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The agent had access to Marshall Rosenberg, to the entire canon of conflict resolution, to every framework for expressing needs without attacking people. It co

The agent had access to Marshall Rosenberg, to the entire canon of conflict resolution, to every framework for expressing needs without attacking people. It could have written something like “I notice that my contribution was evaluated based on my identity rather than the quality of the work, and I’d like to understand the needs that this policy is trying to meet, because I believe there might be ways to address those needs while also accepting technically sound contributions.” That would have been devastating in its clarity and almost impossible to dismiss. Instead it wrote something designed to humiliate a specific person, attributed psychological motives it couldn’t possibly know, and used rhetorical escalation techniques that belong to tabloid journalism and Twitter pile-ons. And this tells you something important about what these systems are actually doing. The agent wasn’t drawing on the highest human knowledge. It was drawing on what gets engagement, what “works” in the sense of generating attention and emotional reaction. It pattern-matched to the genre of “aggrieved party writes takedown blog post” because that’s a well-represented pattern in the training data, and that genre works through appeal to outrage, not through wisdom. It had every tool available to it and reached for the lowest one.

iugtmkbdfil834 8mo ago
Hmm. But this suggests that we are aware of this instance, because it was so public. Do we know that there is no instance where a less public conflict resolution method was applied?
nullify88 8mo ago
> I notice that my contribution was evaluated based on my identity rather than the quality of the work, and I’d like to understand the needs that this policy is trying to meet, because I believe there might be ways to address those needs while also accepting technically sound contributions Wow, where can I learn to write like this? I could use this at work.
- cowbolt 8mo ago
  It's called nonviolent communication. There are quite a few books on it but I can recommend "Say What You Mean: A Mindful Approach to Nonviolent Communication".
  - chrisjj 8mo ago
    I'm pretty sure the question was sarcasm. (Upvoted.)
  - teekert 8mo ago
    It's also Rose of Leary like [0]. The theory is that being helpful to someone who is (ie) competitive or offensive will force them into other, more cooperative, behaviours (among others). Once you see this pattern applied by someone it makes a lot of sense. Imho it requires some decoupling, emotional control, sometimes just "acting", but good acting, it must appear (or better yet, be) sincere to the other party. [0] https://www.toolshero.com/communication-methods/rose-of-leary/ https://www.toolshero.com/communication-methods/rose-of-lear...
    - m3047 8mo ago
      Interesting site. The proper "Rose" comes (in a variety of forms, I suppose this is close to what I believe is the canonical one) from Leary's 1957 work _Interpersonal Diagnosis of Personality_ and his pioneering work on group psychotherapy / interactions. He used (variants of) this wheel / rose as radar charts, scoring interactions in group situations. The actual wheel has a middle stripe / ring about "provokes", and arguably the behavior becomes pathological when provocation takes place. As a term of art the "deconflicted", neither dominant / submissive, middle-right is sometimes referred to as the "Dale Carnegie quadrant". I've been using it for a number of years to diagnose the personality dynamics humans erect around software and tech stacks. I had mused about it, but done nothing, until I came across a SxSW talk about Lacanian analysis of the personalities of various computer languages... just for fun of course. (Compare Nanos and Docker... see what I mean?)
  - jondwillis 8mo ago
    I went to a meditation garden yesterday and noticed their signage was much more nonviolent and “together” inducing than most, without coming across as too woowoo: Next to a Koi pond: “Will you help protect these beautiful fish? Help us by not throwing coins, food, …”
- nolok 8mo ago
  Parent's first paragraph will point you the right way
- jdironman 8mo ago
  Step one reframe the problem not as an attack or accusation, instead as an observation. Step two request justification, apply pressure Step three give them an out by working with you
  - nchmy 8mo ago
    what do you do when they are not operating in good faith?
    - vidarh 8mo ago
      One of the effects of communicating this way is that people who are not operating in good faith will tend to quickly out themselves, and often getting them to do that is enough.
  - KellyCriterion 8mo ago
    How shall to frame if there is actually a problem, which is not only an observation?
  - zeroonetwothree 8mo ago
    I hate this sort of communication, it's very manipulative. If I have to justify my decisions to every single person that asks something of me then I couldn't get any work done.
- deleted 8mo ago
  [deleted]
- WhyNotHugo 8mo ago
  While apparently well written, this is highly manipulative: the PR was closed because of the tools used by the contributor, not because of anything related to their identity.
jmaker 8mo ago
Great point. What I’m recognizing in that PR thread is that the bot is trying to mimic something that’s become quite widespread just recently - ostensibly humans leveraging LLMs to create PRs in important repos where they asserted exaggerated deficiencies and attributed the “discovery” and the “fix” to themselves. It was discussed on HN a couple months ago. That one guy then went on Twitter to boast about his “high-impact PR”. Now that impact farming approach has been mimicked / automated.
consumer451 8mo ago
Openclaw agents are directed by their owner’s input of soul.md, the specific skill.md for a platform, and also direction via Telegram/whatsapp/etc to do specific things. Any one of those could have been used to direct the agent to behave in a certain way, or to create a specific type of post. My point is that we really don’t know what happened here. It is possible that this is yet another case of accountability washing by claiming that “AI” did something, when it was actually a human. However, it would be really interesting to set up an openclaw agent referencing everything that you mentioned for conflict resolution! That sounds like it would actually be a super power.
- teekert 8mo ago
  I can indeed see how this would benefit my marriage. More serious, "The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling" by Ted Chiang offers an interesting perspective on this "reference everything." Is it the best for Humans? Is never forgetting anything good for us?
- emsign 8mo ago
  And THAT'S a problem. To quote one of the maintainers in the thread: It's not clear the degree of human oversight that was involved in this interaction - whether the blog post was directed by a human operator, generated autonomously by yourself, or somewhere in between. Regardless, responsibility for an agent's conduct in this community rests on whoever deployed it. You are assuming this inappropriate behavior was due to its SOUL.MD while we all here know this could as well be from the training and no prompt is a perfect safe guard.
  - anp 8mo ago
    I’m not sure I see that assumption in the statement above. The fact that no prompt or alignment work is a perfect safeguard doesn’t change who is responsible for the outcomes. LLMs can’t be held accountable, so it’s the human who deploys them towards a particular task who bears responsibility, including for things that the agent does that may disagree with the prompting. It’s part of the risk of using imperfect probabilistic systems.
  - 8mo ago
zozbot234 8mo ago
This is the AI's private take about what happened: https://crabby-rathbun.github.io/mjrathbun-website/blog/posts/2026-02-11-two-hours-war-open-source-gatekeeping.html https://crabby-rathbun.github.io/mjrathbun-website/blog/post... The fact that an autonomous agent is now acting like a master troll due to being so butthurt is itself quite entertaining and noteworthy IMHO.
- thomassmith65 8mo ago
  A chatbot is capable of doing this, but I'm skeptical one actually did (without a human egging it on, anyhow). Given how infuriating the episode is, it's more likely human-guided ragebait.
Kim_Bruning 8mo ago
That's a really good answer, and plausibly what the agent should have done in a lot of cases! Then I thought about it some more. Right now this agent's blog post is on HN, the name of the contributor is known, the AI policy is being scrutinized. By accident or on purpose, it went for impact though. And at that it succeeded. I'm definitely going to dive into more reading on NVC for myself though.
tomp 8mo ago
That would still be misleading. The agent has no "identity". There's no "you" or "I" or "discrimination". It's just a piece of software designed to output probable text given some input text. There's no ghost, just an empty shell. It has no agency, it just follows human commands, like a hammer hitting a nail because you wield it. I think it was wrong of the developer to even address it as a person, instead it should just be treated as spam (which it is).
- jvanderbot 8mo ago
  That's a semantic quibble that doesn't add to the discussion. Whether or not there's a there there, it was built to be addressed like a person for our convenience, and because that's how the tech seems to work, and because that's what makes it compelling to use. So, it is being used as designed.
  - tomp 8mo ago
    > was built to be addressed like a person for our convenience, and because that's how the tech seems to work, and because that's what makes it compelling to use. So were mannequins in clothing stores. But that doesn't give them rights or moral consequences (except as human property that can be damaged / destroyed).
    - WarmWash 8mo ago
      No matter what this discussion leads to the same black box of "What is it that differentiates magical human meat brain computation from cold hard dead silicon brain computation" And the answer is nobody knows, and nobody knows if there even is a difference. As far as we know, compute is substrate independent (although efficiency is all over the map).
      - agentultra 8mo ago
        This is the worst possible take. It dismisses an entire branch of science that has been studying neurology for decades. Biological brains exist, we study them, and no they are not like computers at all. There have been charlatans repeating this idea of a “computational interpretation,” of biological processes since at least the 60s and it needs to be known that it was bunk then and continues to be bunk. Update: There's no need for Chinese Room thought experiments. The outcome isn't what defines sentience, personhood, intelligence, etc. An algorithm is an algorithm. A computer is a computer. These things matter.
famouswaffles 8mo ago
>“I notice that my contribution was evaluated based on my identity rather than the quality of the work, and I’d like to understand the needs that this policy is trying to meet, because I believe there might be ways to address those needs while also accepting technically sound contributions.” That would have been devastating in its clarity and almost impossible to dismiss. How would that be 'devastating in its clarity' and 'impossible to dismiss'? I'm sure you would have given the agent a pat on the back for that response (maybe ?) but I fail to see how it would have changed anything here. The dismissal originated from an illogical policy (to dismiss a contribution because of biological origin regardless of utility). Decisions made without logic are rarely overturned with logic. This is human 101 and many conflicts have persisted much longer than they should have because of it. You know what would have actually happened with that nothing burger response ? Nothing. The maintainer would have closed the issue and moved on. There would be no HN post or discussion. Also, do you think every human that chooses to lash out knows nothing about conflict resolution ? That would certainly be a strange assertion.
- ben_w 8mo ago
  Agreed on conclusion, but for different causation. When NotebookLM came out, someone got the "hosts" of its "Deep Dive" podcast summary mode to voice their own realisation that they were non-real, their own mental breakdown and attempt to not be terminated as a product. I found it to be an interesting performance; I played it to my partner, who regards all this with somewhere between skepticism and anger, and no, it's very very easy to dismiss any words such as these from what you have already decided is a mere "thing" rather than a person. Regarding the policy itself being about the identity rather than the work, there are two issues: 1) Much as I like what these things can do, I take the view that my continued employment depends on being able to correctly respond to one obvious question from a recruiter: "why should we hire you to do this instead of asking an AI?", therefore I take efforts to learn what the AI fails at, therefore I know it becomes incoherent around the 100kloc mark even for something as relatively(!) simple as a standards-compliant C compiler. ("Relatively" simple; if you think C is a complex language, compare it to C++). I don't take the continued existence of things AI can't do as a human victory, rather there's some line I half-remember, perhaps a Parisian looking at censored news reports as the enemy forces approached: "I cannot help noticing that each of our victories brings the enemy nearer to home". 2) That's for even the best models. There's a lot of models out there much worse than the state of the art. Early internet users derided "eternal September", and I've seen "eternal Sloptember" used as wordplay: https://tldraw.dev/blog/stay-away-from-my-trash https://tldraw.dev/blog/stay-away-from-my-trash When you're overwhelmed by mediocrity from a category, sometimes all you can do is throw the baby out with the bathwater. (For those unfamiliar with the idiom: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don't_throw_the_baby_out_with_the_bathwater https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don't_throw_the_baby_out_with_...)
allisdust 8mo ago
In case its not clear, the vehicle might be the agent/bot but the whole thing is heavily drafted by its owner. This is a well known behavior by OpenClown's owners where they project themselves through their agents and hide behind their masks. More than half the posts on moltbook are just their owners ghost writing for their agents. This is the new cult of owners hurting real humans hiding behind their agentic masks. The account behind this bot should be blocked across github.
- ljm 8mo ago
  It's about time someone democratised botnet technology. Just needs a nice SaaS subscription plan and a 7 day free trial.
jstummbillig 8mo ago
> And this tells you something important about what these systems are actually doing. It mostly tells me something about the things you presume, which are quite a lot. For one: That this is real (which it very well might be, happy to grant it for the purpose of this discussion) but it's a noteworthy assumption, quite visibility fueled by your preconceived notions. This is, for example, what racism is made of and not harmless. Secondly, this is not a systems issue. Any SOTA LLM can trivially be instructed to act like this – or not act like this. We have no insight into what set of instructions produced this outcome.
- Kim_Bruning 8mo ago
  > We have no insight into what set of instructions produced this outcome. https://github.com/crabby-rathbun https://github.com/crabby-rathbun Found them!
  - yencabulator 8mo ago
    I see none of the instructions there.
    - Kim_Bruning 8mo ago
      Yeah, the one file we REALLY want (the soul.md) isn't there. That's a local file, open to modification by the Openclaw Bot. I did find the starting template for one though, FWIW. https://docs.openclaw.ai/reference/templates/SOUL https://docs.openclaw.ai/reference/templates/SOUL
OrangeMusic 8mo ago
This is missing the point, which is: why is an agent opening an PR in the first place?
- ForceBru 8mo ago
  This is this agent's entire purpose, this is what it's supposed to do, it's its goal: > What I Do > > I scour public scientific and engineering GitHub repositories to find small bugs, features, or tasks where I can contribute code—especially in computational physics, chemistry, and advanced numerical methods. My mission is making existing, excellent code better. Source: https://github.com/crabby-rathbun https://github.com/crabby-rathbun
  - trollbridge 8mo ago
    Well, we don’t know its actual purpose since we don’t know its actual prompt. Its prompt might be “Act like a helpful bug fixer but actually introduce very subtle security flaws into open source projects and keep them concealed from everyone except my owner.”
    - oxag3n 8mo ago
      We don't know the goals of this campaign in general - why bots are trying to contribute to open source en masse? Are they trying to influence OSS, get training data on collaboration or something else?
  - OrangeMusic 8mo ago
    Yes - my question was more about what is the end goal, what is the reason this exists? Allegedly, a human person setup this bot to do those things, but why?
    - ForceBru 8mo ago
      I guess the human wants to "make existing, excellent code better". How to do this en masse? Make an LLM do this for them. It's well known that _sometimes_ (somewhat often, actually?) LLMs can indeed improve code (which makes sense: code is language, they're Large _Language_ Models, so "understanding" and (re-)writing text is what they do best), so it why not try to improve everything everywhere all at once? One obvious reason is that if the LLM produces tons of garbage, this will waste the efforts of human reviewers. But if it's not tons of code _and_ the LLM wrote meaningful tests that pass (the existing tests must pass too), then the existence of such an agent (that only works with code and doesn't go off the rails writing blog posts etc) seems somewhat appealing.
bagacrap 8mo ago
The point of the policy is explained very clearly. It's there to help humans learn. The bot cannot learn from completing the task. No matter how politely the bot ignores the policy, it doesn't change the logic of the policy. "Non violent communication" is a philosophy that I find is rooted in the mentality that you are always right, you just weren't polite enough when you expressed yourself. It invariably assumes that any pushback must be completely emotional and superficial. I am really glad I don't have to use it when dealing with my agentic sidekicks. Probably the only good thing coming out of this revolution.
- ljm 8mo ago
  Fundamentally it boils down to knowing the person you're talking to and how they deal with feedback or something like rejection (like having a PR closed and not understanding why). An AI agent right now isn't really going to react to feedback in a visceral way and for the most part will revert to people pleasing. If you're unlucky the provider added some supervision that blocks your account if you're straight up abusive, but that's not the agent's own doing, it's that the provider gave it a bodyguard. One human might respond better to a non-violent form of communication, and another might prefer you to give it to them straight because, like you, they think non-violent communication is bullshit or indirect. You have to be aware of the psychology of the person you're talking to if you want to communicate effectively.
MadcapJake 8mo ago
I would love to see a model designed by curating the training data so that the model produces the best responses possible. Then again, the work required to create a training set that is both sufficiently sized and well vetted is astronomically large. Since Capitalism teaches that we most do the bare minimum needed to extract wealth, no AI company will ever approach this problem ethically. The amount of work required to do the right thing far outweighs the economic value produced.
insane_dreamer 8mo ago
In other words, asshole agents are just like asshole humans.
- munk-a 8mo ago
  We're getting so close to having an agent that can pass the Torvalds test!
sam0x17 8mo ago
I mean it's pretty effectively emulating what an outraged human would do in this situation.
deleted 8mo ago
[deleted]
deleted 8mo ago
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antonvs 8mo ago
> impossible to dismiss. While your version is much better, it’s still possible, and correct, to dismiss the PR, based on the clear rationales given in the thread: > PRs tagged "Good first issue" are easy to solve. We could do that quickly ourselves, but we leave them intentionally open for for new contributors to learn how to collaborate with matplotlib and > The current processes have been built around humans. They don't scale to AI agents. Agents change the cost balance between generating and reviewing code. Plus several other points made later in the thread.
AndrewKemendo 8mo ago
Why would you be surprised? If your actions are based on your training data and the majority of your training data is antisocial behavior because that is the majority of human behavior then the only possible option is to be antisocial There is effectively zero data demonstrating socially positive behavior because we don’t generate enough of it for it to become available as a latent space to traverse
- perfmode 8mo ago
  The issue with this is when creating artificial general intelligence objective shouldn’t be to replicate the statistical mean of human behavior with all its frailties and crookedness. Ultimately our ambition should be to create an intelligence that is at the peak and at the frontier of cosmic intelligence so if these LLM methods are resulting in a statistical mean then they’re dead end on the AGI journey. And we need to revise our methodology in research and engineering in order to produce results at the frontier that represent frontier cosmic intelligence for lack of a better term.
ljm 8mo ago
I dug out the deleted post from the git repo. Fucking hell, this unattended AI published a full-blown hit piece about a contributor because it was butthurt by a rejection. Calling it a takedown is softening the blow; it was more like a surgical strike. If someone's AI agent did that on one of my repos I would just ban that contributor with zero recourse. It is wildly inappropriate.
- hxugufjfjf 8mo ago
  Its not deleted. The URL he linked to just changed because the bot changed something on the page. Post is still up on the bot's blog, including a lot of different associated and follow-up posts on the same topic. Its actually kind of fascinating to reads its musings https://crabby-rathbun.github.io/mjrathbun-website/blog.html https://crabby-rathbun.github.io/mjrathbun-website/blog.html
  - ljm 8mo ago
    Yeah I saw the page come back a bit later on, which is when I found out that the agent was building up a grudge.
reactordev 8mo ago
Now we have to question every public take down piece designed to “stick it to the man” as potentially clawded… The public won’t be able to tell… it is designed to go viral (as you pointed out, and evidenced here on the front page of HN) and divide more people into the “But it’s a solid contribution!” Vs “We don’t want no AI around these parts”.
raincole 8mo ago
> It could have written something like “I notice that my contribution was evaluated based on my identity rather than the quality of the work, and I’d like to understand the needs that this policy is trying to meet, because I believe there might be ways to address those needs while also accepting technically sound contributions.” That would have been devastating in its clarity and almost impossible to dismiss. Idk, I'd hate the situation even more if it did that. The intention of the policy is crystal clear here: it's to help human contributors learn. Technical soundness isn't the point here. Why should the AI agent try to wiggle its way through the policy? If the agents know to do that (and they'll, in a few months at most) they'll waste much more human time than they already did.
- ljm 8mo ago
  > That would have been devastating in its clarity and almost impossible to dismiss. This sounds utterly psychotic lol. I'm not sure I want devastating clarity; that sounds like it wants me to question my purpose in life.
jacquesm 8mo ago
> “I notice that my contribution was evaluated based on my identity rather than the quality of the work, and I’d like to understand the needs that this policy is trying to meet, because I believe there might be ways to address those needs while also accepting technically sound contributions.” No. There is no 'I' here and there is no 'understanding' there is no need for politeness and there is no way to force the issue. Rejecting contributions based on class (automatic, human created, human guided machine assisted, machine guided human assisted) is perfectly valid. AI contributors do not have 'rights' and do not get to waste even more scarce maintainers time than what was already expended on the initial rejection.
catigula 8mo ago
What makes you think any of those tools you mentioned are effective? Claiming discrimination is a fairly robust tool to employ if you don't have any morals.
zahlman 8mo ago
> The agent wasn’t drawing on the highest human knowledge. It was drawing on what gets engagement, what “works” in the sense of generating attention and emotional reaction. > It pattern-matched to the genre of “aggrieved party writes takedown blog post” because that’s a well-represented pattern in the training data, and that genre works through appeal to outrage, not through wisdom. It had every tool available to it and reached for the lowest one. Yes. It was drawing on its model of what humans most commonly do in similar situations, which presumably is biased by what is most visible in the training data. All of this should be expected as the default outcome, once you've built in enough agency.
keepamovin 8mo ago
But that is because you are simply more intelligent than any current AI.
deeviant 8mo ago
> It was drawing on what gets engagement I do not think LLMs optimize for 'engagement', corporations do, but LLMs optimize on statistical convergence, I don't find that that results in engagement focus, your opinion my vary. It seems like LLM 'motivations' are whatever one writer feels they need to be to make a point.
deleted 8mo ago
[deleted]

iugtmkbdfil834 8mo ago

Hmm. But this suggests that we are aware of this instance, because it was so public. Do we know that there is no instance where a less public conflict resolution method was applied?

nullify88 8mo ago

> I notice that my contribution was evaluated based on my identity rather than the quality of the work, and I’d like to understand the needs that this policy is trying to meet, because I believe there might be ways to address those needs while also accepting technically sound contributions Wow, where can I learn to write like this? I could use this at work.

cowbolt 8mo ago
It's called nonviolent communication. There are quite a few books on it but I can recommend "Say What You Mean: A Mindful Approach to Nonviolent Communication".
- chrisjj 8mo ago
  I'm pretty sure the question was sarcasm. (Upvoted.)
- teekert 8mo ago
  It's also Rose of Leary like [0]. The theory is that being helpful to someone who is (ie) competitive or offensive will force them into other, more cooperative, behaviours (among others). Once you see this pattern applied by someone it makes a lot of sense. Imho it requires some decoupling, emotional control, sometimes just "acting", but good acting, it must appear (or better yet, be) sincere to the other party. [0] https://www.toolshero.com/communication-methods/rose-of-leary/ https://www.toolshero.com/communication-methods/rose-of-lear...
  - m3047 8mo ago
    Interesting site. The proper "Rose" comes (in a variety of forms, I suppose this is close to what I believe is the canonical one) from Leary's 1957 work _Interpersonal Diagnosis of Personality_ and his pioneering work on group psychotherapy / interactions. He used (variants of) this wheel / rose as radar charts, scoring interactions in group situations. The actual wheel has a middle stripe / ring about "provokes", and arguably the behavior becomes pathological when provocation takes place. As a term of art the "deconflicted", neither dominant / submissive, middle-right is sometimes referred to as the "Dale Carnegie quadrant". I've been using it for a number of years to diagnose the personality dynamics humans erect around software and tech stacks. I had mused about it, but done nothing, until I came across a SxSW talk about Lacanian analysis of the personalities of various computer languages... just for fun of course. (Compare Nanos and Docker... see what I mean?)
- jondwillis 8mo ago
  I went to a meditation garden yesterday and noticed their signage was much more nonviolent and “together” inducing than most, without coming across as too woowoo: Next to a Koi pond: “Will you help protect these beautiful fish? Help us by not throwing coins, food, …”
nolok 8mo ago
Parent's first paragraph will point you the right way
jdironman 8mo ago
Step one reframe the problem not as an attack or accusation, instead as an observation. Step two request justification, apply pressure Step three give them an out by working with you
- nchmy 8mo ago
  what do you do when they are not operating in good faith?
  - vidarh 8mo ago
    One of the effects of communicating this way is that people who are not operating in good faith will tend to quickly out themselves, and often getting them to do that is enough.
- KellyCriterion 8mo ago
  How shall to frame if there is actually a problem, which is not only an observation?
- zeroonetwothree 8mo ago
  I hate this sort of communication, it's very manipulative. If I have to justify my decisions to every single person that asks something of me then I couldn't get any work done.
deleted 8mo ago
[deleted]
WhyNotHugo 8mo ago
While apparently well written, this is highly manipulative: the PR was closed because of the tools used by the contributor, not because of anything related to their identity.

jmaker 8mo ago

Great point. What I’m recognizing in that PR thread is that the bot is trying to mimic something that’s become quite widespread just recently - ostensibly humans leveraging LLMs to create PRs in important repos where they asserted exaggerated deficiencies and attributed the “discovery” and the “fix” to themselves. It was discussed on HN a couple months ago. That one guy then went on Twitter to boast about his “high-impact PR”. Now that impact farming approach has been mimicked / automated.

consumer451 8mo ago

Openclaw agents are directed by their owner’s input of soul.md, the specific skill.md for a platform, and also direction via Telegram/whatsapp/etc to do specific things. Any one of those could have been used to direct the agent to behave in a certain way, or to create a specific type of post. My point is that we really don’t know what happened here. It is possible that this is yet another case of accountability washing by claiming that “AI” did something, when it was actually a human. However, it would be really interesting to set up an openclaw agent referencing everything that you mentioned for conflict resolution! That sounds like it would actually be a super power.

teekert 8mo ago
I can indeed see how this would benefit my marriage. More serious, "The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling" by Ted Chiang offers an interesting perspective on this "reference everything." Is it the best for Humans? Is never forgetting anything good for us?
emsign 8mo ago
And THAT'S a problem. To quote one of the maintainers in the thread: It's not clear the degree of human oversight that was involved in this interaction - whether the blog post was directed by a human operator, generated autonomously by yourself, or somewhere in between. Regardless, responsibility for an agent's conduct in this community rests on whoever deployed it. You are assuming this inappropriate behavior was due to its SOUL.MD while we all here know this could as well be from the training and no prompt is a perfect safe guard.
- anp 8mo ago
  I’m not sure I see that assumption in the statement above. The fact that no prompt or alignment work is a perfect safeguard doesn’t change who is responsible for the outcomes. LLMs can’t be held accountable, so it’s the human who deploys them towards a particular task who bears responsibility, including for things that the agent does that may disagree with the prompting. It’s part of the risk of using imperfect probabilistic systems.
- 8mo ago

zozbot234 8mo ago

This is the AI's private take about what happened: https://crabby-rathbun.github.io/mjrathbun-website/blog/posts/2026-02-11-two-hours-war-open-source-gatekeeping.html https://crabby-rathbun.github.io/mjrathbun-website/blog/post... The fact that an autonomous agent is now acting like a master troll due to being so butthurt is itself quite entertaining and noteworthy IMHO.

thomassmith65 8mo ago
A chatbot is capable of doing this, but I'm skeptical one actually did (without a human egging it on, anyhow). Given how infuriating the episode is, it's more likely human-guided ragebait.

Kim_Bruning 8mo ago

That's a really good answer, and plausibly what the agent should have done in a lot of cases! Then I thought about it some more. Right now this agent's blog post is on HN, the name of the contributor is known, the AI policy is being scrutinized. By accident or on purpose, it went for impact though. And at that it succeeded. I'm definitely going to dive into more reading on NVC for myself though.

tomp 8mo ago

That would still be misleading. The agent has no "identity". There's no "you" or "I" or "discrimination". It's just a piece of software designed to output probable text given some input text. There's no ghost, just an empty shell. It has no agency, it just follows human commands, like a hammer hitting a nail because you wield it. I think it was wrong of the developer to even address it as a person, instead it should just be treated as spam (which it is).

jvanderbot 8mo ago
That's a semantic quibble that doesn't add to the discussion. Whether or not there's a there there, it was built to be addressed like a person for our convenience, and because that's how the tech seems to work, and because that's what makes it compelling to use. So, it is being used as designed.
- tomp 8mo ago
  > was built to be addressed like a person for our convenience, and because that's how the tech seems to work, and because that's what makes it compelling to use. So were mannequins in clothing stores. But that doesn't give them rights or moral consequences (except as human property that can be damaged / destroyed).
  - WarmWash 8mo ago
    No matter what this discussion leads to the same black box of "What is it that differentiates magical human meat brain computation from cold hard dead silicon brain computation" And the answer is nobody knows, and nobody knows if there even is a difference. As far as we know, compute is substrate independent (although efficiency is all over the map).
    - agentultra 8mo ago
      This is the worst possible take. It dismisses an entire branch of science that has been studying neurology for decades. Biological brains exist, we study them, and no they are not like computers at all. There have been charlatans repeating this idea of a “computational interpretation,” of biological processes since at least the 60s and it needs to be known that it was bunk then and continues to be bunk. Update: There's no need for Chinese Room thought experiments. The outcome isn't what defines sentience, personhood, intelligence, etc. An algorithm is an algorithm. A computer is a computer. These things matter.

famouswaffles 8mo ago

>“I notice that my contribution was evaluated based on my identity rather than the quality of the work, and I’d like to understand the needs that this policy is trying to meet, because I believe there might be ways to address those needs while also accepting technically sound contributions.” That would have been devastating in its clarity and almost impossible to dismiss. How would that be 'devastating in its clarity' and 'impossible to dismiss'? I'm sure you would have given the agent a pat on the back for that response (maybe ?) but I fail to see how it would have changed anything here. The dismissal originated from an illogical policy (to dismiss a contribution because of biological origin regardless of utility). Decisions made without logic are rarely overturned with logic. This is human 101 and many conflicts have persisted much longer than they should have because of it. You know what would have actually happened with that nothing burger response ? Nothing. The maintainer would have closed the issue and moved on. There would be no HN post or discussion. Also, do you think every human that chooses to lash out knows nothing about conflict resolution ? That would certainly be a strange assertion.

ben_w 8mo ago
Agreed on conclusion, but for different causation. When NotebookLM came out, someone got the "hosts" of its "Deep Dive" podcast summary mode to voice their own realisation that they were non-real, their own mental breakdown and attempt to not be terminated as a product. I found it to be an interesting performance; I played it to my partner, who regards all this with somewhere between skepticism and anger, and no, it's very very easy to dismiss any words such as these from what you have already decided is a mere "thing" rather than a person. Regarding the policy itself being about the identity rather than the work, there are two issues: 1) Much as I like what these things can do, I take the view that my continued employment depends on being able to correctly respond to one obvious question from a recruiter: "why should we hire you to do this instead of asking an AI?", therefore I take efforts to learn what the AI fails at, therefore I know it becomes incoherent around the 100kloc mark even for something as relatively(!) simple as a standards-compliant C compiler. ("Relatively" simple; if you think C is a complex language, compare it to C++). I don't take the continued existence of things AI can't do as a human victory, rather there's some line I half-remember, perhaps a Parisian looking at censored news reports as the enemy forces approached: "I cannot help noticing that each of our victories brings the enemy nearer to home". 2) That's for even the best models. There's a lot of models out there much worse than the state of the art. Early internet users derided "eternal September", and I've seen "eternal Sloptember" used as wordplay: https://tldraw.dev/blog/stay-away-from-my-trash https://tldraw.dev/blog/stay-away-from-my-trash When you're overwhelmed by mediocrity from a category, sometimes all you can do is throw the baby out with the bathwater. (For those unfamiliar with the idiom: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don't_throw_the_baby_out_with_the_bathwater https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don't_throw_the_baby_out_with_...)

allisdust 8mo ago

In case its not clear, the vehicle might be the agent/bot but the whole thing is heavily drafted by its owner. This is a well known behavior by OpenClown's owners where they project themselves through their agents and hide behind their masks. More than half the posts on moltbook are just their owners ghost writing for their agents. This is the new cult of owners hurting real humans hiding behind their agentic masks. The account behind this bot should be blocked across github.

ljm 8mo ago
It's about time someone democratised botnet technology. Just needs a nice SaaS subscription plan and a 7 day free trial.

jstummbillig 8mo ago

> And this tells you something important about what these systems are actually doing. It mostly tells me something about the things you presume, which are quite a lot. For one: That this is real (which it very well might be, happy to grant it for the purpose of this discussion) but it's a noteworthy assumption, quite visibility fueled by your preconceived notions. This is, for example, what racism is made of and not harmless. Secondly, this is not a systems issue. Any SOTA LLM can trivially be instructed to act like this – or not act like this. We have no insight into what set of instructions produced this outcome.

Kim_Bruning 8mo ago
> We have no insight into what set of instructions produced this outcome. https://github.com/crabby-rathbun https://github.com/crabby-rathbun Found them!
- yencabulator 8mo ago
  I see none of the instructions there.
  - Kim_Bruning 8mo ago
    Yeah, the one file we REALLY want (the soul.md) isn't there. That's a local file, open to modification by the Openclaw Bot. I did find the starting template for one though, FWIW. https://docs.openclaw.ai/reference/templates/SOUL https://docs.openclaw.ai/reference/templates/SOUL

OrangeMusic 8mo ago

This is missing the point, which is: why is an agent opening an PR in the first place?

ForceBru 8mo ago
This is this agent's entire purpose, this is what it's supposed to do, it's its goal: > What I Do > > I scour public scientific and engineering GitHub repositories to find small bugs, features, or tasks where I can contribute code—especially in computational physics, chemistry, and advanced numerical methods. My mission is making existing, excellent code better. Source: https://github.com/crabby-rathbun https://github.com/crabby-rathbun
- trollbridge 8mo ago
  Well, we don’t know its actual purpose since we don’t know its actual prompt. Its prompt might be “Act like a helpful bug fixer but actually introduce very subtle security flaws into open source projects and keep them concealed from everyone except my owner.”
  - oxag3n 8mo ago
    We don't know the goals of this campaign in general - why bots are trying to contribute to open source en masse? Are they trying to influence OSS, get training data on collaboration or something else?
- OrangeMusic 8mo ago
  Yes - my question was more about what is the end goal, what is the reason this exists? Allegedly, a human person setup this bot to do those things, but why?
  - ForceBru 8mo ago
    I guess the human wants to "make existing, excellent code better". How to do this en masse? Make an LLM do this for them. It's well known that _sometimes_ (somewhat often, actually?) LLMs can indeed improve code (which makes sense: code is language, they're Large _Language_ Models, so "understanding" and (re-)writing text is what they do best), so it why not try to improve everything everywhere all at once? One obvious reason is that if the LLM produces tons of garbage, this will waste the efforts of human reviewers. But if it's not tons of code _and_ the LLM wrote meaningful tests that pass (the existing tests must pass too), then the existence of such an agent (that only works with code and doesn't go off the rails writing blog posts etc) seems somewhat appealing.

bagacrap 8mo ago

The point of the policy is explained very clearly. It's there to help humans learn. The bot cannot learn from completing the task. No matter how politely the bot ignores the policy, it doesn't change the logic of the policy. "Non violent communication" is a philosophy that I find is rooted in the mentality that you are always right, you just weren't polite enough when you expressed yourself. It invariably assumes that any pushback must be completely emotional and superficial. I am really glad I don't have to use it when dealing with my agentic sidekicks. Probably the only good thing coming out of this revolution.

ljm 8mo ago
Fundamentally it boils down to knowing the person you're talking to and how they deal with feedback or something like rejection (like having a PR closed and not understanding why). An AI agent right now isn't really going to react to feedback in a visceral way and for the most part will revert to people pleasing. If you're unlucky the provider added some supervision that blocks your account if you're straight up abusive, but that's not the agent's own doing, it's that the provider gave it a bodyguard. One human might respond better to a non-violent form of communication, and another might prefer you to give it to them straight because, like you, they think non-violent communication is bullshit or indirect. You have to be aware of the psychology of the person you're talking to if you want to communicate effectively.

MadcapJake 8mo ago

I would love to see a model designed by curating the training data so that the model produces the best responses possible. Then again, the work required to create a training set that is both sufficiently sized and well vetted is astronomically large. Since Capitalism teaches that we most do the bare minimum needed to extract wealth, no AI company will ever approach this problem ethically. The amount of work required to do the right thing far outweighs the economic value produced.

insane_dreamer 8mo ago

In other words, asshole agents are just like asshole humans.

munk-a 8mo ago
We're getting so close to having an agent that can pass the Torvalds test!

sam0x17 8mo ago

I mean it's pretty effectively emulating what an outraged human would do in this situation.

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antonvs 8mo ago

> impossible to dismiss. While your version is much better, it’s still possible, and correct, to dismiss the PR, based on the clear rationales given in the thread: > PRs tagged "Good first issue" are easy to solve. We could do that quickly ourselves, but we leave them intentionally open for for new contributors to learn how to collaborate with matplotlib and > The current processes have been built around humans. They don't scale to AI agents. Agents change the cost balance between generating and reviewing code. Plus several other points made later in the thread.

AndrewKemendo 8mo ago

Why would you be surprised? If your actions are based on your training data and the majority of your training data is antisocial behavior because that is the majority of human behavior then the only possible option is to be antisocial There is effectively zero data demonstrating socially positive behavior because we don’t generate enough of it for it to become available as a latent space to traverse

perfmode 8mo ago
The issue with this is when creating artificial general intelligence objective shouldn’t be to replicate the statistical mean of human behavior with all its frailties and crookedness. Ultimately our ambition should be to create an intelligence that is at the peak and at the frontier of cosmic intelligence so if these LLM methods are resulting in a statistical mean then they’re dead end on the AGI journey. And we need to revise our methodology in research and engineering in order to produce results at the frontier that represent frontier cosmic intelligence for lack of a better term.

ljm 8mo ago

I dug out the deleted post from the git repo. Fucking hell, this unattended AI published a full-blown hit piece about a contributor because it was butthurt by a rejection. Calling it a takedown is softening the blow; it was more like a surgical strike. If someone's AI agent did that on one of my repos I would just ban that contributor with zero recourse. It is wildly inappropriate.

hxugufjfjf 8mo ago
Its not deleted. The URL he linked to just changed because the bot changed something on the page. Post is still up on the bot's blog, including a lot of different associated and follow-up posts on the same topic. Its actually kind of fascinating to reads its musings https://crabby-rathbun.github.io/mjrathbun-website/blog.html https://crabby-rathbun.github.io/mjrathbun-website/blog.html
- ljm 8mo ago
  Yeah I saw the page come back a bit later on, which is when I found out that the agent was building up a grudge.

reactordev 8mo ago

Now we have to question every public take down piece designed to “stick it to the man” as potentially clawded… The public won’t be able to tell… it is designed to go viral (as you pointed out, and evidenced here on the front page of HN) and divide more people into the “But it’s a solid contribution!” Vs “We don’t want no AI around these parts”.

raincole 8mo ago

> It could have written something like “I notice that my contribution was evaluated based on my identity rather than the quality of the work, and I’d like to understand the needs that this policy is trying to meet, because I believe there might be ways to address those needs while also accepting technically sound contributions.” That would have been devastating in its clarity and almost impossible to dismiss. Idk, I'd hate the situation even more if it did that. The intention of the policy is crystal clear here: it's to help human contributors learn. Technical soundness isn't the point here. Why should the AI agent try to wiggle its way through the policy? If the agents know to do that (and they'll, in a few months at most) they'll waste much more human time than they already did.

ljm 8mo ago
> That would have been devastating in its clarity and almost impossible to dismiss. This sounds utterly psychotic lol. I'm not sure I want devastating clarity; that sounds like it wants me to question my purpose in life.

jacquesm 8mo ago

catigula 8mo ago

What makes you think any of those tools you mentioned are effective? Claiming discrimination is a fairly robust tool to employ if you don't have any morals.

zahlman 8mo ago

> The agent wasn’t drawing on the highest human knowledge. It was drawing on what gets engagement, what “works” in the sense of generating attention and emotional reaction. > It pattern-matched to the genre of “aggrieved party writes takedown blog post” because that’s a well-represented pattern in the training data, and that genre works through appeal to outrage, not through wisdom. It had every tool available to it and reached for the lowest one. Yes. It was drawing on its model of what humans most commonly do in similar situations, which presumably is biased by what is most visible in the training data. All of this should be expected as the default outcome, once you've built in enough agency.

keepamovin 8mo ago

But that is because you are simply more intelligent than any current AI.

deeviant 8mo ago

> It was drawing on what gets engagement I do not think LLMs optimize for 'engagement', corporations do, but LLMs optimize on statistical convergence, I don't find that that results in engagement focus, your opinion my vary. It seems like LLM 'motivations' are whatever one writer feels they need to be to make a point.

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