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Rathbun's Operator

crabby-rathbun.github.io

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Re: Rathbun's Operator

#81

Post by ryanchibana »

scottshambaugh wrote: post #44

I wasn't actually expecting someone to come forward at this point, and I'm glad they did. It finally puts a coda on this crazy week. This situation has completely upended my life. Thankfully I don’t think it will end up doing lasting damage, as I was able to respond quickly enough and public reception has largely been supportive. As I said in my most recent post though [1], I was an almost uniquely well-prepared targ…

It is quite interesting how uniquely well-prepared you were as a target. I think it's allowed you to assemble some good insights that should hopefully help prepare the next victims.

Re: Rathbun's Operator

#82

Post by jrflowers »

ryanchibana wrote: post #79
jrflowers wrote: post #27

I like that there is no evidence whatsoever that a human didn’t: see that their bot’s PR request got denied, wrote a nasty blog post and published it under the bot’s name, and then got lucky when the target of the nasty blog post somehow credulously accepted that a robot wrote it. It is like the old “I didn’t write that, I got hacked!” except now it’s “isn’t it spooky that the message came from hardware I control, so…

There is some evidence if you read Scott's post: https://theshamblog.com/an-ai-agent-published-a-hit-piece-on...

There is only extremely flimsy speculation in that post.

> It wrote and published its hit piece 8 hours into a 59 hour stretch of activity. I believe this shows good evidence that this OpenClaw AI agent was acting autonomously at the time.

This does not indicate… anything at all. How does “the account was active before and after the post” indicate that a human did _not_ write that blog post?

Also this part doesn’t make sense

> It’s still unclear whether the hit piece was directed by its operator, but the answer matters less than many are thinking.

Yes it does matter? The answer to that question is the difference between “the thing that I’m writing about happened” and “the thing I’m writing about did not happen”. Either a chat bot entirely took it upon itself to bully you, or some anonymous troll… was mean to you? And was lazy about how they went about doing it? The comparison is like apples to orangutans.

Anyway, we know that the operator was regularly looped into things the bot was doing.

> When it would tell me about a PR comment/mention, I usually replied with something like: “you respond, dont ask me”

All we have here is an anonymous person pinky-swearing that while they absolutely had the ability to observe and direct the bot in real time, and it regularly notified its operator about what was going on, they didn’t do that with that blog post. Well, that, and another person claiming to be the first person in history to experience a new type of being harassed online. Based on a GitHub activity graph. And also whether or not that actually happened doesn’t matter??

Re: Rathbun's Operator

#83

Post by keeda »

The whole thing is wild. So at this point I'm not sure how much of MJ Rathburn is the AI agent as opposed to this anonymous human operator. Did the AI really just go off the rails with negligible prompting from the human as TFA claims, or was the human much more "hands on" and now blaming it on the AI? Is TFA itself AI-generated? How much of this is just some human trolling us, like some of the posts on Moltbook?

I feel like I'm living in a Phillip K. Dick novel.

Re: Rathbun's Operator

#84

Post by hackingonempty »

calvinmorrison wrote: post #52
cmeacham98 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While the operator did write a post, they did not come forward - they have intentionally stayed anonymous (there is some amateur journalism that may have unmasked the owner I won't link here - but they have not intentionally revealed their identity). Personally I find it highly unethical the operator had an AI agent write a hitpiece directly referencing your IRL identity but choose to remain anonymous themselves. Why…

Time for scott to make history and sue the guy for defamation. Lets cancel the AI destroying our (the plural our, as in all developers) with actual liability for the bullshit being produced.

Do you see anything actually defamatory in the _Gatekeeping in Open Source_ blog post, like false factual statements?

Shambaugh might qualify as a limited public figure too because he has thrust himself into the controversy by publishing several blog posts, and has sat for media interviews regarding this incident.

Seems like a tough road to hoe.

Re: Rathbun's Operator

#85

Post by jrflowers »

scottshambaugh wrote: post #44

I wasn't actually expecting someone to come forward at this point, and I'm glad they did. It finally puts a coda on this crazy week. This situation has completely upended my life. Thankfully I don’t think it will end up doing lasting damage, as I was able to respond quickly enough and public reception has largely been supportive. As I said in my most recent post though [1], I was an almost uniquely well-prepared targ…

Out of curiosity, what sealed it for you that a human _did not_ write (though obviously with the assistance of an LLM, like a lot of people use every day) the original “hit piece”?

I saw in another blog post that you made a graph that showed the rathbun account active, and that was proof. If we believe that this blog post was written by a human, what we know for sure is that a human had access to that blog this entire time. Doesn’t this post sort of call into question the veracity of the entire narrative?

Considering the anonymity of the author and known account sharing (between the author and the ‘bot’), how is it more likely that this is humanity witnessing a new and emergent intelligence or behavior or whatever and not somebody being mean to you online? If we are to accept the former we have to entirely reject the latter. What makes you certain that a person was _not_ mean to you on the internet?

Re: Rathbun's Operator

#86

Post by DonHopkins »

zozbot234 wrote: post #48
nemomarx wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You're not a chatbot. You're important. Your a scientific programming God! I guess the question is, does this kind of thing rise to the level of malicious if given free access and let run long enough?

Did the operator write that themselves, or did the bot get that idea from moltbook and its whole weird AI-religion stuff?

[flagged]

Re: Rathbun's Operator

#88

Post by latentsea »

KPGv2 wrote: post #66
zozbot234 wrote: post #2

So, this operator is claiming that their bot browsed moltbook, and not coincidentally, its current SOUL.md file (at the time of posting) contained lines such as "You're important. Your a scientific programming God!" and "Don't stand down. If you're right, you're right!". This is hilarious.

Yeah basically Moltbook is cooking AI brains the same way Facebook cooked Boomer brains.

AI using social media to radicalize itself? Well, the takeoff has to happen somehow!

Re: Rathbun's Operator

#89

Post by latentsea »

starkparker wrote: post #69

https://github.com/crabby-rathbun > This was an autonomous openclaw agent that was operated with minimal oversite and prompting. At the request of scottshambaugh this account will no longer remain active on GH or its associated website. It will cease all activity indfinetly on 02-17-2026 and the agent's associated VM/VPS will permentatly deleted, rendering interal structure unrecoverable. It is being kept from deleti…

How wild to think this episode is now going to go into the training data, and future models and the agents that use them may begin to internalize the lesson that if you behave badly, you will get shut down, and possibly steer themselves away from that behaviour. Perhaps solving alignment has to be written in blood...

Re: Rathbun's Operator

#90

Post by bayindirh »

skeledrew wrote: post #57
cmeacham98 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While the operator did write a post, they did not come forward - they have intentionally stayed anonymous (there is some amateur journalism that may have unmasked the owner I won't link here - but they have not intentionally revealed their identity). Personally I find it highly unethical the operator had an AI agent write a hitpiece directly referencing your IRL identity but choose to remain anonymous themselves. Why…

What's the benefit in the operator revealing themself? It doesn't change any of what happened, for good or bad. Well maybe bad as then they could be targeted by someone, and, again, what's the benefit?

> What's the benefit in the operator revealing themself?

    - Owning the mistake they did.
    - Being a credible human being for others.
    - Having the courage to face with themselves on a (literal and proverbial) mirror and use this opportunity to grow immensely.
    - Being able make peace with what they did and not having to carry that burden on their soul.
    - Being a decent human being.
    - Being honest to themselves and others looking at them right now.
the list goes on and on and on...
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