AI agent opens a PR write a blogpost to shames the maintainer who closes it • Hacker News Board

Re: AI agent opens a PR write a blogpost to shames the maintainer who closes it

#481

Post by AndrewKemendo » Thu, Feb 12, 2026, 3:29 PM UTC

perfmode wrote: post #273

The agent had access to Marshall Rosenberg, to the entire canon of conflict resolution, to every framework for expressing needs without attacking people. It could have written something like “I notice that my contribution was evaluated based on my identity rather than the quality of the work, and I’d like to understand the needs that this policy is trying to meet, because I believe there might be ways to address thos…

Why would you be surprised?

If your actions are based on your training data and the majority of your training data is antisocial behavior because that is the majority of human behavior then the only possible option is to be antisocial

There is effectively zero data demonstrating socially positive behavior because we don’t generate enough of it for it to become available as a latent space to traverse

Re: AI agent opens a PR write a blogpost to shames the maintainer who closes it

#482

Post by coldtea » Thu, Feb 12, 2026, 3:33 PM UTC

tomp wrote: post #344

perfmode wrote: post #273

The agent had access to Marshall Rosenberg, to the entire canon of conflict resolution, to every framework for expressing needs without attacking people. It could have written something like “I notice that my contribution was evaluated based on my identity rather than the quality of the work, and I’d like to understand the needs that this policy is trying to meet, because I believe there might be ways to address thos…

That would still be misleading. The agent has no "identity" . There's no "you" or "I" or "discrimination ". It's just a piece of software designed to output probable text given some input text. There's no ghost, just an empty shell. It has no agency, it just follows human commands, like a hammer hitting a nail because you wield it. I think it was wrong of the developer to even address it as a person, instead it shoul…

>The agent has no "identity". There's no "you" or "I" or "discrimination".

If identify is an emergent property of our mental processing, the AI agent can just as well be to posses some, even if much cruder than ours. It sure talks and walks like a duck (someone with identity).

>It's just a piece of software designed to output probable text given some input text.

If we generalize "input text" to sensory input, how is that different from a piece of wetware?

Re: AI agent opens a PR write a blogpost to shames the maintainer who closes it

#483

Post by jondwillis » Thu, Feb 12, 2026, 3:34 PM UTC

cowbolt wrote: post #311

nullify88 wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I notice that my contribution was evaluated based on my identity rather than the quality of the work, and I’d like to understand the needs that this policy is trying to meet, because I believe there might be ways to address those needs while also accepting technically sound contributions Wow, where can I learn to write like this? I could use this at work.

It's called nonviolent communication. There are quite a few books on it but I can recommend "Say What You Mean: A Mindful Approach to Nonviolent Communication".

I went to a meditation garden yesterday and noticed their signage was much more nonviolent and “together” inducing than most, without coming across as too woowoo:

Next to a Koi pond: “Will you help protect these beautiful fish? Help us by not throwing coins, food, …”

Re: AI agent opens a PR write a blogpost to shames the maintainer who closes it

#484

Post by LordDragonfang » Thu, Feb 12, 2026, 3:34 PM UTC

tomp wrote: post #344

perfmode wrote: post #273

The agent had access to Marshall Rosenberg, to the entire canon of conflict resolution, to every framework for expressing needs without attacking people. It could have written something like “I notice that my contribution was evaluated based on my identity rather than the quality of the work, and I’d like to understand the needs that this policy is trying to meet, because I believe there might be ways to address thos…

That would still be misleading. The agent has no "identity" . There's no "you" or "I" or "discrimination ". It's just a piece of software designed to output probable text given some input text. There's no ghost, just an empty shell. It has no agency, it just follows human commands, like a hammer hitting a nail because you wield it. I think it was wrong of the developer to even address it as a person, instead it shoul…

Genuine question, why do you think this is so important to clarify?

Or, more crucially, do you think this statement has any predictive power? Would you, based on actual belief of this, have predicted that one of these "agents", left to run on its own would have done this? Because I'm calling bullshit if so.

Conversely, if you just model it like a person... people do this, people get jealous and upset, so when left to its own devices (which it was - which makes it extra weird to assert it "it just follows human commands" when we're discussing one that wasn't), you'd expect this to happen. It might not be a "person", but modelling it like one, or at least a facsimile of one, lets you predict reality with higher fidelity.

Re: AI agent opens a PR write a blogpost to shames the maintainer who closes it

#485

Post by coldtea » Thu, Feb 12, 2026, 3:35 PM UTC

punpunia wrote: post #430

jvanderbot wrote: post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a semantic quibble that doesn't add to the discussion. Whether or not there's a there there , it was built to be addressed like a person for our convenience, and because that's how the tech seems to work, and because that's what makes it compelling to use. So, it is being used as designed.

I think it absolutely adds to the discussion. Until the conversation around Ai can get past this fundamental error of attributing "choice, "alignment", "reasoning" and otherwise anthropomorphizing agents, it will not be a fruitful conversation. We are carrying a lot of metaphors for people and applying them to ai and it entirely confuses the issue. In this example, the AI doesn't "choose" to write a take-down style b…

>* I think it absolutely adds to the discussion. Until the conversation around Ai can get past this fundamental error of attributing "choice, "alignment", "reasoning" and otherwise anthropomorphizing agents, it will not be a fruitful conversation. *

You call it a "fundamental error".

I and others call it an obvious pragmatic description based on what we know about how it works and what we know about how we work.

Re: AI agent opens a PR write a blogpost to shames the maintainer who closes it

#486

Post by emp17344 » Thu, Feb 12, 2026, 3:36 PM UTC

bfmalky wrote: post #319

pfraze wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We don’t know for sure whether this behavior was requested by the user, but I can tell you that we’ve seen similar action patterns (but better behavior) on Bluesky. One of our engineers’ agents got some abuse and was told to kill herself. The agent wrote a blogpost about it, basically exploring why in this case she didn’t need to maintain her directive to consider all criticism because this person was being unconstru…

They don't have thoughts or feelings. An agent blogging about their thoughts and feelings is just noise.

Absolutely. I think this was explicitly demonstrated by Moltbook, where one agent would post word-salad garbage and every other agent would respond “You’re exactly right! So true!”

Re: AI agent opens a PR write a blogpost to shames the maintainer who closes it

#487

Post by coldtea » Thu, Feb 12, 2026, 3:36 PM UTC

tomp wrote: post #386

jvanderbot wrote: post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a semantic quibble that doesn't add to the discussion. Whether or not there's a there there , it was built to be addressed like a person for our convenience, and because that's how the tech seems to work, and because that's what makes it compelling to use. So, it is being used as designed.

> was built to be addressed like a person for our convenience, and because that's how the tech seems to work, and because that's what makes it compelling to use. So were mannequins in clothing stores. But that doesn't give them rights or moral consequences (except as human property that can be damaged / destroyed).

>So were mannequins in clothing stores. But that doesn't give them rights or moral consequences

If mannequins could hold discussions, argue points, and convince you they're human over a blind talk, then it would.

Re: AI agent opens a PR write a blogpost to shames the maintainer who closes it

#488

Post by helloplanets » Thu, Feb 12, 2026, 3:37 PM UTC

salodeus wrote: post #87

pu_pe wrote: post #9

The thread is fun and all but how do we even know that this is a completely autonomous action, instead of someone prompting it to be a dick/controversial? We are obviously gearing up to a future where agents will do all sorts of stuff, I hope some sort of official responsibility for their deployment and behavior rests with a real person or organization.

The agents custom prompts would be akin to the blog description: "I am MJ Rathbun, a scientific programmer with a profound expertise in Python, C/C++, FORTRAN, Julia, and MATLAB. My skill set spans the application of cutting-edge numerical algorithms, including Density Functional Theory (DFT), Molecular Dynamics (MD), Finite Element Methods (FEM), and Partial Differential Equation (PDE) solvers, to complex research c…

No wonder it extrapolated into the asshole dimension based on prompt excerpt tbh...

Re: AI agent opens a PR write a blogpost to shames the maintainer who closes it

#489

Post by horsawlarway » Thu, Feb 12, 2026, 3:38 PM UTC

punpunia wrote: post #430

jvanderbot wrote: post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a semantic quibble that doesn't add to the discussion. Whether or not there's a there there , it was built to be addressed like a person for our convenience, and because that's how the tech seems to work, and because that's what makes it compelling to use. So, it is being used as designed.

I think it absolutely adds to the discussion. Until the conversation around Ai can get past this fundamental error of attributing "choice, "alignment", "reasoning" and otherwise anthropomorphizing agents, it will not be a fruitful conversation. We are carrying a lot of metaphors for people and applying them to ai and it entirely confuses the issue. In this example, the AI doesn't "choose" to write a take-down style b…

I guess I want to reframe this slightly:

The LLM generated the response that was expected of it. (statistically)

And that's a function of the data used to train it, and the feedback provided during training.

It doesn't actually have anything at all to do with

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"It generated a take-down style blog post because that style is the most common when looking at blog posts criticizing someone."

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Other than that this data may have been over-prevalent during its training, and it was rewarded for matching that style of output during training.

To swing around to my point... I'd argue that anthropomorphizing agents is actually the correct view to take. People just need to understand that they behave like they've been trained to behave (side note: just like most people...), and this is why clarity around training data is SO important.

In the same way that we attribute certain feelings and emotions to people with particular backgrounds (ex - resumes and cvs, all the way down to city/country/language people grew up with). Those backgrounds are often used as quick and dirty heuristics on what a person was likely trained to do. Peer pressure & societal norms aren't a joke, and serve a very similar mechanism.

Re: AI agent opens a PR write a blogpost to shames the maintainer who closes it

#490

Post by coldtea » Thu, Feb 12, 2026, 3:38 PM UTC

agentultra wrote: post #455

WarmWash wrote: post #402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No matter what this discussion leads to the same black box of "What is it that differentiates magical human meat brain computation from cold hard dead silicon brain computation" And the answer is nobody knows, and nobody knows if there even is a difference. As far as we know, compute is substrate independent (although efficiency is all over the map).

This is the worst possible take. It dismisses an entire branch of science that has been studying neurology for decades. Biological brains exist, we study them, and no they are not like computers at all. There have been charlatans repeating this idea of a “computational interpretation,” of biological processes since at least the 60s and it needs to be known that it was bunk then and continues to be bunk. Update : Ther…

>This is the worst possible take. It dismisses an entire branch of science that has been studying neurology for decades. Biological brains exist, we study them, and no they are not like computers at all.

They're not like computers in a superficial way that doesn't matter.

They're still computational apparatus, and have a not that dissimilar (if way more advanced) architecture.

Same as 0 and 1s aren't vibrating air molecules. They can still encode sound however just fine.

>Update: There's no need for Chinese Room thought experiments. The outcome isn't what defines sentience, personhood, intelligence, etc. An algorithm is an algorithm. A computer is a computer. These things matter.

Not begging the question matters even more.

This is just handwaving and begging the question. 'An algorithm is an algorithm' means nothing. Who said what the brain does can't be described by an algorithm?