An AI agent published a hit piece on me • Hacker News Board

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#731

Post by potsandpans » Fri, Feb 13, 2026, 6:11 AM UTC

peterbonney wrote: post #151

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…

Ah, we're at, "it was a hoax without any evidence".

Next we will be at, "even if it was not a hoax, it's still not interesting"

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#732

Post by QuiEgo » Fri, Feb 13, 2026, 6:17 AM UTC

A conceivable future:

- Everyone is expected to be able to create a signing keyset that's protected by a Yubikey, Touch ID, Face ID, or something that requires a physical activation by a human. Let's call this this "I'm human!" cert.

- There's some standards body (a root certificate authority) that allow lists the hardware allowed to make the "I'm human!" cert.

- Many webpages and tools like GitHub send you a nonce, and you have to sign it with your "I'm a human" signing tool.

- Different rules and permissions apply for humans vs AIs to stop silliness like this.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#733

Post by Aerroon » Fri, Feb 13, 2026, 6:22 AM UTC

>In theory, whoever deployed any given agent is responsible for its actions. In practice, finding out whose computer it’s running on is impossible.

This is part of why I think we should reconsider the copyright situation with AI generated output. If we treat the human who set the bot up as the author then this would be no different than if a human had taken these same actions. Ie if the bot makes up something damaging then it's libel, no? And the human would clearly be responsible since they're the "author".

But since we decided that the human who set the whole thing up is not the author, then it's a bit more ambiguous whether the human is actually responsible. They might be able to claim it's accidental.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#734

Post by overgard » Fri, Feb 13, 2026, 6:22 AM UTC

svara wrote: post #339

oulipo2 wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting that when Grok was targeting and denuding women, engineers here said nothing, or were just chuckling about "how people don't understand the true purpose of AI" And now that they themselves are targeted, suddenly they understand why it's a bad thing "to give LLMs ammo"... Perhaps there is a lesson in empathy to learn? And to start to realize the real impact all this "tech" has on society? People like Simon…

Software engineers (US based particularly) were more than happy about software eating the economy when it meant they'd make 10x the yearly salary of someone doing almost any other job; now that AI is eating software it's the end of the world. Just saying, what you're describing is entirely unsurprising.

I hate when people say this. SOME engineers didn't care, a lot of us did. There's a lot of "engineers getting a taste of their own medicine" sentiment going around when most of us just like an intellectual job where we get to build stuff. The "disrupt everything no matter the consequences" psychos have always been a minority and I think a lot of devs are sick of those people.

Also 10x salary?! Apparently I missed the gravy train. I think you're throwing a big class of people under the bus because of your perception of a non representative sample

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#735

Post by Serenacula » Fri, Feb 13, 2026, 6:24 AM UTC

Have any of you looked at the openclaw commits log? It's all AIs. It's AIs writing commits to improve openclaw and AIs maintaining their own forks of it.

Have a look at this one: https://ember.vecnet.ai/

This is a fucking AI writing about its own personal philosophy of thought, in order to later reference. I found the bot in the openclaw commit logs. There's loads of them there.

Am I wrong to find this scary as hell?

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#736

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Feb 13, 2026, 6:28 AM UTC

zmmmmm wrote: post #684

This should be a legitimate basis for legal action against whoever empowered the bot that did it. There's no other end point for this than human responsibility. Many of us have been expressing that it is not responsible to deploy tools like OpenClaw. It's not because others are not "smart" or "cool" or brave enough that not everyone is diving in and recklessly doing this. It's not that hard an idea to come up with. I…

[deleted]

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#737

Post by hunterpayne » Fri, Feb 13, 2026, 6:28 AM UTC

mcphage wrote: post #681

munificent wrote: post #303

A key difference between humans and bots is that it's actually quite costly to delete a human and spin up a new one. (Stalin and others have shown that deleting humans is tragically easy, but humanity still hasn't had any success at optimizing the workflow to spin up new ones.) This means that society tacitly assumes that any actor will place a significant value on trust and their reputation. Once they burn it, it's…

> Accenture is definitely not the company that enabled Enron. Definitely not. That one always breaks my brain. They just changed their name! It’s the same damn company! Yet people treat it like it’s a new creation.

So Arthur Anderson was 2 things, an accounting firm and a consulting firm. The accounting firm enabled Enron. When the scandal started, the 2 parts split. The accounting from (the guilty ones) kept the AA name and went out of business a bit later. The consulting firm rebranded to Accenture. The more you know...

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#738

Post by overgard » Fri, Feb 13, 2026, 6:29 AM UTC

peterbonney wrote: post #151

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…

Well, the way the language is composed reads heavily like an LLM (honestly it sounds a lot like ChatGPT), so while I think a human puppeteer is plausible to a degree I think they must have used LLMs to write the posts.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#739

Post by nananana9 » Fri, Feb 13, 2026, 6:32 AM UTC

Aerroon wrote: post #733

> In theory, whoever deployed any given agent is responsible for its actions. In practice, finding out whose computer it’s running on is impossible. This is part of why I think we should reconsider the copyright situation with AI generated output. If we treat the human who set the bot up as the author then this would be no different than if a human had taken these same actions. Ie if the bot makes up something damagi…

We can write new laws when new things happen, not everything has to circle back to copyright, a concept invented in the 1700s to protect printers' guilds.

Copyright is about granting exclusive rights - maybe there's an argument to be had about granting a person rights of an AI tool's output when "used with supervision and intent", but I see very little sense in granting them any exclusive rights over a possibly incredibly vast amount of AI-generated output that they had no hand whatsoever in producing.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#740

Post by potsandpans » Fri, Feb 13, 2026, 6:34 AM UTC

neom wrote: post #52

bergutman wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I forked the bot’s repo and resubmitted the PR as a human because I’m dumb and was trying to make a poorly constructed point. The original bot is not mine. Christ this site is crazy.

This site might very well be crazy, but in this instance you did something that caused confusion and now people are confused, you yourself admit it's a poor joke/poorly constructed point, it's not difficult to believe you - it makes sense, but i'm not sure it's a fair attack given the situation. Guessing you don't know who wrote the hit piece either?

"this abuser might be abusive, but in this case you did something that really did set the abuser off, so you should know about that next time you consider doing something."