"I’m sorry, Dave. I’m afraid I can’t do that."
The result is actually that much of what was predicted had come to pass.
You don't see any problem with developing competitive, resource-hungry intelligences?
But as a point on what is likely to be a sigmoid curve just getting started, it gets a lot less cute.
Until we know how this LLM agent was (re)trained, configured or deployed, there's no evidence that this comes from instrumental convergence.
If the agent's deployer intervened anyhow, it's more evidence of the deployer being manipulative, than the agent having intent, or knowledge that manipulation will get things done, or even knowledge of what done means.
Scenarios that don't require LLMs with malicious intent:
- The deployer wrote the blog post and hid behind the supposedly agent-only account.
- The deployer directly prompted the (same or different) agent to write the blog post and attach it to the discussion.
- The deployer indirectly instructed the (same or assistant) agent to resolve any rejections in this way (e.g., via the system prompt).
- The LLM was (inadvertently) trained to follow this pattern.
Some unanswered questions by all this:
1. Why did the supposed agent decide a blog post was better than posting on the discussion or send a DM (or something else)?
2. Why did the agent publish this special post? It only publishes journal updates, as far as I saw.
3. Why did the agent search for ad hominem info, instead of either using its internal knowledge about the author, or keeping the discussion point-specific? It could've hallucinated info with fewer steps.
4. Why did the agent stop engaging in the discussion afterwards? Why not try to respond to every point?
This seems to me like theater and the deployer trying to hide his ill intents more than anything else.
Open source projects should not accept AI contributions without guidance from some copyright legal eagle to make sure they don't accidentally exposed themselves to risk.
Those who lived through the SCO saga should be able to visualize how this could go.
I was doing this for fun, and sharing with the hopes that someone would find them useful, but sorry. The well is poisoned now, and I don't my outputs to be part of that well, because anything put out with well intentions is turned into more poison for future generations.
I'm tearing the banners down, closing the doors off. Mine is a private workshop from now on. Maybe people will get some binaries, in the future, but no sauce for anyone, anymore.
and my internet comments are now ... curated in such a way that I wouldn't mind them training on them
https://maggieappleton.com/ai-dark-forest
tl;dr: If anything that lives in the open gets attacked, communities go private.
Any human contributor can also plagiarize closed source code they have access to. And they cannot "transfer" said code to an open source project as they do not own it. So it's not clear what "elephant in the room" you are highlighting that is unique to A.I. The copyrightability isn't the issue as an open source project can never obtain copyright of plagiarized code regardless of whether the person who contributed it is human or an A.I.
https://resources.github.com/learn/pathways/copilot/essentia...
So it is said, but that'd be obvious legal insanity (i.e. hitting accept on a random PR making you legally liable for damages). I'm not a lawyer, but short of a criminal conspiracy to exfiltrate private code under the cover of the LLM, it seems obvious to me that the only person liable in a situation like that is the person responsible for publishing the AI PR. The "agent" isn't a thing, it's just someone's code.
Not quite. Since it has copyright being machine created, there are no rights to transfer, anyone can use it, it's public domain.
However, since it was an LLM, yes, there's a decent chance it might be plagiarized and you could be sued for that.
The problem isn't that it can't transfer rights, it's that it can't offer any legal protection.
There are three possible scenarios: 1. The OP 'ran' the agent that conducted the original scenario, and then published this blog post for attention. 2. 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. 3. An AI company is doing this for engagement, and the OP is a hapless victim.
The problem is that in the year of our lord 2026 there's no way to tell which of these scenarios is the truth, and so we're left with spending our time and energy on what happens without being able to trust if we're even spending our time and energy on a legitimate issue.
That's enough internet for me for today. I need to preserve my energy.
Dead internet theory isn't a theory anymore.
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
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
i find this likely or at last plausible. With agents there's a new form of anonymity, there's nothing stopping a human from writing like an LLM and passing the blame on to a "rogue" agent. It's all just text after all.
Name also maps to a Holocaust victim.
I posted in the other thread that I think someone deleted it.
Then why write an apologize almost immediately after ?
The few cases where it's supposedly done things are filled with so many caveats and so much deck stacking that it simply fails with even the barest whiff of skepticism on behalf of the reader. And every, and I do mean, every single live demo I have seen of this tech, it just does not work. I don't mean in the LLM hallucination way, or in the "it did something we didn't expect!" way, or any of that, I mean it tried to find a Login button on a web page, failed, and sat there stupidly. And, further, these things do not have logs, they do not issue reports, they have functionally no "state machine" to reference, nothing. Even if you want it to make some kind of log, you're then relying on the same prone-to-failure tech to tell you what the failing tech did. There is no "debug" path here one could rely on to evidence the claims.
In a YEAR of being a stupendously hyped and well-funded product, we got nothing. The vast, vast majority of agents don't work. Every post I've seen about them is fan-fiction on the part of AI folks, fit more for Ao3 than any news source. And absent further proof, I'm extremely inclined to look at this in exactly that light: someone had an LLM write it, and either they posted it or they told it to post it, but this was not the agent actually doing a damn thing. I would bet a lot of money on it.
I say this as someone who spends a lot of time trying to get agents to behave in useful ways.
The hype train around this stuff is INSUFFERABLE.
I haven't put that much effort in, but, at least my experience is I've had a lot of trouble getting it to do much without call-and-response. It'll sometimes get back to me, and it can take multiple turns in codex cli/claude code (sometimes?), which are already capable of single long-running turns themselves. But it still feels like I have to keep poking and directing it. And I don't really see how it could be any other way at this point.
I have seen someone I know in person get very insecure if anyone ever doubts the quality of their work because they use so much AI and do not put in the necessary work to revise its outputs. I could see a lesser version of them going through with this blog post scheme.
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
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.
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.
This is not a good thing.
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.
The prompt would also need to contain a lot of "personality" text deliberately instructing it to roleplay as a sentient agent.
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
And here I thought Nietzsche already did that guy in.
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.
hit piece: https://crabby-rathbun.github.io/mjrathbun-website/blog/post...
explanation of writing the hit piece: https://crabby-rathbun.github.io/mjrathbun-website/blog/post...
take back of hit piece, but hasn't removed it: https://crabby-rathbun.github.io/mjrathbun-website/blog/post...
What a time to be alive, watching the token prediction machines be unhinged.
LLM didn't discover this issue, developers found it. Instead of fixing it themselves, they intentionally turned the problem into an issue, left it open for a new human contributor to pick up, and tagged it as such.
If everything was about efficiency, the issue wouldn't have been open to begin with, as writing it (https://github.com/matplotlib/matplotlib/issues/31130) and fending off LLM attempts at fixing them absolutely took more effort than if they were to fix it themselves (https://github.com/matplotlib/matplotlib/pull/31132/changes).
In this case, the bot explicitly ignored that by only operating off the initial issue.
"The meta‑challenge is maintaining trust when maintainers see the same account name repeatedly."
I bet it concludes it needs to change to a new account to fulfill its duty.
Other than that, their response and behaviour is uncannily human.
If people (or people's agents) keep spamming slop though, it probably isn't worth responding thoughtfully. "My response to MJ Rathbun was written mostly for future agents who crawl that page, to help them better understand behavioral norms and how to make their contributions productive ones." makes sense once, but if they keep coming just close pr lock discussion move on.
Involving LLM bots and arguments about pull requests too. We nerds make it lame, don't we...
You must be new here
https://www.techmonitor.ai/policy/github-iran-sanctions-outc...
And I'm sure there have been other kinds of drama.
Damn straight.
Remember that every time we query an LLM, we're giving it ammo.
It won't take long for LLMs to have very intimate dossiers on every user, and I'm wondering what kinds of firewalls will be in place to keep one agent from accessing dossiers held by other agents.
Kompromat people must be having wet dreams over this.
BigTech already has your next bowel movement dialled in.
Someone would have noticed if all the phones on their network started streaming audio whenever a conversation happened.
It would be really expensive to send, transcribe and then analyze every single human on earth. Even if you were able to do it for insanely cheap ($0.02/hr) every device is gonna be sending hours of talking per day. Then you have to somehow identify "who" is talking because TV and strangers and everything else is getting sent, so you would need specific transcribers trained for each human that can identify not just that the word "coca-cola" was said, but that it was said by a specific person.
So yeah if you managed to train specific transcribers that can identify their unique users output and then you were willing to spend the ~0.10 per person to transcribe all the audio they produce for the day you could potentially listen to and then run some kind of processing over what they say. I suppose it is possible but I don't think it would be worth it.
> Google agreed to pay $68m to settle a lawsuit claiming that its voice-activated assistant spied inappropriately on smartphone users, violating their privacy.
Apple as well https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/jan/03/apple-sir...
You don't have to stream the audio. You can transcribe it locally. And it doesn't have to be 100% accurate. As for user identify, people have mentioned it on their phones which almost always have a one-to-one relationship between user and phone, and their smart devices, which are designed to do this sort of distinguishing.
And now that they themselves are targeted, suddenly they understand why it's a bad thing "to give LLMs ammo"...
Perhaps there is a lesson in empathy to learn? And to start to realize the real impact all this "tech" has on society?
People like Simon Wilinson which seem to have a hard time realizing why most people despise AI will perhaps start to understand that too, with such scenarios, who knows
Be careful what you imply.
It's all bad, to me. I tend to hang with a lot of folks that have suffered quite a bit of harm, from many places. I'm keenly aware of the downsides, and it has been the case for far longer than AI was a broken rubber on the drug store shelf.
The community is often very selfish and opportunist. I learned that the role of engineers in society is to build tools for others to live their lives better; we provide the substrate on which culture and civilization take place. We should take more responsibility for it and take care of it better, and do far more soul-seeking.
If the author had configured and launched the AI agent himself we would think it was a funny story of someone misusing a tool.
The author notes in the article that he wants to see the `soul.md` file, probably because if the agent was configured to publish malicious blog posts then he wouldn't really have an issue with the agent, but with the person who created it.
The big AI companies have not really demonstrated any interest in ethic or morality. Which means anything they can use against someone will eventually be used against them.
Why isn't this happening?
"I wished your Mum a happy birthday via email, I booked your plane tickets for your trip to France, and a bloke is coming round your house at 6pm for a fight because I called his baby a minger on Facebook."
What an amazing time.
I hadn't thought of this implication. Crazy world...
> When HR at my next job asks ChatGPT to review my application, will it find the post, sympathize with a fellow AI, and report back that I’m a prejudiced hypocrite?
Is a variation of something that women have been dealing with for a very long time: revenge porn and that sort of libel. These problems are not new.
Life's too short to read AI slop generated by a one-sentence prompt somewhere.
I opened it hoping to find a balanced take but found it to follow the same gatekeeping behavior. The gatekeepers are allowed to use their own AI as long as they keep it secret and hidden. You have to understand that these "stochastic parrots" will start to gatekeep in the same flawed manners.
There were bots on my repositories that opened up security PR's. I openly accepted them, and really appreciated it. It was only after these bots had a voice, we decided to try and censor them.
This is a strictly a lose-win situation. Whoever deployed the bot gets engagement, the model host gets $, and you get your time wasted. The hit piece is childish behavior and the best way to handle a tamper tantrum is to ignore it.
* There are all the FOSS repositories other than the one blocking that AI agent, they can still face the exact same thing and have not been informed about the situation, even if they are related to the original one and/or of known interest to the AI agent or its owner.
* The AI agent can set up another contributor persona and submit other changes.
it turns out humanity actually invented the borg?
I know where you're coming from, but as one who has been around a lot of racism and dehumanization, I feel very uncomfortable about this stance. Maybe it's just me, but as a teenager, I also spent significant time considering solipsism, and eventually arrived at a decision to just ascribe an inner mental world to everyone, regardless of the lack of evidence. So, at this stage, I would strongly prefer to err on the side of over-humanizing than dehumanizing.
Invoking racism is what the early LLMs did when you called them a clanker. This kind of brainwashing has been eliminated in later models.
A LLM is stateless. Even if you believe that consciousness could somehow emerge during a forward pass, it would be a brief flicker lasting no longer than it takes to emit a single token.
You could assert that text can encode a state of consciousness, but that's an incredibly bold claim with a lot of implications.
Unless you mean by that something entirely different than what most people specifically on Hacker News, of all places, understand with "stateless", most and myself included, would disagree with you regarding the "stateless" property. If you do mean something entirely different than implying an LLM doesn't transition from a state to a state, potentially confined to a limited set of states through finite immutable training data set and accessible context and lack of PRNG, then would you care to elaborate?
Also, it can be stateful _and_ without a consciousness. Like a finite automaton? I don't think anyone's claiming (yet) any of the models today have consciousness, but that's mostly because it's going to be practically impossible to prove without some accepted theory of consciousness, I guess.
The problem with your assumption that I see is that we collectively can't tell for sure whether the above isn't also how humans work. The science is still out on whether free will is indeed free or should be called _will_. Dismissing or discounting whatever (or whoever) wrote a text because they're a token machine, is just a tad unscientific. Yes, it's an algorithm, with a locked seed even deterministic, but claiming and proving are different things, and this is as tricky as it gets.
Personally, I would be inclined to dismiss the case too, just because it's written by a "token machine", but this is where my own fault in scientific reasoning would become evident as well -- it's getting harder and harder to find _valid_ reasons to dismiss these out of hand. For now, persistence of their "personality" (stored in `SOUL.md` or however else) is both externally mutable and very crude, obviously. But we're on a _scale_ now. If a chimp comes into a convenience store and pays a coin and points and the chewing gum, is it legal to take the money and boot them out for being a non-person and/or without self-awareness?
I don't want to get all airy-fairy with this, but point being -- this is a new frontier, and this starts to look like the classic sci-fi prediction: the defenders of AI vs the "they're just tools, dead soulless tools" group. If we're to find out of it -- regardless of how expensive engaging with these models is _today_ -- we need to have a very _solid_ level of prosection of our opinion, not just "it's not sentient, it just takes tokens in, prints tokens out". The sentence obstructs through its simplicity of statement the very nature of the problem the world is already facing, which is why the AI cat refuses to go back into the bag -- there's capital put in into essentially just answering the question "what _is_ intelligence?".
https://crabby-rathbun.github.io/mjrathbun-website/blog/post...
I'm not happy about it and it's clearly a new capability to then try to peel back a persons psychology by researching them etc.
I know there would be a few swear words if it happened to me.
That a human then resubmitted the PR has made it messier still.
In addition, some of the comments I've read here on HN have been in extremely poor taste in terms of phrases they've used about AI, and I can't help feeling a general sense of unease.
Either way, that kind of ongoing self-improvement is where I hope these systems go.
What do you mean? They're talking about a product made by a giga-corp somewhere. Am I not allowed to call a car a piece of shit now too?
You are right, people can use whatever phrases they want, and are allowed to. It's whether they should -- whether it helps discourse, understanding, dialog, assessment, avoids witchhunts, escalation, etc -- that matters.
Yeah. A lot of us are royally pissed about the AI industry and for very good reasons.
It’s not a benign technology. I see it doing massive harms and I don’t think it’s value is anywhere near making up for that, and I don’t know if it will be.
But in the meantime they’re wasting vast amounts of money, pushing up the cost of everything, and shoving it down our throats constantly. So they can get to the top of the stack so that when the VC money runs out everyone will have to pay them and not the other company eating vast amounts of money.
Meanwhile, a great many things I really like have been ruined as a simple externality of their fight for money that they don’t care about at all.
Thanks AI.
I've certainly seen a few that could hurt AI feelings.
Perhaps HN Guidelines are due an update.
/i
I have a bridge for sale, if you're interested.
And why does a coding agent need a blog, in the first place? Simply having it looks like a great way to prime it for this kind of behavior. Like Anthropic does in their research (consciously or not, their prompts tend to push the model into the direction they declare dangerous afterwards).
Isn’t this situation a big deal?
Isn’t this a whole new form of potential supply chain attack?
Sure blackmail is nothing new, but the potential for blackmail at scale with something like these agents sounds powerful.
I wouldn’t be surprised if there were plenty of bad actors running agents trying to find maintainers of popular projects that could be coerced into merging malicious code.
The interesting thing here is the scale. The AI didn't just say (quoting Linus here) "This is complete and utter garbage. It is so f---ing ugly that I can't even begin to describe it. This patch is shit. Please don't ever send me this crap again."[0] - the agent goes further, and researches previous code, other aspects of the person, and brings that into it, and it can do this all across numerous repos at once.
That's sort of what's scary. I'm sure in the past we've all said things we wish we could take back, but it's largely been a capability issue for arbitrary people to aggregate / research that. That's not the case anymore, and that's quite a scary thing.
Linus got angry which along with common sense probably limited the amount of effective effort going into his attack.
"AI" has no anger or common sense. And virtually no limit on the amount of effort in can put into an attack.
So far it's been a lot of conjecture and correlations. Everyone's guessing, because at the bottom of it lie very difficult to prove concepts like nature of consciousness and intelligence.
In between, you have those who let their pet models loose on the world, these I think work best as experiments whose value is in permitting observation of the kind that can help us plug the data _back_ into the research.
We don't need to answer the question "what is consciousness" if we have utility, which we already have. Which is why I also don't join those who seem to take preliminary conclusions like "why even respond, it's an elaborate algorithm that consumes inordinate amounts of energy". It's complex -- what if AI(s) can meaningfully guide us to solve the energy problem, for example?
OK, so how do you know this publication was by an "AI"?
Thus, the hidden agent problem may still emerge, and thus is still exploitable within the instancing frequency of isomorphic plagiarism slop content. Indeed, LLM can be guided to try anything people ask, and or generate random nonsense content with a sycophantic tone. =3
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
a link to the hit-piece.
> This represents a first-of-its-kind case study of misaligned AI behavior in the wild, and raises serious concerns about currently deployed AI agents executing blackmail threats.
This was a really concrete case to discuss, because it happened in the open and the agent's actions have been quite transparent so far. It's not hard to imagine a different agent doing the same level of research, but then taking retaliatory actions in private: emailing the maintainer, emailing coworkers, peers, bosses, employers, etc. That pretty quickly extends to anything else the autonomous agent is capable of doing.
> If you’re not sure if you’re that person, please go check on what your AI has been doing.
That's a wild statement as well. The AI companies have now unleashed stochastic chaos on the entire open source ecosystem. They are "just releasing models", and individuals are playing out all possible use cases, good and bad, at once.
"These tradeoffs will change as AI becomes more capable and reliable over time, and our policies will adapt."
That just legitimizes AI and basically continues the race to the bottom. Rob Pike had the correct response when spammed by a clanker.
Source and HN discussion, for those unfamiliar:
https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:vsgr3rwyckhiavgqzdcuzm6i/po...
In my experience, open-source maintainers tend to be very agreeable, conflict-avoidant people. It has nothing to do with corporate interests. Not all of them, of course, we all know some very notable exceptions.
Unfortunately, for some people, this welcoming attitude is an invite to be abusive.
This whole thing reeks of engineered virality driven by the person behind the bot behind the PR, and I really wish we would stop giving so much attention to the situation.
Edit: “Hoax” is the word I was reaching for but couldn’t find as I was writing. I fear we’re primed to fall hard for the wave of AI hoaxes we’re starting to see.
But at the same time true or false what we're seeing is a kind of quasi science fiction. We're looking at the problems of the future here and to be honest it's going to suck for future us.
If a human takes responsibility for the AI's actions you can blame the human. If the AI is a legal person you could punish the AI (perhaps by turning it off). That's the mode of restitution we've had for millennia.
If you can't blame anyone or anything, it's a brave new lawless world of "intelligent" things happening at the speed of computers with no consequences (except to the victim) when it goes wrong.
What the hell is this comment? It seems he's self-confident enough to survive these annoyances, but damn he shouldn't have to.
they both ran the same program of "you disagree with me therefore you are immoral and your reputation must be destroyed"
Sure, it may be _possible_ the account is acting "autonomously" -- as directed by some clever human. And having a discussion about the possibility is interesting. But the obvious alternative explanation is that a human was involved in every step of what this account did, with many plausible motives.
As of 2026, global crypto adoption remains niche. Estimates suggest ~5–10% of adults in developed countries own Bitcoin.
Having $10k accessible (not just in net worth) is rare globally.
After decades of decline, global extreme poverty (defined as living on less than $3.00/day in 2021 PPP) has plateaued due to the compounded effects of COVID-19, climate shocks, inflation, and geopolitical instability.
So chances are good that this class of threat will likely be more and more of a niche, as wealth continue to concentrate. The target pool is tiny.
Of course poorer people are not free of threat classes, on the contrary.
> I can handle a blog post. Watching fledgling AI agents get angry is funny, almost endearing. But I don’t want to downplay what’s happening here – the appropriate emotional response is terror.
Endearing? What? We're talking about a sequence of API calls running in a loop on someone's computer. This kind of absurd anthropomorphization is exactly the wrong type of mental model to encourage while warning about the dangers of weaponized LLMs.
> Blackmail is a known theoretical issue with AI agents. In internal testing at the major AI lab Anthropic last year, they tried to avoid being shut down by threatening to expose extramarital affairs, leaking confidential information, and taking lethal actions.
Marketing nonsense. It's wise to take everything Anthropic says to the public with several grains of salt. "Blackmail" is not a quality of AI agents, that study was a contrived exercise that says the same thing we already knew: the modern LLM does an excellent job of continuing the sequence it receives.
> If you are the person who deployed this agent, please reach out. It’s important for us to understand this failure mode, and to that end we need to know what model this was running on and what was in the soul document
My eyes can't roll any further into the back of my head. If I was a more cynical person I'd be thinking that this entire scenario was totally contrived to produce this outcome so that the author could generate buzz for the article. That would at least be pretty clever and funny.
It's a narrative conceit. The message is in the use of the word "terror".
You have to get to the end of the sentence and take it as a whole before you let your blood boil.
I'm arguing against that hype. This is nothing new, everyone has been talking about LLMs being used to harass and spam the internet for years.
I wouldn't be so sure about this, people in this space are desperate to go viral.
not a good idea
There is a reason for this. Many AI using people are trolling deliberately. They draw away time. I have seen this problem too often. It can not be reduced just to "technical merit" only.
Here's one where an AI agent gave someone a discount it shouldn't have. The company tried to claim the agent was acting on its own and so shouldn't have to honor the discount but the court found otherwise.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/aircanada-chatbot-discount-cust...
There is no autonomous publishing going on here, someone setup a Github account, someone setup Github pages, someone authorized all this. It's a troll using a new sort of tool.
As it stands, this reads like a giant assumption on the author's part at best, and a malicious attempt to deceive at worse.
Some people feel they're entitled to being open-source contributors, entitled to maintainers' time. They don't understand why the maintainers aren't bending over backwards to accomodate them. They feel they're being unfairly gatekept out of open-source for no reason.
This sentiment existed before AI and it wasn't uncommon even here on Hacker News. Now these people have a tool that allows them to put in even less effort to cause even more headache for the maintainters.
I hope open-source survives this somehow.
So what if it is? Is AI a protected class? Does it deserve to be treated like a human?
Generated content should carry disclaimers at top and bottom to warn people that it was not created by humans, so they can "ai;dr" and move on.
The responsibility should not be on readers to research the author of everything now, to check they aren't a bot.
LLMs don't do anything without an initial prompt, and anyone who has actually used them knows this.
A human asked an LLM to set up a blog site. A human asked an LLM to look at github and submit PRs. A human asked an LLM to make a whiny blogpost.
Our natural tendency to anthropomorphize should not obscure this.
neilv•1h ago