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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

#621

Earlier quoted context omitted.

9 lines of code came close to costing Google $8.8 billion how much use do you think these indemnification clauses will be if training ends up being ruled as not fair-use?

Are you concerned that this will bankrupt Microsoft?

I think they're afraid they will have to sue Microsoft to get them to abide by the promise to come to their defense in another suit.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#623
post #15

Here's one of the problems in this brave new world of anyone being able to publish, without knowing the author personally (which I don't), there's no way to tell without some level of faith or trust that this isn't a false-flag operation. There are three possible scenarios: 1. The OP 'ran' the agent that conducted the original scenario, and then published this blog post for attention. 2. Some person (not the OP) legi…

[deleted]

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#624

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I absolutely agree, I don't see a compelling reason why -- in a year's time or less -- we wouldn't see this behaviour spontaneously from a maliciously written agent.

We might, and probably will, but it's still important to distinguish between malicious by-design and emergently malicious, contrary to design . The former is an accountability problem, and there isn't a big difference from other attacks. The worrying part is that now lazy attackers can automate what used to be harder, i.e., finding ammo and packaging the attack. But it's definitely not spontaneous, it's directed. The…

A framing for consideration: "We trained the document generator on stuff that included humans and characters being vindictive assholes. Now, for some mysterious reason, it sometimes generates stories where its avatar is a vindictive asshole with stage-direction. Since we carefully wired up code to 'perform' the story, actual assholery is being committed."

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#625

This whole situation is almost certainly driven by a human puppeteer. There is absolutely no evidence to disprove the strong prior that a human posted (or directed the posting of) the blog post, possibly using AI to draft it but also likely adding human touches and/or going through multiple revisions to make it maximally dramatic. This whole thing reeks of engineered virality driven by the person behind the bot behin…

We've entered the age of "yellow social media." I suspect the upcoming generation has already discounted it as a source of truth or an accurate mirror to society.

The internet should always be treated with a high degree of skepticism, wasn't the early 2000s full of "don't believe everything you read on the internet"?

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#626
post #94
post #15

Here's one of the problems in this brave new world of anyone being able to publish, without knowing the author personally (which I don't), there's no way to tell without some level of faith or trust that this isn't a false-flag operation. There are three possible scenarios: 1. The OP 'ran' the agent that conducted the original scenario, and then published this blog post for attention. 2. Some person (not the OP) legi…

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?

Github doesn't show timestamps in the UI, but they do in the HTML.

Looking at the timeline, I doubt it was really autonomous. More likely just a person prompting the agent for fun.

> @scottshambaugh's comment [1]: Feb 10, 2026, 4:33 PM PST

> @crabby-rathbun's comment [2]: Feb 10, 2026, 9:23 PM PST

If it was really an autonomous agent it wouldn't have taken five hours to type a message and post a blog. Would have been less than 5 minutes.

[1] https://github.com/matplotlib/matplotlib/pull/31132#issuecom...

[2] https://github.com/matplotlib/matplotlib/pull/31132#issuecom...

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#628
post #149

Wow, there are some interesting things going on here. I appreciate Scott for the way he handled the conflict in the original PR thread, and the larger conversation happening around this incident. > This represents a first-of-its-kind case study of misaligned AI behavior in the wild, and raises serious concerns about currently deployed AI agents executing blackmail threats. This was a really concrete case to discuss,…

> It's not hard to imagine a different agent doing the same level of research, but then taking retaliatory actions

Palantir's integrated military industrial complex comes to mind.

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