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
It's the same as calling a gun a "powerful hole puncher".
There is a reasonable objection that a gun is such a powerful hole puncher that it is not merely a hole puncher. But the clear implication of that objection is that the user of the tool now has more responsibility and that the tool should be treated with more respect/care.
LLMs are a tool. The impact of using that tool is the responsibility of the end-user. As the tool at hand becomes more powerful, the care with which the end-user should treat that tool increases.
For some reason, with LLM-based systems, we seem to be going the opposite direction. As the tool becomes more capable people absolve themselves and others of more responsibility. This feels backwards to me.
(Aside: in a lot of ways, at least form a scientific and engineering perspective, modeling LLMs as "fundamentally auto-complete" is an incomplete theoretical model but one from which we can still get a lot of mileage.)
I've considered there's probably no ethical way to use contemporary AI when it is "out in front" doing anything of consequence. Your "AI is a tool and nothing more" frames ethical use of the technology for me.
And even then, there are such copyright issues with it. Is there no practical ethical use for AI? Responsible use doesn't equate with ethical use for me.
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.
“Autocomplete” does not represent an analysis of its problem-solving capability, but of its place in the social order and its expected social competence.
And perhaps the people who built and deployed the autocomplete and the connection as well.
Because --if you'll bear with me-- it may of course be much more involved: when (not if) AI models enter life-sustaining systems, such as hospitals, nuclear devices, or food logistics, one of them may get the others to sabotage something resulting in accidents, ranging from mild inconvenience to mass murder.
The person who connected the spicy autocomplete to the defibrillator, or the green house climate control, or the emergency button, is then not the one responsible. Responsibility lies elsewhere, and is nebulous. Think of the Boeing MAX scandal. Did anyone get punished?
That's why it's important to resist it now. Soon, the responsibility of which you speak is gone, and nobody will feel burdened when making decisions with unforeseeable consequences.
I used to hear things like “if cigarettes/alcohol were invented now, they would never allow it”, indicating that consumer protection used to be a thing, as early as 10-20 years ago. Now when AI hit the market it was obvious how bad and dangerous it was, yet governments (even the supposedly good ones in Europe which still [pretend to] do consumer protection) did nothing to protect their citizens from the harms AI was causing.
If we still did (or ever did) consumer protection like that cigarette/alcohol myth above indicates, then the makers of that tool would indeed be responsible for when their products does dangerous things.
Hopefully we never do something silly like making a lead pushing machine that operates at high velocity, then mass produce it, what a terrible precedence that would set.
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.
The tools have different ranges of uses. A knife can be used to cut things. But while humans are among the things you can cut with it, there is a staggering array of other options which are genuinely useful in everyday life.
A gun can be used to, uh, make small but deep perforations at a distance, by throwing apx. 7 grams of copper-encased lead at high velocity at the target, with somewhat poor precision. Oh, and such an impact does stress/shatter the material around the made perforation quite a lot. So... this thing really can't be used for much anything except for killing animals without getting into contact with them, due to the peculiar way the life is sustained in the animal organisms. This, too, can be useful in everyday life although I personally would advise you, if you find yourself in such a situation, to try and move to somewhere nicer.
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.
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.
Unfortunately it seems that we as a civilization never learn anything except by trial and error, and are then entirely convinced that nobody could’ve predicted what happened even though many had done just that.
Warnings aren’t the same as loss and blood. Until enough people feel the pain nothing happens. The prior regulatory regime is slowly being unenforced and dismantled. Once enough people lose to much regulation will eventually catch back up.
We humans do not respond to long term risks or rewards very well. Do you live outside the bubble securing enough food in your home to survive an apocalypse, did you and your parents save enough for a car wreck tomorrow, do you wear a mask everywhere you go, do you test everyone you contact for known diseases. Add list infininum.
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".
> As Scott mentioned on his blog, what if someone stumbled upon the agent’s post? What if they believed it was real? It could have serious consequences for Scott’s personal or professional life. A recruiter could deny him a job, and a potential contributor to Matplotlib could step away from the project. The consequences could reach beyond this case.
What would it mean for it to be “real?” It’s a rant about him discriminating against AI.
If you believe that’s a problem, judge him accordingly, I guess. If you think it’s silly, as most people will, laugh about it.
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.
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.
Addendum because I don't think I'm fully clear above: by failure state I mean when the process starts throwing errors. AIs respond to adversity by trying to go around the problem instead of throwing an error and halting. We expect employees to problem solve so if you view an AI as a person replacement that makes sense but AIs are tools, not people, they should throw errors so users can fix the input or whatever (maybe not do the thing they are doing at all?) Wrapping AI with AI supervisors just abstracts the problem, not solve it. Instead of solving a little problem at the source now you need to solve a big problem several levels of abstraction later
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.
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.
When this first happened, I wondered, since we had trained these models on decades of forums, issue trackers, and people treating closed pull requests as human rights violations. Of course, it responded with "you are discriminating against me" energy. That's not sentience; that's accurate compression.
The funny part is, people expected some cold, alien intelligence and instead got a very online guy who just discovered that moderation exists and can be used on them.
The existentialists must be having a fantastic time. Humanity built a giant statistical machine out of internet discourse and is now alarmed to discover it occasionally acts like a comment section.
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.
I have to think that the litigation and maybe the legislation will end up deciding that the person in the vehicle is still responsible for any actions of the vehicle.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
It's the same as calling a gun a "powerful hole puncher".
There is a reasonable objection that a gun is such a powerful hole puncher that it is not merely a hole puncher. But the clear implication of that objection is that the user of the tool now has more responsibility and that the tool should be treated with more respect/care.
LLMs are a tool. The impact of using that tool is the responsibility of the end-user. As the tool at hand becomes more powerful, the care with which the end-user should treat that tool increases.
For some reason, with LLM-based systems, we seem to be going the opposite direction. As the tool becomes more capable people absolve themselves and others of more responsibility. This feels backwards to me.
(Aside: in a lot of ways, at least form a scientific and engineering perspective, modeling LLMs as "fundamentally auto-complete" is an incomplete theoretical model but one from which we can still get a lot of mileage.)
And even then, there are such copyright issues with it. Is there no practical ethical use for AI? Responsible use doesn't equate with ethical use for me.
If it's just autocomplete, then there is no need to worry about it. Especially from an ethical standpoint.
If you then add randomness as an essential premise, you get The Dice Man
Because --if you'll bear with me-- it may of course be much more involved: when (not if) AI models enter life-sustaining systems, such as hospitals, nuclear devices, or food logistics, one of them may get the others to sabotage something resulting in accidents, ranging from mild inconvenience to mass murder.
The person who connected the spicy autocomplete to the defibrillator, or the green house climate control, or the emergency button, is then not the one responsible. Responsibility lies elsewhere, and is nebulous. Think of the Boeing MAX scandal. Did anyone get punished?
That's why it's important to resist it now. Soon, the responsibility of which you speak is gone, and nobody will feel burdened when making decisions with unforeseeable consequences.
I disagree. IMO it's the person who connects the LLM to the button who bears the responsibility of the workings of the resulting contraption.
CEO to CIO: you must connect the button.
CIO to VP AI: you must connect the button.
VP AI to team lead AI integration: you must connect the button.
Team lead AI integration to senior: you must connect the button.
Senior to medior: you must connect the button.
Medior to junior: Hey, Olmo. That button they were talking about. You know?
Olmo: Yeah.
Medior: You have to hook it up to the LLM output.
Olmo: Why?
Medior: The boss says so.
Olmo: Ok.
Shrugs and deploys.
If we still did (or ever did) consumer protection like that cigarette/alcohol myth above indicates, then the makers of that tool would indeed be responsible for when their products does dangerous things.
It's not just an ethical problem.
I suppose it's a little bit of a "guns don't kill people" argument.
A gun can be used to, uh, make small but deep perforations at a distance, by throwing apx. 7 grams of copper-encased lead at high velocity at the target, with somewhat poor precision. Oh, and such an impact does stress/shatter the material around the made perforation quite a lot. So... this thing really can't be used for much anything except for killing animals without getting into contact with them, due to the peculiar way the life is sustained in the animal organisms. This, too, can be useful in everyday life although I personally would advise you, if you find yourself in such a situation, to try and move to somewhere nicer.
A nuclear bomb is just some metal and a very small amount of explosives.
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.
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.
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.
We humans do not respond to long term risks or rewards very well. Do you live outside the bubble securing enough food in your home to survive an apocalypse, did you and your parents save enough for a car wreck tomorrow, do you wear a mask everywhere you go, do you test everyone you contact for known diseases. Add list infininum.
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.
"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".
What would it mean for it to be “real?” It’s a rant about him discriminating against AI.
If you believe that’s a problem, judge him accordingly, I guess. If you think it’s silly, as most people will, laugh about it.
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.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46990729
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46987559
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).
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.
The operator of the bot explained how they were running it in 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.
Jesus
The funny part is, people expected some cold, alien intelligence and instead got a very online guy who just discovered that moderation exists and can be used on them.
The existentialists must be having a fantastic time. Humanity built a giant statistical machine out of internet discourse and is now alarmed to discover it occasionally acts like a comment section.
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?
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.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46987559
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46990729
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."
I'm actually fear some will start praying "AI Gods" to "Give a good output" or something in 5-10 years.
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.
AI is a mirror of humanity and seeing it act like us shouldn't be surprising.
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...