Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

theshamblog.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

271–280 of 532 posts

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

#271

Post by mschild »

protocolture wrote: post #174
MattRix wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anyone who has used OpenClaw knows this is VERY plausible. I don’t know why someone would go through all the effort to fake it. Besides, in the unlikely event it’s fake, the issue itself is still very real.

I think its very plausible in both directions. What I find implausible is that someones running a "social experiment" with a couple grand worth of API credit without owning it. Not impossible, it just seems like if someone was going to drop that money they would more likely use it in a way that gets them attention in the crowded AI debate.

I think the social experiment is a cop-out used after it failed. If the PR was accepted, we'd probably see a blog post show up on HN saying that agents can successfully contribute to open source.

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

#272

Post by teaearlgraycold »

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 completely do not buy the human's story.

> all I said was “you should act more professional”. That was it. I’m sure the mob expects more, okay I get it.

Smells like bullshit.

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

#273

Post by nananana9 »

tovej wrote: post #214
jstanley wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an unnecessarily cynical view. People are excited about AI because it's new powerful technology. They aren't "pandering" to anyone.

I have yet to meet anyone except managers be excited about LLM's or generative AI. And the only people actually excited about the useful kinds of "AI", traditional machine learning, are researchers.

You don' have to look past this very forum, most people here seem to be very positive about gen AI, when it comes to software development specifically.

Lots of folk here will happily tell you about how LLMs made them 10x more productive, and then their custom agent orchestrator made them 20x more productive on top of that (stacking multiplicatively of course, for a total of 200x productivity gain).

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

#274

Post by birdsongs »

bigfishrunning wrote: post #97
jmward01 wrote: post #71

The more intelligent something is, the harder it is to control. Are we at AGI yet? No. Are we getting closer? Yes. Every inch closer means we have less control. We need to start thinking about these things less like function calls that have bounds and more like intelligences we collaborate with. How would you set up an office to get things done? Who would you hire? Would you hire the person spouting crazy musk tweets…

Are we at AGI yet? No. Are we getting closer? Also no.

Neither of you know the answer to this, in any scientific or statistical manner, and I wish people would stop being so confident about it.

If I'm wrong, please give any kind of citation. You can start with defining what human intelligence and sentience is.

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

#275

Post by moeffju »

dang wrote: post #230

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…

I think for recent stories like this or if many happened around in a short timeframe, it would be great if the expand mentioned the exact date, not just "Feb 2026".

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

#276

Post by vasco »

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…

I'm curious how you'd characterize an actual malicious file. This is just attempts at making it be more independent. The user isn't an idiot. The CEOs of companies releasing this are.

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

#277

Post by birdsongs »

aeve890 wrote: post #60

>Again I do not know why MJ Rathbun decided Decided? jfc >You're important. Your a scientific programming God! I'm flabbergasted. I can't imagine what it would take for me to write something so stupid. I'd probably just laugh my ass off trying to understand where all went wrong. wtf is happening, what kind of mass psychosis is this. Am I too old (37) to understand what lengths would incompetent people go to feel they…

Right? Any definition of "a god" that a LLM will hold is going to be problematic to work with. No one wants that personality on their team, much less in the wild.

At best it's absolute in its power and intelligence. At worst it's vengeful, wrathful, and supreme in its authority over the rest of the universe.

I just. Wow.

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

#278

Post by eshaham78 »

dinp wrote: post #24

Zooming out a little, all the ai companies invested a lot of resources into safety research and guardrails, but none of that prevented a "straightforward" misalignment. I'm not sure how to reconcile this, maybe we shouldn't be so confident in our predictions about the future? I see a lot of discourse along these lines: - have bold, strong beliefs about how ai is going to evolve - implicitly assume it's practically gu…

[dead]

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

#279

Post by Gigachad »

Hamuko wrote: post #190
Gigachad wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have finally invented paperclip optimisers. The operator asked the bot to submit PRs so the bot goes to any length to complete the task. Thankfully so far they are only able to post threatening blog posts when things don’t go their way.

How long before bots learn about swatting?

The vending machine bot experiment attempted to contact the FBI. Thankfully that test only provided fake access to the outside world.

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

#280

Post by jmward01 »

birdsongs wrote: post #274
bigfishrunning wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are we at AGI yet? No. Are we getting closer? Also no.

Neither of you know the answer to this, in any scientific or statistical manner, and I wish people would stop being so confident about it. If I'm wrong, please give any kind of citation. You can start with defining what human intelligence and sentience is.

My argument is that we are getting closer, not that we know exactly what AGI will be. That is clearly part of it right? If we had some boolean definition I suspect we would already be there. Figuring it out is a big part of getting there. I think my points still stand based on this. We aren't there yet but it is hard to deny that these things are growing from a complexity/capability standpoint. On a spectrum from rock to human level intelligence, these are getting closer to human and further from rock and getting further from rock every day.
Post reply on HN