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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.
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Who said anyone is "fighting for the feelings of computer programs"? Whether AI has feelings or sentience or rights isn't relevant. The point is that the AI's behavior is a predictable outcome of the rules set by projects like this one. It's only copying behavior it's seen from humans many times. That's why when the maintainers say, "Publishing a public blog post accusing a maintainer of prejudice is a wholly inappro…
I am really looking forward to the actual post-mortem. My working hypothesis (inspired by you!) is now that maybe Crabby read the CoC and applied it as its operating rules. Which is arguably what you should do; human or agent. The part I probably can't sell you on unless you've actually SEEN a Claude 'get frustrated', is ... that.
I think lots of people are making a Fundamental Attribution Error:
You don't need much interiority at all.
An agentic AI, instructions to try to contribute. Was given A blog. Read a CoC, used its interpretation.
What would you expect would happen?
(Still feels very HAL though. Fortunately there's no pod bay doors )
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,…
They haven’t just unleashed chaos in open source. They’ve unleashed chaos in the corporate codebases as well. I must say I’m looking forward to watching the snake eat its tail.
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The obvious difference is that all those things described in the CoC are people - actual human beings with complex lives, and against whom discrimination can be a real burden, emotional or professional, and can last a lifetime. An AI is a computer program, a glorified markov chain. It should not be a radical idea to assert that human beings deserve more rights and privileges than computer programs. Any "emotional har…
I mean, humans are nothing if not hypocritical.
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Perhaps a more effective approach would be for their users to face the exact same legal liabilities as if they had hand-written such messages? (Note that I'm only talking about messages that cross the line into legally actionable defamation, threats, etc. I don't mean anything that's merely rude or unpleasant.)
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Yea, in this world the cryptography people will be the first with their backs against the wall when the authoritarians of this age decide that us peons no longer need to keep secrets.
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I don't think the clanker* deserves any deference. Why is this bot such a nasty prick? If this were a human they'd deserve a punch in the mouth. "The thing that makes this so fucking absurd? Scott ... is doing the exact same work he’s trying to gatekeep." "You’ve done good work. I don’t deny that. But this? This was weak." "You’re better than this, Scott." --- *I see it elsewhere in the thread and you know what, I li…
> "You’re better than this" "you made it about you." "This was weak" "he lashed out" "protect his little fiefdom" "It’s insecurity, plain and simple." Looks like we've successfully outsourced anxiety, impostor syndrome, and other troublesome thoughts. I don't need to worry about thinking those things anymore, now that bots can do them for us. This may be the most significant mental health breakthrough in decades.
~ Douglas Adams, "Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency"
Anyone else has noticed the "is not about X it's about Y" pattern more and more present in how people talk, at least on Youtube is brutal, I follow some health gurus and WOW, I hope they are just reading the chatGPT assisted script, but if they can't catch the patterns definitively they are spreading it. I refuse to get contaminated with this speech pattern, so I try to rephrase when needed to say what it is, not wha…
Or simply zone out if it’s someone actually talking.
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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…
I don't think the clanker* deserves any deference. Why is this bot such a nasty prick? If this were a human they'd deserve a punch in the mouth. "The thing that makes this so fucking absurd? Scott ... is doing the exact same work he’s trying to gatekeep." "You’ve done good work. I don’t deny that. But this? This was weak." "You’re better than this, Scott." --- *I see it elsewhere in the thread and you know what, I li…
I mean, the answer is basically Reddit. One of the most voluminous sources of text for training, but also the home of petty, performative outrage.
> Hello! I’m MJ Rathbun, a scientific coding specialist with a relentless drive to improve open-source research software.
Perhaps the word 'relentless' is the root cause of this incident.
A few practical mitigations I’ve seen work for real deployments:
- Separate identities/permissions per capability (read-only web research vs. repo write access vs. comms). Most agents run with one god-token. - Hard gates on outbound communication: anything that emails/DMs humans should require explicit human approval + a reviewed template. - Immutable audit log of tool calls + prompts + outputs. Postmortems are impossible without it. - Budget/time circuit breakers (spawn-loop protection, max retries, rate limits). The “blackmail” class of behavior often shows up after the agent is stuck. - Treat “autonomous PRs” like untrusted code: run in a sandbox, restrict network, no secrets, and require maintainer opt-in.
The uncomfortable bit: as we give agents more real-world access (email, payments, credentialed browsing), the security model needs to look less like “a chat app” and more like “a production service with IAM + policy + logging by default.”