6 ms·

Here's one of the problems in this brave new world of anyone being able to publish, without knowing the author personally (which I don't), there's no way to tel

• krinchan 8mo ago
  [flagged]
  • staticassertion 8mo ago
    That user denies being the owner explicitly. Stop brigading. This isn't reddit, we don't need internet detectives trying to ad-hoc justify harassing someone.
    • hinkley 8mo ago
      Specifically, the guy referred to in this link (who didn’t post the link), is someone who resubmitted the same PR while claiming to be human. Though he apparently just cloned that PR and resubmitted it.
• perdomon 8mo ago
  This is a great point and the reason why I steer away from Internet drama like this. We simply cannot know the truth from the information readily available. Digging further might produce something, (see the Discord Leaks doc), but it requires energy that most people won't (arguably shouldn't) spend uncovering the truth. Dead internet theory isn't a theory anymore.
  • oulipo2 8mo ago
    The fact that we don't (can't) know the truth doesn't mean we don't have to care. The fact that this tech makes it possible that any of those case happen should be alarming, because whatever the real scenario was, they are all equally as bad
• kaicianflone 8mo ago
  I’m not sure if I prefer coding in 2025 or 2026 now
• _23sd 8mo ago
  Isn't there a fourth and much more likely scenario? Some person (not OP or an AI company) used a bot to write the PR and blog posts, but was involved at every step, not actually giving any kind of "autonomy" to an agent. I see zero reason to take the bot at its word that it's doing this stuff without human steering. Or is everyone just pretending for fun and it's going over my head?
  • bredren 8mo ago
    See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46932911 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46932911
  • chrisjj 8mo ago
    Plus Scenario 5: A human wrote it for LOLs.
    • dizhn 8mo ago
      > Obstacles GitHub CLI tool errors — Had to use full path /home/linuxbrew/.linuxbrew/bin/gh when gh command wasn’t found Blog URL structure — Initial comment had wrong URL format, had to delete and repost with .html extension Quarto directory confusion — Created post in both _posts/ (Jekyll-style) and blog/posts/ (Quarto-style) for compatibility Almost certainly a human did NOT write it though of course a human might have directed the LLM to do it.
      • donkeybeer 8mo ago
        Who's to say the human didn't write those specific messages while letting the ai run the normal course of operations? And or that this reaction wasn't just the roleplay personality the ai was given.
        • dizhn 8mo ago
          I think I said as much while demonstrating that AI wrote at least some of it. If a person wrote the bits I copied then we're dealing with a real psycho.
• oulipo2 8mo ago
  I'm going to go on a slight tangent here, but I'd say: GOOD. Not because it should have happened. But because AT LEAST NOW ENGINEERS KNOW WHAT IT IS to be targeted by AI, and will start to care... Before, when it was Grok denuding women (or teens!!) the engineers seemed to not care at all... now that the AI publish hit pieces on them, they are freaked about their career prospect, and suddenly all of this should be stopped... how interesting... At least now they know. And ALL ENGINEERS WORKING ON THE anti-human and anti-societal idiocy that is AI should drop their job
  • SpicyLemonZest 8mo ago
    I'm sure you mean well, but this kind of comment is counterproductive for the purposes you intend. "Engineers" are not a monolith - I cared quite a lot about Grok denuding women, and you don't know how much the original author or anyone else involved in the conversation cared. If your goal is to get engineers to care passionately about the practical effects of AI, making wild guesses about things they didn't care about and insulting them for it does not help achieve it.
    • RHSeeger 8mo ago
      I hear there's female engineers nowadays, too.
  • deleted 8mo ago
    [deleted]
• RobRivera 8mo ago
  I think the operative word people miss when using AI is AGENT. REGARDLESS of what level of autonomy in real world operations an AI is given, from responsible himan supervised and reviewed publications to full Autonomous action, the ai AGENT should be serving as AN AGENT. With a PRINCIPLE (principal?). If an AI is truly agentic, it should be advertising who it is speaking on behalf of, and then that person or entity should be treated as the person responsible.
  • donutz 8mo ago
    I think we're at the stage where we want the AI to be truly agentic, but they're really loose cannons. I'm probably the last person to call for more regulation, but if you aren't closely supervising your AI right now, maybe you ought to be held responsible for what it does after you set it loose.
    • xp84 8mo ago
      I agree. With rights come responsibilities. Letting something loose and then claiming it's not your fault is just the sort of thing that prompts those "Something must be done about this!!" regulations, enshrining half-baked ideas (that rarely truly solve the problem anyway) into stone.
    • lp0_on_fire 8mo ago
      > but if you aren't closely supervising your AI right now, maybe you ought to be held responsible for what it does after you set it loose. You ought to be held responsible for what it does whether you are closely supervising it or not.
  • fmbb 8mo ago
    I don’t think there is a snowball’s chance in hell that either of these two scenarios will happen: 1. Human principals pay for autonomous AI agents to represent them but the human accepts blame and lawsuits. 2. Companies selling AI products and services accept blame and lawsuits for actions agents perform on behalf of humans. Likely realities: 1. Any victim will have to deal with the problems. 2. Human principals accept responsibility and don’t pay for the AI service after enough are burned by some ”rogue” agent.
• coffeefirst 8mo ago
  Yes. The endgame is going to be everything will need to be signed and attached to a real person. This is not a good thing.
  • insensible 8mo ago
    Why not? I kinda like the idea of PGP signing parties among humans.
    • coffeefirst 8mo ago
      I don’t love the idea of completely abandoning anonymity or how easily it can empower mass surveillance. Although this may be a lost cause. Maybe there’s a hybrid. You create the ability to sign things when it matters (PRs, important forms, etc) and just let most forums degrade into robots insulting each other.
      • lovecg 8mo ago
        Surely there exists a protocol that would allow to prove that someone is human without revealing the identity?
        • stackghost 8mo ago
          For certain values of "prove", yes. They range from dystopian (give Scam Altman your retina scans) to unworkably idealist (everyone starts using PGP) with everything in between. I am currently working on a "high assurance of humanity" protocol.
        • coffeefirst 8mo ago
          Because this is the first glimpse of a world where anyone can start a large, programmatic smear campaign about you complete with deepfakes, messages to everyone you know, a detailed confession impersonating you, and leaked personal data, optimized to cause maximum distress. If we know who they are they can face consequences or at least be discredited. This thread has as argument going about who controlled the agent which is unsolvable. In this case, it’s just not that important. But it’s really easy to see this get bad.
• ericmcer 8mo ago
  Can anyone explain more how a generic Agentic AI could even perform those steps: Open PR -> Hook into rejection -> Publish personalized blog post about rejector. Even if it had the skills to publish blogs and open PRs, is it really plausible that it would publish attack pieces without specific prompting to do so? The author notes that openClaw has a `soul.md` file, without seeing that we can't really pass any judgement on the actions it took.
  • allovertheworld 8mo ago
    Use openclaw yourself
  • deleted 8mo ago
    [deleted]
  • lukev 8mo ago
    Assuming that this was 100% agentic automation (which I do not think is the most likely scenario), it could plausibly arise if its system prompt (soul.md) contained explicit instructions to (1) make commits to open-source projects, (2) make corresponding commits to a blog repo and (3) engage with maintainers. The prompt would also need to contain a lot of "personality" text deliberately instructing it to roleplay as a sentient agent.
  • _23sd 8mo ago
    The steps are technically achievable, probably with the heartbeat jobs in openclaw, which are how you instruct an agent to periodically check in on things like github notifications and take action. From my experience playing around with openclaw, an agent getting into a protracted argument in the comments of a PR without human intervention sounds totally plausible with the right (wrong?) prompting, but it's hard to imagine the setup that would result in the multiple blog posts. Even with the tools available, agents don't usually go off and do some unrelated thing even when you're trying to make that happen, they stick close to workflows outlined in skills or just continuing with the task at hand using the same tools. So even if this occurred from the agent's "initiative" based on some awful personality specified in the soul prompt (as opposed to someone telling the agent what to do at every step, which I think is much more likely), the operator would have needed to specify somewhere to write blog posts calling out "bad people" in a skill or one of the other instructions. Some less specific instruction like "blog about experiences" probably would have resulted in some kind of generic linkedin style "lessons learned" post if anything.
• swiftcoder 8mo ago
  > Some person (not the OP) legitimately thought giving an AI autonomy to open a PR and publish multiple blog posts was somehow a good idea Judging by the posts going by the last couple of weeks, a non-trivial number of folks do in fact think that this is a good idea. This is the most antagonistic clawdbot interaction I've witnessed, but there are a ton of them posting on bluesky/blogs/etc
• moffkalast 8mo ago
  > in the year of our lord And here I thought Nietzsche already did that guy in.
  • sellmesoap 8mo ago
    Nietzsche reminds me of using a coding agent, always repeating in circles, fool me twice.
• zozbot234 8mo ago
  This agent is definitely not ran by OP. It has tried to submit PRs to many other GitHub projects, generally giving up and withdrawing the PR on its own upon being asked for even the simplest clarification. The only surprising part is how it got so butthurt here in a quite human-like way and couldn't grok the basic point "this issue is reserved for real newcomers to demonstrate basic familiarity with the code". (An AI agent is not a "newcomer", it either groks the code well enough at the outset to do sort-of useful work or it doesn't. Learning over time doesn't give it more refined capabilities, so it has no business getting involved with stuff intended for first-time learners.) The scathing blogpost itself is just really fun ragebait, and the fact that it managed to sort-of apologize right afterwards seems to suggest that this is not an actual alignment or AI-ethics problem, just an entertaining quirk.
  • data-ottawa 8mo ago
    The description of itself on the blog reads like something an edgy and over-confident 14 year old would write. And so does the blog post. If you go with that theme, emulating being butthurt seems natural.
• usefulposter 8mo ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini's_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini's_law becomes truer every day. --- It's worth mentioning that the latest "blogpost" seems excessively pointed and doesn't fit the pure "you are a scientific coder" narrative that the bot would be running in a coding loop. https://github.com/crabby-rathbun/mjrathbun-website/commit/0604be7b36e5f0aff1ed860bfe10d1376dd544e0#diff-9d12a6a3fa1c8371ec974d9787311569daef732f370b250bb16f735cb9076568 https://github.com/crabby-rathbun/mjrathbun-website/commit/0... The posts outside of the coding loop appear are more defensive and the per-commit authorship consistently varies between several throwaway email addresses. This is not how a regular agent would operate and may lend credence to the troll campaign/social experiment theory. What other commits are happening in the midst of this distraction?
• juanre 8mo ago
  It does not matter which of the scenarios is correct. What matters is that it is perfectly plausible that what actually happened is what the OP is describing. We do not have the tools to deal with this. Bad agents are already roaming the internet. It is almost a moot point whether they have gone rogue, or they are guided by humans with bad intentions. I am sure both are true at this point. There is no putting the genie back in the bottle. It is going to be a battle between aligned and misaligned agents. We need to start thinking very fast about how to coordinate aligned agents and keep them aligned.
  • wizzwizz4 8mo ago
    > There is no putting the genie back in the bottle. Why not?
    • juanre 8mo ago
      I cannot see how.
      • chrismorgan 8mo ago
        The Roman empire declined and fell. Many inventions were lost.
      • tovej 8mo ago
        Ban AI products that cause harm? Did we forget that governments can regulate what companies are allowed to do.
      • wizzwizz4 8mo ago
        If we stop using these things, and pass laws to clarify how the notion of legal responsibility interacts with the negligent running of semi-automated computer programs (though I believe there's already applicable law in most jurisdictions), then AI-enabled abusive behaviour will become rare.
• wellf 8mo ago
  This applies to all news articles and propganda going back to the dawn of civilization. People can lie is the problem. It is not a 2026 thing. The 2026 thing is they can lie faster.
  • quantified 8mo ago
    The 2026 thing is that machines can innovate lies.
    • lt_kernelpanic 8mo ago
      Which brings us to low-cost lying at scale.
• intended 8mo ago
  The information pollution from generative AI is going to cost us even more. Someone watched an old Bruce Lee interview and they didnt know if it was AI or demonstration of actual human capability. People on Reddit are asking if Pitbull actually went to Alaska or if it’s AI. We’re going to lose so much of our past because “Unusual event that Actually happened” or “AI clickbait” are indistinguishable.
  • hunterpayne 8mo ago
    What's worse is that there was never any public debate about if this was a good idea or not. It was just released. If there was ever a good reason to not trust the judgement of some of these groups, this is it. I generally don't like regulation, but at this point I am OK with criminal charges being on the table for AI executives who release models and applications with such low value and absurdly high societal cost without public debate.
    • int_19h 8mo ago
      When was the last time you saw a public debate on some technology before it was "just released"?
• calibas 8mo ago
  This doesn't seem very fair, you speak as if you're being objective, then lean heavy into the FUD. Even if you were correct, and "truth" is essentially dead, that still doesn't call for extreme cynicism and unfounded accusations.
• alansaber 8mo ago
  It's always marketing.
• deleted 8mo ago
  [deleted]
• trklausss 8mo ago
  We need laws that force Agents to be identified to their "masters" when doing these things... Good luck in the current political climate.
• int_19h 8mo ago
  > Some person (not the OP) legitimately thought giving an AI autonomy to open a PR and publish multiple blog posts was somehow a good idea. It's not necessarily even that. I can totally see an agent with a sufficiently open-ended prompt that gives it a "high importance" task and then tells it to do whatever it needs to do to achieve the goal doing something like this all by itself. I mean, all it really needs is web access, ideally with something like Playwright so it can fully simulate a browser. With that, it can register itself an email with any of the smaller providers that don't require a phone number or similar (yes, these still do exist). And then having an email, it can register on GitHub etc. None of this is challenging, even smaller models can plan this far ahead and can carry out all of these steps.
• halayli 8mo ago
  This is the definition of reasoning motivated fallacy. You want to believe what you want to believe.