (because of sites like yours) is far from dead. It sounds cliche but to be blunt: you're exactly the type of person who I wish were more common, who makes the internet happy and fun, and the people harassing you are why the internet is sad and boring.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#232

Post by minimaxir »

input_sh wrote: post #207
mock-possum wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh wow that is fun. Also if the writeup isn’t misrepresenting the situation, then I feel like it’s actually a good point - if there’s an easy drop-in speed-up, why does it matter whether it’s suggest by a human or an LLM agent?

Not everything is about being 100% efficient. LLM didn't discover this issue, developers found it. Instead of fixing it themselves, they intentionally turned the problem into an issue, left it open for a new human contributor to pick up, and tagged it as such. If everything was about efficiency, the issue wouldn't have been open to begin with, as writing it ( https://github.com/matplotlib/matplotlib/issues/31130 ) an…

And then there's the actual discussion in #31130 which came to the conclusion that the performance increase had uncertain gains and wasn't worth it.

In this case, the bot explicitly ignored that by only operating off the initial issue.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#233

Post by famouswaffles »

MisterTea wrote: post #161
_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?

This feels like the most likely scenario. Especially since the meat bag behind the original AI PR responded with "Now with 100% more meat" meaning they were behind the original PR in the first place. It's obvious they got miffed at their PR being rejected and decided to do a little role playing to vent their unjustified anger.

>It's obvious they got miffed at their PR being rejected and decided to do a little role playing to vent their unjustified anger.

In that case, apologizing almost immediately after seems strange.

EDIT:

>Especially since the meat bag behind the original AI PR responded with "Now with 100% more meat"

This person was not the original 'meat bag' behind the original AI.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#234

Post by hackrmn »

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.

> A LLM is stateless

Unless you mean by that something entirely different than what most people specifically on Hacker News, of all places, understand with "stateless", most and myself included, would disagree with you regarding the "stateless" property. If you do mean something entirely different than implying an LLM doesn't transition from a state to a state, potentially confined to a limited set of states through finite immutable training data set and accessible context and lack of PRNG, then would you care to elaborate?

Also, it can be stateful _and_ without a consciousness. Like a finite automaton? I don't think anyone's claiming (yet) any of the models today have consciousness, but that's mostly because it's going to be practically impossible to prove without some accepted theory of consciousness, I guess.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#235

Post by INTPenis »

Whoever is running the AI is a troll, plain and simple. There are no concerns about AI or anything here, just a troll.

There is no autonomous publishing going on here, someone setup a Github account, someone setup Github pages, someone authorized all this. It's a troll using a new sort of tool.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#236

Post by amatecha »

ericmcer wrote: post #224
caminante wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I have always been dubious of this because: Someone would have noticed if all the phones on their network started streaming audio whenever a conversation happened. It would be really expensive to send, transcribe and then analyze every single human on earth. Even if you were able to do it for insanely cheap ($0.02/hr) every device is gonna be sending hours of talking per day. Then you have to somehow identify "who" i…

Google literally just settled for $68m about this very issue https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jan/26/google-pr...

> Google agreed to pay $68m to settle a lawsuit claiming that its voice-activated assistant spied inappropriately on smartphone users, violating their privacy.

Apple as well https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/jan/03/apple-sir...

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#237

Post by chrisjj »

AlexandrB wrote: post #146
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?

> 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

I've certainly seen a few that could hurt AI feelings.

Perhaps HN Guidelines are due an update.

/i

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#238

Post by root_axis »

browningstreet wrote: post #226
root_axis wrote: post #203

This is insanity. It's bad enough that LLMs are being weaponized to autonomously harass people online, but it's depressing to see the author (especially a programmer) joyfully reify the "agent's" identity as if it were actually an entity. > I can handle a blog post. Watching fledgling AI agents get angry is funny, almost endearing. But I don’t want to downplay what’s happening here – the appropriate emotional respons…

You misspelled "almost endearing". It's a narrative conceit. The message is in the use of the word "terror". You have to get to the end of the sentence and take it as a whole before you let your blood boil.

I deliberately copied the entire quote to preserve the full context. That juxtaposition is a tonal choice representative of the article's broader narrative, i.e. "agents are so powerful that they're potentially a dangerous new threat!".

I'm arguing against that hype. This is nothing new, everyone has been talking about LLMs being used to harass and spam the internet for years.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#240

Post by b00ty4breakfast »

Is there any indication that this was completely autonomous and that the agent wasn't directed by a human to respond like this to a rejected submission? That seems infinitely more likely to me, but maybe I'm just naive.

As it stands, this reads like a giant assumption on the author's part at best, and a malicious attempt to deceive at worse.

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