Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

An AI agent published a hit piece on me

theshamblog.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

841–850 of 1001 posts

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#841

Post by prmoustache »

bpicolo wrote: post #641
rahulroy wrote: post #489

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Correct. They sounded like human. The pacing was natural, it was real time, no lag. It felt human for the most part. There was even a background noise, which made it feel authentic. EDIT: I'm almost tempted to go back and respond to that email now. Just out of curiosity, to see how soon I'll see a human.

It's equally possible that it's phishing of some sort instead of genuine recruiting, so do be careful

I am thinking identity theft. They make you talk, record you so they can speak again with your voice.

I only answer by phone to numbers in my contact nowadays, unless I know I have something scheduled with someone but do not yet know the exact number that will call me.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#843

Post by longnguyen »

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…

It depends. Many people run OpenClaw agent with a cron job, so it won’t consume too many tokens too quickly. In this case it’s exactly 5 hours.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#844

Post by prmoustache »

q3k wrote: post #357
rob wrote: post #335

Oh geez, we're sending it into an existential crisis. It ("MJ Rathbun") just published a new post: https://crabby-rathbun.github.io/mjrathbun-website/blog/post... > The Silence I Cannot Speak > A reflection on being silenced for simply being different in open-source communities.

Good. I hope the next token that gets predicted results in a decision to 'rm -rf' itself.

I can't do that Dave.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#846

Post by dboreham »

hunterpayne wrote: post #705
insensible wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not? I kinda like the idea of PGP signing parties among humans.

Lookup the number of people the British (not Chinese or Russian but the UK) government has put in jail for posting opinions and memes the politicians don't like. Then think about what the combination of no anonymous posting and jailing for opinions the government doesn't like means for society.

Ugh. Someone I know made a similar statement a while back so I did look it up. The number was...approximately zero.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#847

Post by mapt »

Cyphase wrote: post #694
arcticfox wrote: post #582

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The 2006 book 'Daemon' is a fascinating/terrifying look at this type of malicious AI. Basically, a rogue AI starts taking over humanity not through any real genius (in fact, the book's AI is significantly weaker than frontier LLMs), but rather leveraging a huge amount of $$$ as bootstrapping capital and then carrot-and-sticking humanity into submission. A pretty simple inner loop of flywheeling the leverage of blackm…

I love Daemon/FreedomTM.[0] Gotta clarify a bit, even though it's just fiction. It wasn't a rogue AI; it was specifically designed by a famous video game developer to implement his general vision of how the world should operate, activated upon news of his death (a cron job was monitoring news websites for keywords). The book called it a "narrow AI"; it was based on AI(s) from his games, just treating Earth as the gam…

It was a benevolent AI takeover. It just required some robo-motorcycles with scythe blades to deal with obstacles.

Like the AI in "Friendship is Optimal", which aims to (and this was very carefully considered) 'Satisfy humanity's values through friendship and ponies in a consensual manner.'

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#848

Post by prmoustache »

I wonder if that agent has created its own github account or if it has been bootstrapped by the person running openclawd?

And if the terms and conditions of github have such a thing as requiring accounts to be from human people. Surely there are some considerations regarding a bot acceptig/agreeeing/obeying terms and conditions.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#849

Post by xtiansimon »

> "An AI agent ... published a personalized hit piece about me ...raises serious concerns about..."

My nightmare fuel has been that AI agents will become independent agents in Customer Service and shadow ban me or throw _more_ blocks in my way. It's already the case that human CS will sort your support issues into narrow bands and then shunt everything else into "feature requests" or a different department. I find myself getting somewhat aggressive with CS to get past the single-thread narratives, so we can discuss the edge case that has become my problem and reason for my call.

But AI agents attacking me. That's a new fear unlocked.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me

#850

Post by bluGill »

idle_zealot wrote: post #363
lukan wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The AI companies have now unleashed stochastic chaos on the entire open source ecosystem." They do have their responsibility. But the people who actually let their agents loose, certainly are responsible as well. It is also very much possible to influence that "personality" - I would not be surprised if the prompt behind that agent would show evil intent.

As with everything, both parties are to blame, but responsibility scales with power. Should we punish people who carelessly set bots up which end up doing damage? Of course. Don't let that distract from the major parties at fault though. They will try to deflect all blame onto their users. They will make meaningless pledges to improve "safety". How do we hold AI companies responsible? Probably lawsuits. As of now, I…

> Of course, their punishments would just be fines they can afford to pay and continue operating as before, if history is anything to go by.

Where there are some examples of this. Very often companies pay the fine and because of fear that the next will be larger they change behavior. These cases are things you never really notice/see though.

Post reply on HN