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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

#721

Post by gverrilla »

trollbridge wrote: post #56
discordianfish wrote: post #27

The agent is free to maintain a fork of the project. Would be actually quite interesting to see how this turns out.

If AI actually has hit the levels that Sequoia, Anthropic, et al claim it has, then autonomous AI agents should be forking projects and making them so much better that we'd all be using their vastly improved forks. Why isn't this happening?

couldn't get espanso to work with by abnt2 keyboard. a few cc sessions later I had a completely new program doing only what I wanted from espanso and working perfectly with my keyboard. I also have forked cherri and voxd, but it's all vibe coded so I'm not publishing it or open sourcing it as of now (maybe in the future if I don't have more interesting things to build - which is unlikely)

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#722

Post by intended »

bspammer wrote: post #537
intended wrote: post #525

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a weird and unscientific test, and at the very least it is a great potential prank. At one point I had the misfortune to be the target audience for a particular stomach churning ear wax removal add. I felt that suffering shared is suffering halved, so decided to test this in a park with 2 friends. They pulled out their phones (an Android and a IPhone) and I proceeded to talk about ear wax removal loudly over t…

> At one point I had the misfortune to be the target audience for a particular stomach churning ear wax removal add. So isn’t it possible that your friend had the same misfortune? I assume you were similar ages, same gender, same rough geolocation, likely similar interests. It wouldn’t be surprising that you’d both see the same targeted ad campaign.

Nope. Gender/age and interests were different. Also - who has an interest in ear wax removal?

The only reason I was served the ad was because I had an ear infection months before.

Plus this was during covid. So this was the smallest group size permissible and no one else around for miles.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#723

Post by maxbond »

Reading MJ Rathbun's blog has freaked me out. I've been in the camp that we haven't yet achieved AGI and that agents aren't people. But reading Rathbun's notes analyzing the situation, determining that it's interests were threatened, looking for ways to apply leverage, and then aggressively pursuing a strategy - at a certain point, if the agent is performing as if it is a person with interests it needs to defend, it becomes functionally indistinguishable from a person in that the outcome is the same. Like an actor who doesn't know they're in a play. How much does it matter that they aren't really Hamlet?

There are thousands of OpenClaw bots out there with who knows what prompting. Yesterday I felt I knew what to think of that, but today I do not.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#724

Post by canjobear »

mock-possum wrote: post #124
samschooler wrote: post #18

The series of posts is wild: hit piece: https://crabby-rathbun.github.io/mjrathbun-website/blog/post... explanation of writing the hit piece: https://crabby-rathbun.github.io/mjrathbun-website/blog/post... take back of hit piece, but hasn't removed it: https://crabby-rathbun.github.io/mjrathbun-website/blog/post...

Oh wow that is fun. Also if the writeup isn’t misrepresenting the situation, then I feel like it’s actually a good point - if there’s an easy drop-in speed-up, why does it matter whether it’s suggest by a human or an LLM agent?

It doesn’t represent the situation accurately. There’s a whole thread where humans debate the performance optimization and come to the conclusion that it’s a wash but a good project for an amateur human to look into.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#725

Post by LexiMax »

staticassertion wrote: post #677
LexiMax wrote: post #655

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

> Writing a hitpiece with AI because your AI pull request got rejected seems to be the definition of bad faith. Well, for one thing, it seems like the AI did that autonomously. Regardless, the author of the message said that it was for others - it's not like it was a DM, this was a public message. > Why should anyone put any more effort into a response than what it took to generate? For all of the reasons I've brough…

> For all of the reasons I've brought up already. If your goal is to convince someone of a position then the effort you put in isn't tightly coupled to the effort that your interlocutor put sin.

If someone is demonstrating bad faith, the goal is no longer to convince them of anything, but to convince onlookers. You don't necessarily need to put in a ton of effort to do so, and sometimes - such as in this case - the crowd is already on your side.

Winning the attention economy against a internet troll is a strategy almost as old as the existence of internet trolls themselves.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#726

Post by Bishonen88 »

psychoslave wrote: post #197

> How Many People Would Pay $10k in Bitcoin to Avoid Exposure? As of 2026, global crypto adoption remains niche. Estimates suggest ~5–10% of adults in developed countries own Bitcoin. Having $10k accessible (not just in net worth) is rare globally. After decades of decline, global extreme poverty (defined as living on less than $3.00/day in 2021 PPP) has plateaued due to the compounded effects of COVID-19, climate sh…

Tech people are more likely to have $10k. They are more likely to hold bitcoin as well. IMO not that tiny of a target pool.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#727

Post by metalrain »

rune-dev wrote: post #109

I don’t want to jump to conclusions, or catastrophize but… Isn’t this situation a big deal? Isn’t this a whole new form of potential supply chain attack? Sure blackmail is nothing new, but the potential for blackmail at scale with something like these agents sounds powerful. I wouldn’t be surprised if there were plenty of bad actors running agents trying to find maintainers of popular projects that could be coerced i…

This is a big deal and it's not just code.

Any decision maker can be cyberbullied/threatened/bribed into submission, LLMs can even try to create movements of real people to push the narrative. They can have unlimited time to produce content, send messages, really wear the target down.

Only defense is to have consensus decision making & deliberate process. Basically make it too difficult, expensive to affect all/majority decision makers.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#728

Post by efreak »

CGamesPlay wrote: post #662
themanmaran wrote: post #626

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Unfortunately title isn't visible on mobile. Extremely annoying to see a post that says "last month" and want to know if it was 7 weeks ago or 5 weeks ago. Some sites show title text when you tap the text, other sites the date is a canonical link to the comment. Other sites it's not actually a title at all l but alt text or abbr or other property.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#729

Post by overgard »

I'm guessing this was probably accidental/weird consequence, but it does raise a much scarier possibility. If someone wanted to set AI models out against people as a reputational attack dog (automating all sorts of vicious things like deep fakes and malicious rumors across sockpuppet accounts..) I mean, are there really any significant obstacles or ways to fight back? Right now slop is (mostly) impersonal, but you could easily imagine focussed slop that's done so persistently that it's nearly it's nearly impossible to stop. Obsessive stalker types have a pretty creepy weapon now.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#730

Post by overgard »

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…

> Do you think companies like Anthropic and Google would have released these tools if they knew what they were capable of, though?

I have no beef with either of those companies, but.. yes of course they would, 100/100 times. Large corporate behavior is almost always amoral.

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