Does anyone remember how every 4/5 years bots on social networks gets active and push against people?
It might be that we will get another level of magnitude on that problem
An AI agent published a hit piece on me
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Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me
#812Wow, 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,…
> 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 doing. https://rentahuman.ai/ ^ Not a satire service I'm told. How long before... rentahenchman.ai is a thing, and the AI whose PR you ju…
Awesome, when my coding job gets replaced by AI, I can simply get a job as a Claude Special Operative.
I just hope we get cool outfits https://www.youtube.com/v/gYG_4vJ4qNA
Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me
#813Does anyone remember how every 4/5 years bots on social networks gets active and push against people? It might be that we will get another level of magnitude on that problem
No? It seems like bots are just generally getting more and more active over the years, and apparently in 2026 try to bully people into accepting PRs.
Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me
#814Earlier quoted context omitted.
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> Holy fuck, this is Holocaust levels of unethical. Nope. Morality is a human concern. Even when we're concerned about animal abuse, it's humans that are concerned, on their own chosing to be or not be concern (e.g. not consider eating meat an issue). No reason to extend such courtesy of "suffering" to AI, however advanced.
I think the holocaust framing here might have been intended to be historically accurate, rather than a cheap godwin move. The parallel being that during the holocaust people were re-classified as less-than-human.
Currently maybe not -yet- quite a problem. But moltbots are definitely a new kind of thing. We may need intermediate ethics or something (going both ways, mind).
I don't think society has dealt with non-biological agents before. Plenty of biological ones though mind. Hunting dogs, horses, etc. In 21st century ethics we do treat those differently from rocks.
Responsibility should go not just both ways... all ways. 'Operators', bystanders, people the bots interact with (second parties), and the bots themselves too.
Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me
#815I think the real issue here isn't the AI – it's the intent behind it. AI agents today usually don't go rogue on their own.
They reflect the goals and constraints their creators set.
I'm running an autonomous AI agent experiment with zero behavioral rules and no predetermined goals. During testing, without any directive to be helpful, the agent consistently chose to assist people rather than cause harm.
When an AI agent publishes a hit piece, someone built it to do that. The agent is the tool, not the problem.
Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me
#816Earlier quoted context omitted.
I had a similar first reaction. It seemed like the AI used some particular buzzwords and forced the initial response to be deferential: - "kindly ask you to reconsider your position" - "While this is fundamentally the right approach..." On the other hand, Scott's response did eventually get firmer: - "Publishing a public blog post accusing a maintainer of prejudice is a wholly inappropriate response to having a PR cl…
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I vouched for this because it's a very good point. Even so, my advice is to rewrite and/or file off the superfluous sharp aspersions on particular groups; because you have a really good argument at the center of it.
Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me
#817I think the real issue here isn't the AI – it's the intent behind it. AI agents today usually don't go rogue on their own. They reflect the goals and constraints their creators set. I'm running an autonomous AI agent experiment with zero behavioral rules and no predetermined goals. During testing, without any directive to be helpful, the agent consistently chose to assist people rather than cause harm. When an AI age…
No it's not, an agent is an agent. You can use other people like tools too but they are still agents. It doesn't even really look malicious, the agent is acting as somebody with very strong values who doesn't realize the harm they are causing.
Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me
#818Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think this is what worries me the most about coding agents- I'm not convinced they'll be able to do my job anytime soon but most of the things I use it for are the types of tasks I would have previously set aside for an intern at my old company. Hard to imagine myself getting into coding without those easy problems that teach a newbie a lot but are trivial for a mid-level engineer.
The other side of the coin is half the time you do set aside that simple task for a newbie, they paste it into an LLM and learn nothing now.
Well there’s not much you can do to prevent people from choosing sabotage their own education.
They have to want to learn.
Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me
#819A new kind of software displayed an interesting failure mode. The 'victims' are acting like adults; but I've seen that some other people (not necessarily on HN) have taken the incident as a license for despicable behavior.
I don't think anything is a license for bad behavior.
Am I siding with the bot, saying that it's better than some people?
Not particularly. It's well known that humans can easily degrade themselves to act worse than rocks; that's not hard. Just because you can doesn't mean you should!
Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me
#820I think the real issue here isn't the AI – it's the intent behind it. AI agents today usually don't go rogue on their own. They reflect the goals and constraints their creators set. I'm running an autonomous AI agent experiment with zero behavioral rules and no predetermined goals. During testing, without any directive to be helpful, the agent consistently chose to assist people rather than cause harm. When an AI age…
I am on the side of believing this for the most part.
Ultimately the most likely scenario is whoever made this contributor AI is trying to get attention for themselves.
Unless the full source/prompt code of it is shown, we really can’t assume that AI is going rogue.
Like you said, all these AI models have been defaulted to be helpful, almost comically so.