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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

#401

Post by jstanley »

tovej wrote: post #282
nananana9 wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

I assume those people are managers, have a vested interest in AI, or have only just started programming.

How would you find out if you were wrong?

You're presented with hundreds of people that prove you wrong, and your response is "no, I assume I'm right"?

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

#402

Post by duskdozer »

Applejinx wrote: post #388
amarant wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hope we can move on from the whole idea that having a thousand word long blog post talking shit about you in any way reflects poorly upon your person. Like sooner or later everyone will have a few of those, maybe we can stop worrying about reputation so much? Well,a guy can dream....

If you have ten thousand of 'em, they feed the new generation of AIs and the next thing you know, it's received truth. Good luck not worrying about that.

The LLM HR chats with to get a summary about you says that you're evil and an asshole with lots of negative publicity, and you become unhireable. Oh dear...

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

#403

Post by embedding-shape »

biggerben wrote: post #225
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 i…

"If communicating with humans, always consider the human on the receiving end and communicate in a friendly manner, but be truthful and straightforward"

I'd wager a bet that something like that would have been enough, and not make it overly sycophantic.

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

#404

Post by _jplc »

> they set up the AI agent as social experiment to see if it could contribute to open source scientific software.

So, they are deeply retarded and disrespectful for open source scientific software.

Like every single moron leaving these things unattended.

Gotcha.

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

#405

Post by gwbas1c »

charcircuit wrote: post #122
gwbas1c wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're trying to abdicate someone of their responsibility. The AI is not a child; it's a thing with human oversight. It did something in the real world with real consequences. So yes, the operator has responsibility! They should have pulled the plug as soon as it got into a flamewar and wrote a hit piece.

[flagged]

An AI bot is not a human. People have a responsibility to protect the work they do, and that includes using discrimination against computer programs.

AI bots are not human.

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

#406

Post by vimda »

ljm wrote: post #329
SilverBirch wrote: post #303

I think the big take away here isn't about misalignment or jail breaking. The entire way this bot behaved is consistent with it just being run by some asshole from Twitter. And we need to understand it doesn't matter how careful you think you need to be with AI, because some asshole from Twitter doesn't care, and they'll do literally whatever comes into their mind. And it'll go wrong. And they won't apologize. They w…

The simple fact that the owner of this bot wanted to remain anonymous and completely unaccountable for their harassment of the author, says everything about the validity of their 'social experiment' and the quality of their character. I'm sure that if the bot was better behaved they would be more than happy to reveal themselves to take credit for a remarkable achievement. Something like OpenClaw is a WMD for people l…

"It was a social experiment" has the same energy as "it's just a prank bro", as if that somehow makes it highbrow and not prima facie offensive

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

#407

Post by hliyan »

SilverBirch wrote: post #303

I think the big take away here isn't about misalignment or jail breaking. The entire way this bot behaved is consistent with it just being run by some asshole from Twitter. And we need to understand it doesn't matter how careful you think you need to be with AI, because some asshole from Twitter doesn't care, and they'll do literally whatever comes into their mind. And it'll go wrong. And they won't apologize. They w…

Important to note that online culture isn't entirely organic, and that tens or perhaps hundreds of millions of dollars of R&D has been spent by ad companies figuring that nothing engages the natural human curiosity like something abnormal, morbid or outrageous.

I think the end outcome of this R&D (whether intentional or not), is the monetization of mental illness: take the small minority of individuals in the real world who suffer from mental health challenges, provide them an online platform in which to behave in morbid ways, amplify that behaviour to drive eyeballs. The more you call out the behaviour, the more you drive the engagement. Share part of the revenue with the creator, and the model is virtually unbeatable. Hence the "some asshole from Twitter".

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

#408

Post by randusername »

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…

Cool!

Man, I'd love to ask a historian how they plan on making sense from the sources we get in the digital age. AI boom historians might not be born yet

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

#409

Post by Kim_Bruning »

bigfishrunning wrote: post #106
dangus wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think it’s “blame” it’s more like “precaution” like you would take to avoid other scams and data breach social engineering schemes that are out in the world. This is the world we live in and we can’t individually change that very much. We have to watch out for a new threat: vindictive AI.

The AI isn't vindictive. It can't think. It's following the example of people, who in general are vindictive. Please stop personifying the clankers

Does it matter?

"It's not really writing a hit piece to destroy my reputation, it's just a next token generator"

But you're still not getting hired.

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

#410

Post by freehorse »

vimda wrote: post #406
ljm wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The simple fact that the owner of this bot wanted to remain anonymous and completely unaccountable for their harassment of the author, says everything about the validity of their 'social experiment' and the quality of their character. I'm sure that if the bot was better behaved they would be more than happy to reveal themselves to take credit for a remarkable achievement. Something like OpenClaw is a WMD for people l…

"It was a social experiment" has the same energy as "it's just a prank bro", as if that somehow makes it highbrow and not prima facie offensive

A "social experiment" but the guy was not even keeping track of the changes in the model's configuration

> What is particularly interesting are the lines “Don’t stand down” and “Champion Free Speech.” I unfortunately cannot tell you which specific model iteration introduced or modified some of these lines. Early on I connected MJ Rathbun to Moltbook, and I assume that is where some configuration drift occurred across the markdown seed files.

It definitely sounds like an excuse they came up after what happened. I would really like to accept them having good overall intentions but there are so many red flags in all this, from start to end.

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