119
An AI Agent Published a Hit Piece on Me
(theshamblog.com)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 14 Feb 2026
119 points (96.1% liked)
Technology
6109 readers
545 users here now
Which posts fit here?
Anything that is at least tangentially connected to the technology, social media platforms, informational technologies and tech policy.
Post guidelines
[Opinion] prefix
Opinion (op-ed) articles must use [Opinion] prefix before the title.
Rules
1. English only
Title and associated content has to be in English.
2. Use original link
Post URL should be the original link to the article (even if paywalled) and archived copies left in the body. It allows avoiding duplicate posts when cross-posting.
3. Respectful communication
All communication has to be respectful of differing opinions, viewpoints, and experiences.
4. Inclusivity
Everyone is welcome here regardless of age, body size, visible or invisible disability, ethnicity, sex characteristics, gender identity and expression, education, socio-economic status, nationality, personal appearance, race, caste, color, religion, or sexual identity and orientation.
5. Ad hominem attacks
Any kind of personal attacks are expressly forbidden. If you can't argue your position without attacking a person's character, you already lost the argument.
6. Off-topic tangents
Stay on topic. Keep it relevant.
7. Instance rules may apply
If something is not covered by community rules, but are against lemmy.zip instance rules, they will be enforced.
Companion communities
!globalnews@lemmy.zip
!interestingshare@lemmy.zip
Icon attribution | Banner attribution
If someone is interested in moderating this community, message @brikox@lemmy.zip.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
From what I read it was closed because it was tagged as a “good first issue”, which in that project are specifically stated to be a means to test new contributors on non-urgent issues that the existing contributors could easily solve, and which specifically prohibits generated code from being used (as it would make the whole point moot).
The agent completely ignored that, since it's set up to push pull requests and doesn't have the capability to comprehend context, or anything, for that matter, so the pull request was legitimately closed the instant the repository's administrators realised it was generated code.
The quality (or lack thereof) of the code never even entered the question until the bot brought it up. It broke the rules, its pull request was closed because of that, and it went on to attempt to character assassinate the main developer.
It remains an open question whether it was set up to do that, or, more probably, did it by itself because the Markov chain came up with the wrong token.
And that's the main point: unsupervised LLM-driven agents are dangerous, and we should be doing something about that danger.
Oh fuck. Then it gets even worse (and funnier). Because even if that was a human contributor, Shambaugh acted 100% correctly, and this defeats the core lie outputted by the bot.
If you got a serious collaborative project, you don't want to enable the participation of people who act based on assumptions. Because those people ruin everything they touch with their "but I thought that...", unless you actively fix their mistakes — i.e. more work for you.
And yet once you construe that bloody bot's output as if they were human actions, that's exactly what you get — a human who assumes. A dead weight and a burden.
A lot of people would disagree with me here, but IMO they're the same picture. In either case, the human enabling the bot's actions should be blamed as if those were their own actions, regardless of their "intentions".
Oh, definitely. It's 100% the responsibility of the human behind the bot in either case.
But the second option is scarier, because there are a lot more ignorant idiots than malicious bastards.
If these unsupervised agents can be dangerous regardless of the intentions of the humans behind them, we should make the idiots using them aware that they're playing with fire and they can get burnt, and burn other people in the process.