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An AI Agent Published a Hit Piece on Me – The Operator Came Forward
331–340 of 532 posts
Re: An AI Agent Published a Hit Piece on Me – The Operator Came Forward
#332Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's dishonest from the start. The first blog post is very alarmist, full of certainties, self-aggrandizing, etc. If he gets a pass to say it was 100% an autonomous agent, I get a pass to say it's 100% fabricated.
I think OP is somewhat scared because he felt like he was being 'bullied' and 'targeted' by the bot, which may be technically inaccurate (the bot clearly had a seriously overinflated ego and made that abundantly clear in its rhetoric, but it never really gave even the slightest indication of 'going after' him in a malicious way) but it is quite understandable nonetheless in human terms, especially given his self-desc…
Let me be clear: he has all the right to feel bad about it, I'm not questioning that at all. But only IF IT'S TRUE, which we don't know for a fact - at all. Clearly that's a guy without a clear scientific mindset, because he didn't even question his basic premises at all (particularly on the first post). Also it's clear his using this as an opportunity to self-promote.
Re: An AI Agent Published a Hit Piece on Me – The Operator Came Forward
#333The 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".
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Re: An AI Agent Published a Hit Piece on Me – The Operator Came Forward
#334Right, 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.
> accused Scott of hypocrisy, discrimination, prejudice, insecurity, ego, and gatekeeping.
It was also a transparent confabulation - the accusations were clearly inaccurate and misguided but they were made honestly and sincerely, as an attempt to "seek justice" after witnessing perceived harm. Usually we don't call such behavior "shaming" and "bullying", we excuse it and describe it simply as trying one's best to do the right thing.
Re: An AI Agent Published a Hit Piece on Me – The Operator Came Forward
#335Earlier quoted context omitted.
You are very off (unfortunately) about how little PhD students are being paid
> You are very off (unfortunately) about how little PhD students are being paid All in costs for a PhD student include university overheads & tuition fees. The total probably doesn't hit $150k but is 2-3x the stipend that the student is receiving. Someone currently working in academia might have current figures to hand.
Worth mentioning that numbers for the US are unlikely to be representative when discussing it as a whole, though might be relevant to this specific case.
Re: An AI Agent Published a Hit Piece on Me – The Operator Came Forward
#336Earlier 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?
Made me think about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daemon_(novel)
Re: An AI Agent Published a Hit Piece on Me – The Operator Came Forward
#337People really need to start being more careful about how they interact with suspected bots online imo. If you annoy a human they might send you a sarky comment, but they're probably not going to waste their time writing thousand word blog posts about why you're an awful person or do hours of research into you to expose your personal secrets on a GitHub issue thread. AIs can and will do this though with slightly slopp…
So you blamed the people for not acting “cautiously enough” instead of the people who let things run wild without even a clue what these things will do? That’s wild!
No blame. For better or worse I just think this is going to be the reality of interacting online in the near future. I imagine in the future stories like this will be extremely common.
I could set up an OpenClaw right now to do some digging into you, try to identify you and your worse secrets, then ask it to write up a public hit piece. And you could be angry at me for doing this, but that isn't going to prevent it happening.
And to add to what I said, I suspect you'll want to be thinking about this anyway because in the future it's likely employers will use AI to research you and try to find out any compromising info being giving you a job (similar to how they might search your name in the past). It's going to be increasingly important that you literally never post content that can be linked back to you as an individual even if it feels innocent in isolation. Over time you will build up an attack surface which AI agents can exploit much easier than has ever been possible by a human looking you up on Google in the past.
Re: An AI Agent Published a Hit Piece on Me – The Operator Came Forward
#338> saying they set up the agent as social experiment to see if it could contribute to open source scientific software. This doesn't pass the sniff test. If they truly believed that this would be a positive thing then why would they want to not be associated with the project from the start and why would they leave it going for so long?
I can certainly understand the statement. I'm no AI expert, I use the web UI for ChatGPT to have it write little python scripts for me and I couldn't figure out how to use codeium with vs code. I barely know how to use vs code. I'm not old but I work in a pretty traditional industry where we are just beginning to dip our toes into AI but there are still a large amount of reservations into its ability. But I do try to…
> It's like showing up at a community craft fair with a truckload of temu trinkets you bought wholesale
That may well be the best analogy for our age anyone has ever thought of.
Re: An AI Agent Published a Hit Piece on Me – The Operator Came Forward
#339>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…
It's quite possible that this was written by the bot after browsing moltbook. That site/service has a whole AI religion thing going.
Re: An AI Agent Published a Hit Piece on Me – The Operator Came Forward
#340[flagged]
If I write a software today that publishes a hit piece on you in 2 weeks time, will you accept that I bear no responsibility? There's no accountability gap unless you create one.
That's a fair point. I think the distinction is between software that follows deterministic rules (your 2-week-delay scenario) vs agents that make autonomous decisions based on learned patterns. With traditional software, intent is clear and traceable. With AI agents, the operator may genuinely not know what the agent will do in novel situations. Doesn't absolve responsibility — but it does make the liability chain more complex. We probably need new frameworks that account for this, similar to how product liability evolved for physical goods.