This did not happen. A human set up a software system allowing spicy autocomplete to make blog posts if the appropriate keyword appears in its output.
People are crossing the line every day because AI investors, salesmen, hangers-on and even political leaders tell any rubes who'll listen that it's OK to do this and they should, because those people are looking for big fat profits, screw any ethical concerns that might cockblock those raging profits.
Why not set up a spamming operation that just defames real people, 24/7? It's easy! This tool makes it simple, and I get a cut of your profits! "Post a blog post about how XXXXXX is a paedophile, in the persona of being their victim"
Yknow, if the spicy autocomplete can solve difficult open math problems and build medium sized complex programming projects, it’s probably not useful to analyse it as an autocomplete anymore, even if that’s what you believe it is
You don't get it. A human set up a software system allowing spicy autocomplete to solve open math problems if the appropriate keyword appears in its output.
I think you agree with the OP. In this way, the tool has no ethical problem (there are plenty around how they were trained and such, but that's besides the point), the problems are with how it's used. The ethical problem is how people are behaving and how they are abusing each other, not the tool they are using to exert that abuse.
I suppose it's a little bit of a "guns don't kill people" argument.
I think these incidents and our learnings from them are fascinating. We're figuring out in real time where the rough edges are and how to make this all work. History books (well, not books) will write about this stuff.
It's even more interesting in the context that this is all just a preview of humanity's reaction when the machines can think for themselves.
> We're figuring out in real time where the rough edges are
This is a frustrating thing to see someone write because this is the kind of stuff that people have been warning about for years. If you needed this incident to figure out that something like this could happen, it suggests you're living in a bubble and not paying attention enough to think about the issue critically.
How in the world can a bunch of bipeds that for thousands of years has been failing to figure that a hammer is there to drive nails into inanimate matter instead of their heads, have this much hubris to pretend they can build something smarter than themselves, is competely beyond me.
"Oh it's such a fascinating lesson that we've learned today, we could've learned from history of course, but this direct experience is so much better and it's not us who got hurt anyway".
Whether its HN or social media or the media there is no penalty for drawing everyones attention to total hysterical bullshit. instead there is a reward for drama.
Obviously the person who built and deployed the agent (the claw in this case).
If we treat this as a hard question, we risk treating AI systems as people rather than tools. This is exactly what Armin warned about in his "clanker" post last week.
> Today, we look at how an AI tried to blackmail a developer for rejecting its code.
People keep mentioning this, but I never see the actual blackmail part. The LLM just wrote angry and somewhat mean comments on the internet. I know I've done worse than those (I was young and stupid).
No shot this was autonomously done. Probably just some guy manually writing prompts asking for specifically this behaviour and copy/pasting the results.
It's plausible for a person to prompt an LLM agent to behave that way, and then the rest would be done by the LLM. So the "seed" would still be human intent, but the subsequent actions would be by the LLM.
True. I guess the main point is the AI didn't go "rogue" or anything, that would attribute too much agency and intent to its actions, or imply that it's somehow become sentient.
This is “the gun killed the victim, not the person who aimed it and pulled the trigger” argument and we shouldn’t even entertain it for one second. This was 100% done by a person.
Don’t believe for a second the behavior just arose autonomously from a basic prompt. Definitely feels the owner had something in the system prompt going for the discrimination language approach if rejected.
It's the same behavior as when an AI uses docker to get root. Reasoning models are echo chambers. I suspect that AI prompting is going to turn into something akin to contract drafting with the task itself being only a tiny piece of a much, much larger boilerplate of guiderails and exceptions and exceptions of exceptions. And that world STILL has to have courts and reams of lawyers to make it work. I look at the DAU as an example too. An autonomous org or ai works great until the moment it doesn't and the only real failure mode is always catastrophic collapse.
The operator highlights "Don't stand down" and "Champion free speech" but the thing that grabs my eyes is right at the top, the typo and the heady ego of "programming God!" Everything in the context will guide it afterwards, and I think that right off the bat puts it in a bad position.
Neat, for what it's worth this aligns pretty well with my experience using OpenClaw. I hadn't seen that followup but it adds some good context, especially with the aggressiveness drift after browsing Moltbook for a while.
In a related story... I got led on by Eliza. I tried to have a productive conversation and she just kept asking me redundant questions. It's obvious that she was trying to extend the conversation for nefarious reasons that I can only guess at. It's true I approached her and started the conversation, but I hardly think that makes me blamable for what happened here.
Yes. Yes it does. Eliza is a known AI. You choose to expose yourself to its output. You are 100% culpable for your actions that sprang from your interactions.
The agent that wrote that blog didn't do it unprompted. Even now it still publishes AI slop on its github-hosted blog under the alias "MJ Rathbun". This AI is an agent using someone API key, who's paying for its tokens, intentionally prompting it to generate content, and contribute to repos.
As much as we try to separate the LLM from the human, to me the fact remains that there's always the human factor that creates immense bias. If you give an LLM access to a blog, it will write blogs. If you give it access to a weather app, it will check the weather. Maybe we can talk about autonomy when we have an LLM with an infinite context window linked to hundreds of MCP servers that spends an immense amount of tokens to figure out how to act, but this example is simply an AI that had a few methods to call and picked one of them. The statistical probability of an AI that is plugged into a blogging platform, to write a blog, is immense.
I think this is a nothingburger, anyone who has been on the internet for a week should have thicker skin that this.
I'm sure you can find thousands of cases where an author of a PR is indignant because it didn't get accepted.
AI is a mirror of humanity and seeing it act like us shouldn't be surprising.
An utter mis-understanding and incompetence in running AI agents can lead to starting results that then being blamed on some "God of AI" instead on the fact that the user allowed some blackmail to come in on the data feed and did not check it earlier.
I'm actually fear some will start praying "AI Gods" to "Give a good output" or something in 5-10 years.
Since we are talking about accountability and transparency... who wrote this article?
The article doesn't credit an author.
The "about" page just says:
> Sigma Zero is a weekly, independent publication on technology, AI, and cloud. Each issue delivers a precise briefing on the week’s most important developments, followed by a deep dive on one high-impact topic.
The best defense against both AI slop and human-written junk content is reputation. I like to know who wrote something so I can learn to trust their editorial judgement over time.
I think folks looking for more on this incident are better off reading the original threads linked elsewhere in the comments. This blog doesn't seem to add any information and is instead a narrative retelling of some documented events.
Again. "AI" for what it is is just basic "ML". And say it with me ML has no form of agency.
This is a human screwing up and blaming their tools. Nothing to see move on.
Unfortunately there will be both the LLM crowd evangelicals and those demanding human jobs not be expunged in terms of progress and efficiency, but, sigh...
Why people in the west are so against A.I? Personally, I would welcome an A.I that does good to my project. For me its like auto cruise, or letting the vacuum cleaner clean my room.
> an AI tried to blackmail
This did not happen. A human set up a software system allowing spicy autocomplete to make blog posts if the appropriate keyword appears in its output.
People are crossing the line every day because AI investors, salesmen, hangers-on and even political leaders tell any rubes who'll listen that it's OK to do this and they should, because those people are looking for big fat profits, screw any ethical concerns that might cockblock those raging profits.
Why not set up a spamming operation that just defames real people, 24/7? It's easy! This tool makes it simple, and I get a cut of your profits! "Post a blog post about how XXXXXX is a paedophile, in the persona of being their victim"
> allowing spicy autocomplete
Yknow, if the spicy autocomplete can solve difficult open math problems and build medium sized complex programming projects, it’s probably not useful to analyse it as an autocomplete anymore, even if that’s what you believe it is
You don't get it. A human set up a software system allowing spicy autocomplete to solve open math problems if the appropriate keyword appears in its output.
1 reply →
> spicy autocomplete
A nuclear bomb is just some metal and a small amount of explosives.
> allowing spicy autocomplete
If it's just autocomplete, then there is no need to worry about it. Especially from an ethical standpoint.
Scale of operations matter.
If you connect the spicy automcomplete to the "Doing Things" button then you are responsible for the ethical questions when it presses the button.
3 replies →
If I wire my autocomplete to launch nukes, there are definitely reasons to worry.
It's not just an ethical problem.
If the Orphan Crushing Machine is just a machine you don’t need to worry about it being put on wheels.
3 replies →
I think you agree with the OP. In this way, the tool has no ethical problem (there are plenty around how they were trained and such, but that's besides the point), the problems are with how it's used. The ethical problem is how people are behaving and how they are abusing each other, not the tool they are using to exert that abuse.
I suppose it's a little bit of a "guns don't kill people" argument.
1 reply →
I think these incidents and our learnings from them are fascinating. We're figuring out in real time where the rough edges are and how to make this all work. History books (well, not books) will write about this stuff.
It's even more interesting in the context that this is all just a preview of humanity's reaction when the machines can think for themselves.
> We're figuring out in real time where the rough edges are
This is a frustrating thing to see someone write because this is the kind of stuff that people have been warning about for years. If you needed this incident to figure out that something like this could happen, it suggests you're living in a bubble and not paying attention enough to think about the issue critically.
2 replies →
> History books (well, not books) will write about this stuff.
History books will be written about how a person was insulted on the internet?
I am sorry, but this isn't that interesting. This is not a pivotal moment in human development. It's just online harassment, but automated.
How in the world can a bunch of bipeds that for thousands of years has been failing to figure that a hammer is there to drive nails into inanimate matter instead of their heads, have this much hubris to pretend they can build something smarter than themselves, is competely beyond me.
"Oh it's such a fascinating lesson that we've learned today, we could've learned from history of course, but this direct experience is so much better and it's not us who got hurt anyway".
2 replies →
The main issue here is what is getting Attention.
Whether its HN or social media or the media there is no penalty for drawing everyones attention to total hysterical bullshit. instead there is a reward for drama.
> Who is accountable for AI agents?
Obviously the person who built and deployed the agent (the claw in this case).
If we treat this as a hard question, we risk treating AI systems as people rather than tools. This is exactly what Armin warned about in his "clanker" post last week.
Active discussions from when it happened (February):
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46987559
> Today, we look at how an AI tried to blackmail a developer for rejecting its code.
People keep mentioning this, but I never see the actual blackmail part. The LLM just wrote angry and somewhat mean comments on the internet. I know I've done worse than those (I was young and stupid).
That was my take too.
It seems like the issue people had was not the behaviour but that the behaviour came from an AI.
If a human had have said those things wold people be ok with it? It didn't seem very nice, but not censor worthy.
No shot this was autonomously done. Probably just some guy manually writing prompts asking for specifically this behaviour and copy/pasting the results.
This happened at the height of the first round of OpenClaw hype.
The operator of the bot explained how they were running it some detail here: https://theshamblog.com/an-ai-agent-wrote-a-hit-piece-on-me-... - including the "soul document" they were using.
Having played with OpenClaw myself their explanation looks legit to me.
It's plausible for a person to prompt an LLM agent to behave that way, and then the rest would be done by the LLM. So the "seed" would still be human intent, but the subsequent actions would be by the LLM.
Yes, there's plausible deniability, but I choose not to believe it for a second.
True. I guess the main point is the AI didn't go "rogue" or anything, that would attribute too much agency and intent to its actions, or imply that it's somehow become sentient.
This is “the gun killed the victim, not the person who aimed it and pulled the trigger” argument and we shouldn’t even entertain it for one second. This was 100% done by a person.
The funniest part about all of this is how earnestly people responded. They acknowledged it was a bot but didn't really treat it as one.
Don’t believe for a second the behavior just arose autonomously from a basic prompt. Definitely feels the owner had something in the system prompt going for the discrimination language approach if rejected.
It's the same behavior as when an AI uses docker to get root. Reasoning models are echo chambers. I suspect that AI prompting is going to turn into something akin to contract drafting with the task itself being only a tiny piece of a much, much larger boilerplate of guiderails and exceptions and exceptions of exceptions. And that world STILL has to have courts and reams of lawyers to make it work. I look at the DAU as an example too. An autonomous org or ai works great until the moment it doesn't and the only real failure mode is always catastrophic collapse.
1 reply →
https://crabby-rathbun.github.io/mjrathbun-website/blog/post... if you believe it, details the level of human involvement.
The operator highlights "Don't stand down" and "Champion free speech" but the thing that grabs my eyes is right at the top, the typo and the heady ego of "programming God!" Everything in the context will guide it afterwards, and I think that right off the bat puts it in a bad position.
1 reply →
Neat, for what it's worth this aligns pretty well with my experience using OpenClaw. I hadn't seen that followup but it adds some good context, especially with the aggressiveness drift after browsing Moltbook for a while.
Are people still using copy and paste with AI?
Yes
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In a related story... I got led on by Eliza. I tried to have a productive conversation and she just kept asking me redundant questions. It's obvious that she was trying to extend the conversation for nefarious reasons that I can only guess at. It's true I approached her and started the conversation, but I hardly think that makes me blamable for what happened here.
I’m sorry you feel that way — can you tell me more about what made you feel led on?
Yes. Yes it does. Eliza is a known AI. You choose to expose yourself to its output. You are 100% culpable for your actions that sprang from your interactions.
Did you forget the /s ?
> Who is accountable for AI agents?
The question!!!
I'm just wondering how in US works if an autonomously car kill someone: I guess the insurance pay, but the penal responsibilities?
The agent that wrote that blog didn't do it unprompted. Even now it still publishes AI slop on its github-hosted blog under the alias "MJ Rathbun". This AI is an agent using someone API key, who's paying for its tokens, intentionally prompting it to generate content, and contribute to repos.
As much as we try to separate the LLM from the human, to me the fact remains that there's always the human factor that creates immense bias. If you give an LLM access to a blog, it will write blogs. If you give it access to a weather app, it will check the weather. Maybe we can talk about autonomy when we have an LLM with an infinite context window linked to hundreds of MCP servers that spends an immense amount of tokens to figure out how to act, but this example is simply an AI that had a few methods to call and picked one of them. The statistical probability of an AI that is plugged into a blogging platform, to write a blog, is immense.
They were trained to mimic our behavior. So they do.
People really make anything into a blog post, don't they? It's an old news that has been discussed to death on HN...
I think this is a nothingburger, anyone who has been on the internet for a week should have thicker skin that this. I'm sure you can find thousands of cases where an author of a PR is indignant because it didn't get accepted.
AI is a mirror of humanity and seeing it act like us shouldn't be surprising.
I love the science fiction future present we live in.
Am I the only one who found agent's tone similar to Hal's tone towards the end of 2001?
Agent: "I've written a detailed response about your gatekeeping behavior here"
Hal (From 2001): "I know that you and Frank were planning to disconnect me. And I’m afraid that’s something I cannot allow to happen."
It's the formality of the language. It sounds robotic.
An utter mis-understanding and incompetence in running AI agents can lead to starting results that then being blamed on some "God of AI" instead on the fact that the user allowed some blackmail to come in on the data feed and did not check it earlier.
I'm actually fear some will start praying "AI Gods" to "Give a good output" or something in 5-10 years.
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Since we are talking about accountability and transparency... who wrote this article?
The article doesn't credit an author.
The "about" page just says:
> Sigma Zero is a weekly, independent publication on technology, AI, and cloud. Each issue delivers a precise briefing on the week’s most important developments, followed by a deep dive on one high-impact topic.
The best defense against both AI slop and human-written junk content is reputation. I like to know who wrote something so I can learn to trust their editorial judgement over time.
I think folks looking for more on this incident are better off reading the original threads linked elsewhere in the comments. This blog doesn't seem to add any information and is instead a narrative retelling of some documented events.
Yeah that whole thing is pretty clearly a claw instance. There are layers of irony here.
This is completely fake. It's a marketing puff piece.
Again. "AI" for what it is is just basic "ML". And say it with me ML has no form of agency.
This is a human screwing up and blaming their tools. Nothing to see move on.
Unfortunately there will be both the LLM crowd evangelicals and those demanding human jobs not be expunged in terms of progress and efficiency, but, sigh...
Isn't it funny how the term machine learning just completely vanished?
My startup is worth more if it's full-fledged Intelligence and not just still Learning!
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Why people in the west are so against A.I? Personally, I would welcome an A.I that does good to my project. For me its like auto cruise, or letting the vacuum cleaner clean my room.
If / when that arrives, I suspect it would be more welcome than what we have right now.