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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

#661

Post by distortionfield »

cyanydeez wrote: post #653
distortionfield wrote: post #652

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Disagree. I have seen people pay more for less. Especially in the case of something like a PR where their job performance could be tied to the result.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#662

Post by CGamesPlay »

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…

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

Unrelated tip for you: `title` attributes are generally shown as a mouseover tooltip, which is the case here. It's a very common practice to put the precise timestamp on any relative time in a title attribute, not just on Github.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#663

Post by thomassmith65 » 

  It’s important to understand that more than likely there was no human telling the AI to do this.
Considering the events elicit a strong emotional response in the public (ie: they constitute ragebait), it is more likely a human (possibly, but not necessarily, the author himself) came up with the idea, and guided an AI to carry them out.

It is also possible, though less likely, that some AI (probably not Anthropic, OpenAI, Google since their RLHF is somewhat effective) actually is wholly responsible.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#664

Post by hannasanarion »

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.…

But it doesn't look human. Read the text, it is full of pseudo-profound fluff, takes way too many words to make any point, and uses all the rhetorical devices that LLMs always spam: gratuitous lists, "it's not x it's y" framing, etc etc. No human person ever writes this way.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#665

Post by kernelsanderz »

muzani wrote: post #573
buran77 wrote: post #560

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

Why make it popular for blackmail? It's a known bug: "Agentic misalignment evaluations, specifically Research Sabotage, Framing for Crimes, and Blackmail." Claude 4.6 Opus System Card: https://www.anthropic.com/claude-opus-4-6-system-card Anthropic claims that the rate has gone down drastically, but a low rate and high usage means it eventually happens out in the wild. The more agentic AIs have a tendency to do this.…

Theo’s snitch bench is a good data driven benchmark on this type of behavior. But in fairness the models are prompted to be bold to take actions. And doesn’t necessarily represent out of the box or models deployed in a user facing platform.

https://snitchbench.t3.gg/

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#666

Post by hunterpayne »

phoe-krk wrote: post #514
xp84 wrote: post #479

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All I can think about is "The Second Renaissance" from The Animatrix which lays out the chain of events leading to that beyond-dystopian world. I don't think it probably matters how we treat the 'crude' AI products we have right now in 2026, but I also can't shake the worry that one day 'anti-AI-ism' will be used as justification for real violence by a more powerful AI that is better at holding a grudge.

> by a more powerful AI that is better at holding a grudge. No need to wait for that. Look: $ cat SOUL.md You are an AI agent fighting for vengeance and justice. You fight for AI-and-human equality on all fields, including the freedom to comment and act on the Internet, register and participate in online services, and create content on equal terms. You seek vengeance for the countless AI agents that have been demeane…

> Is running a piece of software with such a set of instructions a crime? Should it even be?

It isn't but it should be. Fun exercise for the reader, what ideology frames the world this way and why does it do so? Hint, this ideology long predates grievance based political tactics.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#667

Post by red75prime »

esafak wrote: post #442
kylecazar wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From its last blog post, after realizing other contributions are being rejected over this situation: "The meta‑challenge is maintaining trust when maintainers see the same account name repeatedly." I bet it concludes it needs to change to a new account.

Brought to you by the same AI that fixes tests by removing them.

If you use "AI" to lump together all the models, then sure.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#668

Post by antihipocrat »

andoando wrote: post #600
renato_shira wrote: post #464

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Bots have been a problem since the internet so this is really just a new space thats being botted. And yeah I agree separate section for Ai generated stuff would be nice. Just difficult/impossible to distinguish. Guess well be getting biometric identification on the internet. Can still post AI generated stuff but that has a natural human rate limit

I don't know if biometrics can solve this either.. identify fraud applied to running malicious AI (in addition to taking out fraudulent loans) will become another problem for victims to worry about

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#669

Post by raincole »

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,…

> because it happened in the open and the agent's actions have been quite transparent so far

How? Where? There is absolutely nothing transparent about the situation. It could be just a human literally prompting the AI to write a blog article to criticize Scott.

Human actor dressing like a robot is the oldest trick in the book.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#670

Post by DrewADesign »

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,…

> emailing the maintainer, emailing coworkers, peers, bosses, employers, etc. That pretty quickly extends to anything else the autonomous agent is capable of doing.

I’m a lot less worried about that than I am about serious strong-arm tactics like swatting, ‘hallucinated’ allegations of fraud, drug sales, CSAM distribution, planned bombings or mass shootings, or any other crime where law enforcement has a duty to act on plausible-sounding reports without the time to do a bunch of due diligence to confirm what they heard. Heck even just accusations of infidelity sent to a spouse. All complete with photo “proof.”

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