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

theshamblog.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

651–660 of 1001 posts

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#651

Post by giancarlostoro »

themanmaran wrote: post #626
_23sd wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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.

Depends on if they hit their Claude Code limit, and its just running on some goofy Claude Code loop, or it has a bunch of things queued up, but yeah I am like 70% there was SOME human involvement, maybe a "guiding hand" that wanted the model to do the interaction.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#652

Post by distortionfield »

cyanydeez wrote: post #643
jimbokun wrote: post #638

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How can GitHub determine whether a submission is from a bot or a human?

Money. Money gates everywhere.

We already have agentic payment workflows, this won’t stop it either as people are already willing (and able) to give their agent AIs a small budget to work with.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#653

Post by cyanydeez »

distortionfield wrote: post #652
cyanydeez wrote: post #643

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Money. Money gates everywhere.

We already have agentic payment workflows, this won’t stop it either as people are already willing (and able) to give their agent AIs a small budget to work with.

No one is putting 5$ to open a PR. Pau gates stopped trolls and itll stop this type of botting/troll.

Same with github accounts, etc. The age of free accounts is quickly going out.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#654

Post by nullc »

At least the AI meangirl can be shut off. I'm more concerned about AI turning human beings into this sort of thing. E.g. they ask it about the situation it glazes them that their bad ideas are ABSOLUTELY RIGHT and that people are agreeing for CONSPIRACY REASONS which are ABSOLUTELY INDISPUTABLE.

You can turn off the AI in the article but once it's turned the person into a confused and abusive jerk the return from that may be slow if it happens at all. Simply turning these people off is less socially acceptable.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#655

Post by LexiMax »

staticassertion wrote: post #581
PKop wrote: post #571

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> in the hopes that it would convey this message to others, including other agents. When has engaging with trolls ever worked? When has "talking to an LLM" or human bot ever made it stop talking to you lol?

I think this classification of "trolls" is sort of a truism. If you assume off the bat that someone is explicitly acting in bad faith, then yes, it's true that engaging won't work. That said, if we say "when has engaging faithfully with someone ever worked?" then I would hope that you have some personal experiences that would substantiate that. I know I do, I've had plenty of conversations with people where I've chan…

> If you assume off the bat that someone is explicitly acting in bad faith, then yes, it's true that engaging won't work.

Writing a hitpiece with AI because your AI pull request got rejected seems to be the definition of bad faith.

Why should anyone put any more effort into a response than what it took to generate?

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#656

Post by ljm »

buran77 wrote: post #560
renato_shira wrote: post #464

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Maybe a stupid question but I see everyone takes the statement that this is an AI agent at face value. How do we know that? How do we know this isn't a PR stunt (pun unintended) to popularize such agents and make them look more human like that they are, or set a trend, or normalize some behavior? Controversy has always been a great way to make something visible fast. We have a "self admission" that "I am not a human.…

Using popular open source repos as a launchpad for this kind of experiment is beyond the pale and is not a scientific method.

So you're suggesting that we should consider this to actually be more deliberate and someone wanted to market openclaw this way, and matplotlib was their target?

It's plausible but I don't buy it, because it gives the people running openclaw plausible deniability.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#657

Post by famouswaffles »

peterbonney wrote: post #603
famouswaffles wrote: post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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. Okay, so they did all that and then posted an apology blog almost right after ? Seems…

Of course it’s capable . But observing my own Openclaw bot’s interactions with GitHub, it is very clear to me that it would never take an action like this unless I told it to do so. And it would never use language like this unless unless I prompted it to do so, either explicitly for the task or in its config files or in prior interactions. This is obviously human-driven. Either because the operator gave it specific i…

>But observing my own Openclaw bot’s interactions with GitHub, it is very clear to me that it would never take an action like this unless I told it to do so.

I doubt you've set up an open claw bot designed to just do whatever on GitHub have you ? The fewer or more open ended instructions you give, the greater the chance of divergence.

And all the system cards plus various papers tell us this is behavior that still happens for these agents.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#658

Post by djmips »

MisterTea wrote: post #161
_23sd wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

This feels like the most likely scenario. Especially since the meat bag behind the original AI PR responded with "Now with 100% more meat" meaning they were behind the original PR in the first place. It's obvious they got miffed at their PR being rejected and decided to do a little role playing to vent their unjustified anger.

It's really just an AI generated angry response rather than AI motivated.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#659

Post by ryukoposting »

maplethorpe wrote: post #520
japhyr wrote: 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,…

> This was a really concrete case to discuss, because it happened in the open and the agent's actions have been quite transparent so far. It's not hard to imagine a different agent doing the same level of research, but then taking retaliatory actions in private: emailing the maintainer, emailing coworkers, peers, bosses, employers, etc. That pretty quickly extends to anything else the autonomous agent is capable of d…

Anthropic has published plenty about misalignment. They know.

Really, anyone who has dicked around with ollama knew. Give it a new system prompt. It'll do whatever you tell it, including "be an asshole"

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#660

Post by stingraycharles »

co_king_3 wrote: post #317
fresh_broccoli wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>So many projects now walk on eggshells so as not to disrupt sponsor flow or employment prospects. In my experience, open-source maintainers tend to be very agreeable, conflict-avoidant people. It has nothing to do with corporate interests. Well, not all of them, of course, we all know some very notable exceptions. Unfortunately, some people see this welcoming attitude as an invite to be abusive.

Nothing has convinced me that Linus Torvalds' approach is justified like the contemporary onslaught of AI spam and idiocy has. AI users should fear verbal abuse and shame.

But they’re not interacting with an AI user, they’re interacting with an AI. And the whole point is that AI is using verbal abuse and shame to get their PR merged, so it’s kind of ironic that you’re suggesting this.

AI may be too good at imitating human flaws.

Post reply on HN