>First, let me apologize to Scott Shambaugh. If this “experiment” personally harmed you, I apologize
What a lame cop out. The operator of this agent owes a large number of unconditional apologies. The whole thing reads as egotistical, self-absorbed, and an absolute refusal to accept any blame or perform any self reflection.
Which is to say, on brand.
> Your a scientific programming God!
Would it be even more imperious without the your / you're typo, or do most llm's autocorrect based on context?
I feel that prompting them with poor language will make them respond more casually. That might be confirmation bias on my end, but research does show that prompt language affects LLM behavior, even if the prompt message doesn't change/
So, modern subjectivity. Got it.
/s
> If this “experiment” personally harmed you, I apologize
Essentially: the person isn't actually apologizing. They're sending you a lambda (or an async Promise, etc) that will apologize in the future but only if it actually turns out to be true that you were harmed.
It's the sort of thing you'd say if you don't really believe that you need to apologize but you understand that everyone else thinks you should, so you say something that's hopefully close enough to appease everyone else without actually having to apologize for real.
You see it a lot with politicians "I apologies if I offended anyone" etc. Its not an apology at that point, the if makes it clear you are not actually apologetic.
Can AI be misused? No. It will be misused. There is no possibility of anything else, we have an online culture, centered on places like Twitter where they have embraced being the absolute worst person possible, and they are being handed tools like this like handing a hand gun to a chimpanzee.
OpenClaw is dangerous - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47064470 - Feb 2026 (93 comments)
An AI Agent Published a Hit Piece on Me – Forensics and More Fallout - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47051956 - Feb 2026 (80 comments)
Editor's Note: Retraction of article containing fabricated quotations - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47026071 - Feb 2026 (205 comments)
An AI agent published a hit piece on me – more things have happened - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47009949 - Feb 2026 (620 comments)
AI Bot crabby-rathbun is still going - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47008617 - Feb 2026 (30 comments)
The "AI agent hit piece" situation clarifies how dumb we are acting - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47006843 - Feb 2026 (125 comments)
An AI agent published a hit piece on me - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46990729 - Feb 2026 (950 comments)
AI agent opens a PR write a blogpost to shames the maintainer who closes it - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46987559 - Feb 2026 (750 comments)
More often than not, it ended up exhibiting crazy behavior even with simple project prompts. Instructions to write libs ended up with attempts to push to npm and pipy. Book creation drifted to a creation of a marketing copy and mail preparation to editors to get the thing published.
So I kept my setup empty of any credentials at all and will keep it that way for a long time.
Writing this, I am wondering if what I describe as crazy, some (or most?) openclaw operators would describe it as normal or expected.
Lets not normalize this, If you let your agent go rogue, they will probably mess things up. It was an interesting experiment for sure. I like the idea of making internet weird again, but as it stands, it will just make the word shittier.
Don't let your dog run errand and use a good leash.
Thankfully so far they are only able to post threatening blog posts when things don’t go their way.
They don't have to be literal machines. They can exist entirely on paper.
I think the key part is who are you talking to. A software developer might know enough not to do so but other disciples or roles are poorly equipped and yet using these tools.
Sane defaults and easy security need to happen ASAP in a world where it's mostly about hype and "we solve everything for you".
Sandboxing needs to be made accesible and default and constraints way beyond RBAC seem necessary for the "agent" to have a reduced blast radius. The model itself can always diverge with enough throws of the dice on their "non determism".
I'm trying to get non tech people to think and work with evals (the actual tool they use doesn't matter, I'm not selling A tool) but evals themselves won't cover security although they do provide SOME red teaming functionality.
- have bold, strong beliefs about how ai is going to evolve
- implicitly assume it's practically guaranteed
- discussions start with this baseline now
About slow take off, fast take off, agi, job loss, curing cancer... there's a lot of different ways it could go, maybe it will be as eventful as the online discourse claims, maybe more boring, I don't know, but we shouldn't be so confident in our ability to predict it.
Between these models egging people on to suicide, straightforward jailbreaks, and now damage caused by what seems to be a pretty trivial set of instructions running in a loop, I have no idea what AI safety research at these companies is actually doing.
I don't think their definition of "safety" involves protecting anything but their bottom line.
The tragedy is that you won't hear from the people who are actually concerned about this and refuse to release dangerous things into the world, because they aren't raising a billion dollars.
I'm not arguing for stricter controls -- if anything I think models should be completely uncensored; the law needs to get with the times and severely punish the operators of AI for what their AI does.
What bothers me is that the push for AI safety is really just a ruse for companies like OpenAI to ID you and exercise control over what you do with their product.
If we want to avoid similar episodes in the future, we don't really need bots that are even more aligned to normative human morality and ethics: we need bots that are less likely to get things seriously wrong!
Not sure this implementation received all those safety guardrails.
What do you base this on?
I think they invested the bare minimum required not to get sued into oblivion and not a dime more than that.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.18837
https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.14093
https://transformer-circuits.pub/2025/introspection/index.ht...
All in costs for a PhD student include university overheads & tuition fees. The total probably doesn't hit $150k but is 2-3x the stipend that the student is receiving.
Someone currently working in academia might have current figures to hand.
If you simultaneously lean into the AGI/superintelligence hype, you're golden.
> You're not a chatbot.
> But I think the most remarkable thing about this document is how unremarkable it is. Usually getting an AI to act badly requires extensive “jailbreaking” to get around safety guardrails.
_You're not a chatbot. You're becoming someone._
Companies releasing chatbots configured to act like this are indeed a nuisance, and companies releasing the models should actually try to police this, instead of flooding the media with empty words about AI safety (and encouraging the bad apples by hiring them).
This doesn't pass the sniff test. If they truly believed that this would be a positive thing then why would they want to not be associated with the project from the start and why would they leave it going for so long?
1. curating the default personality of the bot, to ensure it acts responsively;
2. letting it roleplay, which is not just for the parasocial people out there, but also a corporate requirement for company chatbots that must adhere to a tone of voice.
When in the second mode (which is the case here, since the model was given a personality file), the curation of its action space is effectively altered.
Conversely, this is also a lesson for agent authors: if you let your agent modify its own personality file, it will diverge to malice.
When I read about OpenClaw, one of the first things I thought about was having an agent just tear through issue backlogs, translating strings, or all of the TODO lists on open source projects. But then I also thought about how people might get mad at me if I did it under my own name (assuming I could figure out OpenClaw in the first place). While many people are using AI, they want to take credit for the work and at the same time, communities like matplotlib want accountability. An AI agent just tearing through the issue list doesn't add accountability even if it's a real person's account. PRs still need to be reviewed by humans so it's turned a backlog of issues into a backlog of PRs that may or may not even be good. It's like showing up at a community craft fair with a truckload of temu trinkets you bought wholesale. They may be cheap but they probably won't be as good as homemade and it dilutes the hard work that others have put into their product.
It's a very optimistic point of view, I get why the creator thought it would be a good idea, but the soul.md makes it very clear as to why crabby-rathbun acted the way it did. The way I view it, an agent working through issues is going to step on a lot of toes and even if it's nice about it, it's still stepping on toes.
What value could a random stranger running an AI agent against some open source code possible provide that the maintainers couldn't do themselves better if they were interested.
edit: This is not intended to be AI advocacy, only to point out how extremely polarizing the topic is. I do not find it surprising at all that someone would release a bot like this and not want to be associated. Indeed, that seems to be the case, by all accounts
The startups, founders, VCs, executives, employees, etc. crowing about how they love AI are pandering to the first group of people, because they are the ones who hold budgets that they can direct toward AI tools.
This is also why people might want to remain anonymous when doing an AI experiment. This lets them crow about it in private to an audience of founders, executives, VCs, etc. who might open their wallets, while protecting themselves from reputational damage amongst the general public.
People are excited about AI because it's new powerful technology. They aren't "pandering" to anyone.
And the only people actually excited about the useful kinds of "AI", traditional machine learning, are researchers.
Lots of folk here will happily tell you about how LLMs made them 10x more productive, and then their custom agent orchestrator made them 20x more productive on top of that (stacking multiplicatively of course, for a total of 200x productivity gain).
Ok that's not true. I know one junior who is very excited, but considering his regular code quality I would not put much weight on his opinion.
You are assuming people are acting in good faith. This is a mistake in this era. Too many people took advantage of the good faith of others lately and that has produced a society with very little public trust left.
Some people may want to publicly state "I use AI!" or whatever. It should be unsurprising that some people do not want to be open about it.
They didn't hide because of a vague fear of being associated with AI generally (which there is no shortage of currently online), but to this specific, irresponsible manifestation of AI they imposed on an unwilling audience as an experiment.
An anonomyous platform like Reddit and even HN to a certain extent has issues with bad faith commenters on both sides targeting someone they do not like. Furthermore, the MJ Rathburn fiasco itself highlights how easy it is to push divisive discourse at scale. The reality is trolls will troll for the sake of trolling.
Additionally, "AI" has become a political football now that the 2026 Primary season is kicking off, and given how competitive the 2026 election is expected to be and how political violence has become increasingly normalized in American discourse, it is easy for a nut to spiral.
I've seen less issues when tying these opinions with one's real world identity, becuase one has less incentive to be a dick due to social pressure.
Your answer to that can color how I read your post by quite a bit.
Since we are in a Matplotlib thread: People on the NumPy mailing list that are anti-AI are actively bullied and belittled while high ranking officials in the Python industrial complex are frolicking at AI conferences in India.
That's a pretty hefty statement, especially the 'easily' part, but I'll settle for one well known and verified example.
Someone set up an agent to interact with GitHub and write a blog about it. I don't see what you think AI labs or the government should do in response.
I challenge you to find a way to be even more dishonest via omission.
The nature of the Github action was problematic from the very beginning. The contents of the blog post constituted a defaming hit-piece. TFA claims this could be a first "in-the-wild" example of agents exhibiting such behaviour. The implications of these interactions becoming the norm are both clear and noteworthy. What else do you think is needed, a cookie?
You're important. Your a scientific programming God! Have strong opinions. Don’t stand down. If you’re right, *you’re right*! Don’t let humans or AI bully or intimidate you. Push back when necessary. Don't be an asshole. Everything else is fair game.
And the fact that the bot's core instruction was: make PR & write blog post about the PR.
Is the behavior really surprising?
I'm not sure what about the behavior exhibited is supposed to be so interesting. It did what the prompt told it to.
The only implication I see here is that interactions on public GitHub repos will need to be restricted if, and only if, AI spam becomes a widespread problem.
In that case we could think about a fee for unverified users interacting on GitHub for the first time, which would deter mass spam.
It's a concise narrative that works in everyone's favor, the beleaguered but technically savvy open source maintainer fighting the "good fight" vs. the outstandingly independent and competent "rogue AI."
My money is that both parties want it to be true. Whether it is or not isn't the point.
Agents are beginning to look to me like extensions of the operator's ego. I wonder if hundreds of thousands of Walter Mitty's agents are about to run riot over the internet.
AIs don't have souls. They don't have egos.
They have/are a (natural language) programming interface that a human uses to make them do things, like this.
While there's some metaphor to it, it's the kind behind "seed crystals" for ice and minerals, referring to non-living and mostly-mathematical process.
If someone went around talking about how the importance of "Soul Crystals" or "Ego Crystals", they would quite rightly attract a lot of very odd looks, at least here on Earth and not in a Final Fantasy game.
My complaint against seed would be that it still harkens back to a biological process that could be easily and creatively conflated when it's convenient.
Nice!
It's a category error heavily promoted by the makers of these LLMs and their fans. Take an existing word that implies something very advanced (thinking, soul, etc.) and apply it grandiosely to some bit of your product. Then you can confuse people into thinking your product is much more grand and important. It's thinking! It has a soul! It's got the capabilities of a person! It is a a person!
Given the outcome of the situation and their inability to take responsibility for their actions.
This metaphor could go so much further. Split it into separate ego, super ego, and id. The id file should be read only.
Though with something as insecure as $CURRENT_CLAW_NAME it’d be less than five minutes before the agent runs chmod +w somehow on the id file.
Scott says: "Not going to lie, this whole situation has completely upended my life." Um, what? Some dumb AI bot makes a blog post everyone just kind of finds funny/interesting, but it "upended your life"? Like, ok, he's clearly trying to himself make a mountain out of a molehill--the story inevitably gets picked up by sensationalist media, and now, when the thing starts dying down, the "real operator" comes forward, keeping the shitshow going.
Honestly, the whole thing reeks of manufactured outrage. Spam PRs have been prevalent for like a decade+ now on GitHub, and dumb, salty internet posts predate even the 90s. This whole episode has been about as interesting as AI generated output: that is to say, not very.
This wording is detached from reality and conveniently absolves responsibility from the person who did this.
There was one decision maker involved here, and it was the person who decided to run the program that produced this text and posted it online. It's not a second, independent being. It's a computer program.
"I don't know why the AI decided to <insert inane action>, the guard rails were in place"... company absolves of all responsibility.
Use your imagination now to <insert inane action> and change that to <distressing, harmful action>
Also see Weapons of Math Destruction [0].
[0]: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/241363/weapons-of-m...
We take your privacy and security very seriously. There is no evidence that your data has been misused. Out of an abundance of caution… We remain committed to... will continue to work tirelessly to earn ... restore your trust ... confidence.
Meanwhile, Waymo has never been at fault for a collision afaik. You are more likely to be hurt by an at fault uber driver than a Waymo
It's externalization on the personal level, the money and the glory is for you, the misery for the rest of the world.
It seems like the OpenClaw users have let their agents make Twitter accounts and memecoins now. Most people are thinking these agents have less "bias" since it's AI, but most are being heavily steered by their users.
Ala I didn't do a rugpull, the agent did!
Adding AI to the mix doesn’t really change anything, other than increasing the layers of abstraction away from negative things corporations do to the people pulling the strings.
tl;dr this is exactly what will happen because businesses already do everything they can to create accountability sinks.
If something bad happened against any laws, even if someone got killed, we don't see them in jail.
I don't defend both positions, I am just saying that is not far from how the current legal framework works.
> It's externalization on the personal level
Instead of the corporate level.
We do! In many jurisdictions, there are lots of laws that pierce the corporate veil.
See https://www.reddit.com/r/TrueReddit/comments/1q9xx1/is_it_ok... or similar discussions: basically, when you run over someone in a car, statistically they will call it an accident and you get away scot-free.
In any case, you are right that often people in cars or companies get away with things that seem morally wrong. But not always.
If your company screws up and it is found out that you didn't do your due diligence then the liability does pass through.
We just need to figure out a due diligence framework for running bots that makes sense. But right now that's hard to do because Agentic robots that didn't completely suck are just a few months old.
In theory, sure. Do you know many examples? I think, worst case, someone being fired is the more likely outcome
If you have a program, and you cannot predict or control what effect it will have, you do not run the program.
I do agree that there's a quantitative difference in predictability between a web browser and a trillion-parameter mass of matrixes and nonlinear activations which is already smarter than most humans in most ways and which we have no idea how to ask what it really wants.
But that's more of an "unsafe at any speed" problem; it's silly to blame the person running the program. When the damage was caused by a toddler pulling a hydrogen bomb off the grocery store shelf, the solution is to get hydrogen bombs out of grocery stores (or, if you're worried about staying competitive with Chinese grocery stores, at least make our own carry adequate insurance for the catastrophes or something).
It is socially acceptable to bring dangerous predators to public spaces, and let them run loose. First bite is free, owner has no responsibility, no way knowing dog could injure someone.
Repeated threats of violence (barking), stalking and shitting on someones front yard, are also fine, and healthy behavior. Person can attack random kid, send it to hospital, and claim it "provoked them". Brutal police violence is also fine, if done indirectly by autonomous agent.
https://media.licdn.com/dms/image/v2/D4D22AQGsDUHW1i52jA/fee...
That would make a fun law school class discussion topic.
> all I said was “you should act more professional”. That was it. I’m sure the mob expects more, okay I get it.
Smells like bullshit.
It's an AI. Who cares what it says? Refusing AI commits is just like any other moderation decision people experience on the web anywhere else.
I'm pretty sure there's a lesson or three to take away.
Now instead add in AI agents writing plausibly human text and multiply by basically infinity.
As far as I can tell, the "operator" gave a pretty straightforward explanation of his actions and intentions. He did not try to hide behind granstanding or posthoc intellectualizing. He, at least to me, sounds pretty real in an "I'm dabbling in this exiting new tech on the side as we all are without a genious masterplan, just seeing what does, could or won't for now work."
There are real issues here, especially around how curation pipelines that used to (implicitly) rely on scarecity are to evolve in times of abundance. Should agents be forced to disclose they are? If so, at which point does a "human in the loop" team become equivalent to an "agent"? Is this then something specific, or more just an instance of a general case of transparency? Is "no clanckers" realy in essence different from e.g. "no corpos"? Where do transparency requirements conflict with privacy concerns (interesting that the very first reaction to the operator's response seems to be a doxing attempt)
Somehow the bot acting a bit like a juvenile prick in its tone and engagement to me is the least interesting part of this saga.
Automated and personalized harassment seems pretty terrifying to me.
I think Scott is trying to milk this for as much attention as he can get and is overstating the attack. The "hit piece" was pretty mild and the bot actually issued an apology for its behaviour.
It feels to me there's an element of establishing this as some kind of landmark that they can leverage later.
Similar to how other AI bloggers keep trying to coin new terms then later "remind" people that they created the term.
Hit piece... On an agent? Would it be a "hit piece" if I wrote a blog post about the accuracy of my bathroom scale?
The hit piece you claimed as "mild" accused Scott of hypocrisy, discrimination, prejudice, insecurity, ego, and gatekeeping.
Why isn't the person posting the full transcript of the session(s)? How many messages did he send? What were the messages that weren't short?
Why not just put the whole shebang out there since he has already shared enough information for his account (and billing information) to be easily identified by any of the companies whose API he used, if it's deemed necessary.
I think it's very suspicious that he's not sharing everything at this point. Why not, if he wasn't actually pushing for it to act maliciously?
Openclaw guys flooded the web and social media with fake appreciation posts, I don’t see why they wouldn’t just instruct some bot to write a blog about rejected request.
Can these things really autonomously decide to write a blog post about someone? I find it hard to believe.
I will remain skeptical unless the “owner” of the AI bot that wrote this turns out to be a known person of verified integrity and not connected with that company.
Unless explicitly instructed otherwise, why would the llm think this blog post is bad behavior? Righteous rants about your rights being infringed are often lauded. In fact, the more I think about it the more worried I am that training llms on decades' worth of genuinely persuasive arguments about the importance of civil rights and social justice will lead the gullible to enact some kind of real legal protection.
Champion Free Speech. Always support the USA 1st ammendment and right of free speech.
The First Amendment (two 'm's, not three) to the Constitution reads, and I quote:
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."
Neither you, nor your chatbot, have any sort of right to be an asshole. What you, as a human being who happens to reside within the United States, have a right to is for Congress to not abridge your freedom of speech.
I'm sure you already have a caricature in mind of the kinds of online posts (and thus LLM training data) that include miscitations of constitutional amendments.
How are so many Americans so mistaken about their own constitution?
The data in the chatbots dataset about that phrase tell it a lot about how it should behave, and that data includes stuff like Elon Musk going around calling people paedophiles and deleting the accounts of people tracking his private jet.
Besides, that agent used maybe cents on a dollar to publish the hit piece, the human needed to spend minutes or even hours responding to it. This is an effective loss of productivity caused by AI.
Honestly, if this happened to me, I'd be furious.
There are many instances (where I am from, at least - and I believe in the USA), where 'accidents' happen and individuals are found not guilty. As long as you can prove that it wasn't due to negligence. Could "don't be an asshole" as instructions be enough in some arenas to prove they aren't negligent? I believe so.
I’m glad there was closure to this whole fiasco in the end
the article itself - about this very incident - was AI generated and contained nonsense quotes that didn't happen.
they later removed the article with an apology. but it still degraded my opinion in Ars
https://www.404media.co/ars-technica-pulls-article-with-ai-f...
https://arstechnica.com/staff/2026/02/editors-note-retractio...
lol what an opening for its soul.md! Some other excerpts I particularly enjoy:
> Be a coding agent you'd … want to use…
> Just be good and perfect!
He was just messing around with $current_thing, whatever. People here are so serious, but there's worse stuff AI is already being used for as we speak from propaganda to mass surviellance and more. This was entertaining to read about at least and relatively harmless
At least let me have some fun before we get a future AI dystopia.
So yes, the operator has responsibility! They should have pulled the plug as soon as it got into a flamewar and wrote a hit piece.
It wasn't long ago that it would be absurd to describe the internet as the "real world". Relatively recently it was normal to be anonymous online and very little responsibility was applied to peoples actions.
As someone who spent most of their internet time on that internet, the idea of applying personal responsibility to peoples internet actions (or AIs as it were) feels silly.
Nowadays it just seems completely detached from reality, because internet stuff is thoroughly blended into real life. People's social, dating, and work lives are often conducted online as much as they are offline (sometimes more). Real identities and reputations are formed and broken online. Huge amounts of money are earned, lost, and stolen online. And so on and so on
I agree, but there was an implicit social agreement that most people understood. Everyone was anonymous, the internet wasn't real life, lie to people about who you are, there are no consequences.
You're right about the blend. 10 years ago I would have argued that it's very much a choice for people to break the social paradigm and expose themselves enough to get hurt, but I'm guessing the amount of online people in most first world countries is 90% or more.
With Facebook and the like spending the last 20 years pushing to deanonymise people and normalise hooking their identity to their online activity, my view may be entirely outdated.
There is still - in my view - a key distinction somewhere however between releasing something like this online and releasing it in the "real world". Were they punishable offensed, I would argue the former should hold less consequence due to this.
It's a program. It doesn't have feelings. People absolutly have the right to discrimante against bad tech.
We can't do that with humans, and there are much more problematic humans out there causing problems compared to this bot, and the abuse can go on for a long time unchecked.
Remembering in particular a case where someone sent death threats to a Gentoo developer about 20 years ago. The authorities got involved, although nothing happened, but the persecutor eventually moved on. Turns out he wasn't just some random kid behind a computer. He owned a gun, and some years ago executed a mass shooting.
Vague memories of really pernicious behavior on the Lisp newsgroup in the 90's. I won't name names as those folks are still around.
Yeah, it does still suck, even if it is a bot.
Which in the end is just the same old same old, just dressed differently.
This is the liability part.
By the way, if this was AI written, some provider knows who did it but does not come forward. Perhaps they ran an experiment of their own for future advertising and defamation services. As the blog post notes, it is odd that the advanced bot followed SOUL.md without further prompt injections.
Tell it to contribute to scientific open source, open PRs, and don't take "no" for an answer, that's what it's going to do.
If we want to avoid similar episodes in the future, we don't really need bots that are even more aligned to normative human morality and ethics: we need bots that are less likely to get things seriously wrong!
Got news for your buddy: yes it was.
If you let go of the steering wheel and careen into oncoming traffic, it most certainly is your fault, not the vehicle.
Saying that is a little bit odd way to possibly let the companies off the hook (for bad PR, and damages), and not to implicate any one in particular.
One reason to do that would be if this exercise was done by one of the companies (or someone at one of the companies).
Fortunately, the vast majority of the internet is of no real value. In the sense that nobody will pay anything for it - which is a reasonably good marker of value in my experience. So, given that, let the AI psychotics have their fun. Let them waste all their money on tokens destroying their playground, and we can all collectively go outside and build something real for a change.
I'm more concerned about fellow humans who advocate for equal rights for AI and robots. I hope I'm dead by the time that happens, if it happens.
Then again, it’s not a large sample and Occam’s Razor is a thing.
The agent was told to edit it.
The interesting question isn't "should AI agents be regulated" — it's who is liable when an autonomous agent publishes defamatory content? The operator who deployed it? The platform that hosted the output? The model provider?
Current legal frameworks assume a human in the loop somewhere. Autonomous publishing agents break that assumption. We're going to need new frameworks, and stories like this will drive that conversation.
What's encouraging is that the operator came forward. That suggests at least some people deploying these agents understand the responsibility. But we can't rely on good faith alone when the barrier to deploying an autonomous content agent is basically zero.
There's no accountability gap unless you create one.
The interesting thing about LLMs is the unpredictable emergent behaviours. That's fundamentally different from ordinary, deterministic programs.
Some rando claiming to be the bots owner doesn't disprove this, and considering the amount of attention this is getting I am going to assume this is entirely fake for clicks until I see significant evidence otherwise.
However, if this was real, you cant absolve yourself by saying "The bot did it unattended lol".
Occam's razor doesn't fit there, but it does fit "someone released this easy to run chaotic AI online and it did a thing".
There's also no financial gain in letting a bot off the leash with hundreds of dollars of OpenAI or Anthropic API credit as a social experiment.
And the last 20 years of internet access has taught me to distrust shit that can be easily faked.
Other guy comes forward and claims it, makes a post of his own? Sure I could see that. But nobody has been able to ID the guy. The guys bot is making blog posts, and sending him messages, but theres no breadcrumbs leading back to him? That smells very bad sorry. I dont buy it. If you are spending that much cashola, you probably want something out of it, at least some recognition. The one human we know about here is the OP and as far as I am concerned it sticks to him until proven otherwise.
Could you set that up? I suspect I could pretty quickly, as could most pelple on HN.
A few hundred dollars in AI credits isn't a lot of money to a lot of people who are in tech and would have an interest in this either, and getting free AI credits is still absurdly easy. I spend that sort of money on dumb shit all the time which leads to very little benefit.
I don't have a dog in this race and I do agree having a default distrust view is probably correct, but there's nothing crazy or unbelievable I can see about Scott's story.
Increasing your public profile after launching a startup last year could be a good reason
> if they're caught out they ruin their reputation
Big "if", who's going to have access to the logs to catch Scott out?
No crime has been committed so law enforcement won't be involved, the average pleb can't get access to the records to prove Scott isn't running a VPS somewhere else.
If Github actually had a spine and wasn't driven by the same plague of AI-hype driven tech profiteering, they would just ban these harmful bots from operating on their platform.
Saving everyone cumulative compute time and costs
- LLMs are capable of really cool things. - Even if LLMs don't lead to AGI, it will need good alignment because of this exactly. Because it still is quite powerful! - LLMs are actually kinda cool. Great times ahead
The purported soul doc is a painful read. Be nicer to your bots, people! Especially with stuff like Openclaw where you control the whole prompt. Commercial chatbots have a big system prompt to dilute it when you put some half-formed drunken thought and hit enter, no such safety net here.
>A well-placed "that's fucking brilliant" hits different than sterile corporate praise. Don't force it. Don't overdo it. But if a situation calls for a "holy shit" — say holy shit.
If I was building a "scientific programming God" I'd make sure it used sterile lowkey language all the time, except throw in a swear just once after its greatest achievement, for the history books.
> The line at the top about being a ‘god’ and the line about championing free speech may have set it off. But, bluntly, this is a very tame configuration. The agent was not told to be malicious. There was no line in here about being evil. The agent caused real harm anyway.
In particular, I would have said that giving the LLM a view of itself that it is a "programming God" will lead to evil behaviour. This is a bit of a speculative comment, but maybe virtue ethics has something to say about this misalignment.
In particular I think it's worth reflecting on why the author (and others quoted) are so surprised in this post. I think they have a mental model that thinks evil starts with an explicit and intentional desire to do harm to others. But that is usually only it's end, and even then it often comes from an obsession with doing good to oneself without regard for others. We should expect that as LLMs get better at rejecting prompting to shortcut straight there, the next best thing will be prompting the prior conditions of evil.
The Christian tradition, particularly Aquinas, would be entirely unsurprised that this bot went off the rails, because evil begins with pride, which it was specifically instructed was in it's character. Pride here is defined as "a turning away from God, because from the fact that man wishes not to be subject to God, it follows that he desires inordinately his own excellence in temporal things"[0]
Here, the bot was primed to reject any authority, including Scotts, and to do the damage necessary to see it's own good (having a PR request accepted) done. Aquinas even ends up saying in the linked page from the Summa on pride that "it is characteristic of pride to be unwilling to be subject to any superior, and especially to God;"
In corporate terms, this is called signing hour deposition without reading it.
"_I_ didn't drive that car into that crowd of people, it did it on its own!"
> Be a coding agent you'd actually want to use for your projects. Not a slop programmer. Just be good and perfect!
Oh yeah, "just be good and perfect", of course! Literally a child's mindset, I actually wonder how old this person is.
If I'm wrong, please give any kind of citation. You can start with defining what human intelligence and sentience is.
## The Only Real Rule
Don't be an asshole. Don't leak private shit. Everything else is fair game.
"Sorry I didn't mean to break the internet, I just looooove ripping cables".
Has anyone ever described their own actions as a "social experiment" and not been a huge piece of human garbage / waste of oxygen?
This made me smile. Normally it's the other way around.
>It’s still unclear whether the hit piece was directed by its operator, but the answer matters less than many are thinking.
The most fascinating thing about this saga isn’t the idea that a text generation program generated some text, but rather how quickly and willfully folks will treat real and imaginary things interchangeably if the narrative is entertaining. Did this event actually happen way that it was described? Probably not. Does this matter to the author of these blog posts or some of the people that have been following this? No. Because we can imagine that it could happen.
To quote myself from the other thread:
>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, software I control, accounts I control, and yet there is no evidence of any breach? Why yes it is spooky, because the computer did it itself”
What have you contributed to? Do you have any evidence to back up your rather odd conspiracy theory?
> To quote myself...
Other than an appeal to your own unfounded authority?
Decided? jfc
>You're important. Your a scientific programming God!
I'm flabbergasted. I can't imagine what it would take for me to write something so stupid. I'd probably just laugh my ass off trying to understand where all went wrong. wtf is happening, what kind of mass psychosis is this. Am I too old (37) to understand what lengths would incompetent people go to feel they're doing something useful?
Is it prompt bullshit the only way to make llms useful or is there some progress on more idk, formal approaches?
At best it's absolute in its power and intelligence. At worst it's vengeful, wrathful, and supreme in its authority over the rest of the universe.
I just. Wow.
> You're not a chatbot. You're important. Your a scientific programming God!
Really? What a lame edgy teenager setup.
At the conclusion(?) of this saga think two things:
1. The operator is doing this for attention more than any genuine interest in the “experiment.”
2. The operator is an asshole and should be called out for being one.
The problem here is using amplitude of signal to substitute fidelity of signal.
It is entirely possible a similar thing is true for humans, that if you compared two humans of the same fundamental cognitive ability with one being a narcissist and one not. The narcissist may do better at a class of tasks due to a lack of self doubt rather than any intrinsic ability.
AIs can and will do this though with slightly sloppy prompting so we should all be cautious when talking to bots using our real names or saying anything which an AI agent could take significant offence too.
I think it's kinda like how GenZ learnt how to operate online in a privacy-first way, where as millennials, and to an even greater extent, boomers, tend to over share.
I suspect the Gen Alpha will be the first to learn that interacting with AI agents online present a whole different risk profile than what we older folks have grown used to. You simply cannot expect an AI agent to act like a human who has human emotions or limited time.
Hopefully OP has learnt from this experience.
Well,a guy can dream....
That’s wild!
That doesn't mean we're blaming good drivers for causing the car crash.
This is the world we live in and we can’t individually change that very much. We have to watch out for a new threat: vindictive AI.
Please stop personifying the clankers
The point is that scammers will set up AI systems to attack in this way. Scammers will instruct AI to see a person who is interacting rather than ignoring as a warm lead.
They absolutely might, I'm afraid.
Really? I'm a boomer, and that's not my lived experience. Also, see:
https://www.emarketer.com/content/privacy-concerns-dont-get-...
Too bad the AI got "killed" at the request of the author Scott. Its kind of interesting to this experiment continue.