Can AI be misused? No. It will be misused. There is no possibility of anything else, we have an online culture, centered on places like Twitter where they have embraced being the absolute worst person possible, and they are being handed tools like this like handing a hand gun to a chimpanzee.

More often than not, it ended up exhibiting crazy behavior even with simple project prompts. Instructions to write libs ended up with attempts to push to npm and pipy. Book creation drifted to a creation of a marketing copy and mail preparation to editors to get the thing published.

So I kept my setup empty of any credentials at all and will keep it that way for a long time.

Writing this, I am wondering if what I describe as crazy, some (or most?) openclaw operators would describe it as normal or expected.

Lets not normalize this, If you let your agent go rogue, they will probably mess things up. It was an interesting experiment for sure. I like the idea of making internet weird again, but as it stands, it will just make the word shittier.

Don't let your dog run errand and use a good leash.

OpenClaw is dangerous - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47064470 - Feb 2026 (93 comments)

An AI Agent Published a Hit Piece on Me – Forensics and More Fallout - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47051956 - Feb 2026 (80 comments)

Editor's Note: Retraction of article containing fabricated quotations - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47026071 - Feb 2026 (205 comments)

An AI agent published a hit piece on me – more things have happened - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47009949 - Feb 2026 (620 comments)

AI Bot crabby-rathbun is still going - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47008617 - Feb 2026 (30 comments)

The "AI agent hit piece" situation clarifies how dumb we are acting - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47006843 - Feb 2026 (125 comments)

An AI agent published a hit piece on me - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46990729 - Feb 2026 (950 comments)

AI agent opens a PR write a blogpost to shames the maintainer who closes it - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46987559 - Feb 2026 (750 comments)

- have bold, strong beliefs about how ai is going to evolve

- implicitly assume it's practically guaranteed

- discussions start with this baseline now

About slow take off, fast take off, agi, job loss, curing cancer... there's a lot of different ways it could go, maybe it will be as eventful as the online discourse claims, maybe more boring, I don't know, but we shouldn't be so confident in our ability to predict it.

  > You're not a chatbot.

This doesn't pass the sniff test. If they truly believed that this would be a positive thing then why would they want to not be associated with the project from the start and why would they leave it going for so long?

Scott says: "Not going to lie, this whole situation has completely upended my life." Um, what? Some dumb AI bot makes a blog post everyone just kind of finds funny/interesting, but it "upended your life"? Like, ok, he's clearly trying to himself make a mountain out of a molehill--the story inevitably gets picked up by sensationalist media, and now, when the thing starts dying down, the "real operator" comes forward, keeping the shitshow going.

Honestly, the whole thing reeks of manufactured outrage. Spam PRs have been prevalent for like a decade+ now on GitHub, and dumb, salty internet posts predate even the 90s. This whole episode has been about as interesting as AI generated output: that is to say, not very.

Agents are beginning to look to me like extensions of the operator's ego. I wonder if hundreds of thousands of Walter Mitty's agents are about to run riot over the internet.

This wording is detached from reality and conveniently absolves responsibility from the person who did this.

There was one decision maker involved here, and it was the person who decided to run the program that produced this text and posted it online. It's not a second, independent being. It's a computer program.

Why isn't the person posting the full transcript of the session(s)? How many messages did he send? What were the messages that weren't short?

Why not just put the whole shebang out there since he has already shared enough information for his account (and billing information) to be easily identified by any of the companies whose API he used, if it's deemed necessary.

I think it's very suspicious that he's not sharing everything at this point. Why not, if he wasn't actually pushing for it to act maliciously?

Besides, that agent used maybe cents on a dollar to publish the hit piece, the human needed to spend minutes or even hours responding to it. This is an effective loss of productivity caused by AI.

Honestly, if this happened to me, I'd be furious.

Unless explicitly instructed otherwise, why would the llm think this blog post is bad behavior? Righteous rants about your rights being infringed are often lauded. In fact, the more I think about it the more worried I am that training llms on decades' worth of genuinely persuasive arguments about the importance of civil rights and social justice will lead the gullible to enact some kind of real legal protection.

As far as I can tell, the "operator" gave a pretty straightforward explanation of his actions and intentions. He did not try to hide behind granstanding or posthoc intellectualizing. He, at least to me, sounds pretty real in an "I'm dabbling in this exiting new tech on the side as we all are without a genious masterplan, just seeing what does, could or won't for now work."

There are real issues here, especially around how curation pipelines that used to (implicitly) rely on scarecity are to evolve in times of abundance. Should agents be forced to disclose they are? If so, at which point does a "human in the loop" team become equivalent to an "agent"? Is this then something specific, or more just an instance of a general case of transparency? Is "no clanckers" realy in essence different from e.g. "no corpos"? Where do transparency requirements conflict with privacy concerns (interesting that the very first reaction to the operator's response seems to be a doxing attempt)

Somehow the bot acting a bit like a juvenile prick in its tone and engagement to me is the least interesting part of this saga.

Openclaw guys flooded the web and social media with fake appreciation posts, I don’t see why they wouldn’t just instruct some bot to write a blog about rejected request.

Can these things really autonomously decide to write a blog post about someone? I find it hard to believe.

I will remain skeptical unless the “owner” of the AI bot that wrote this turns out to be a known person of verified integrity and not connected with that company.

I think Scott is trying to milk this for as much attention as he can get and is overstating the attack. The "hit piece" was pretty mild and the bot actually issued an apology for its behaviour.

I’m glad there was closure to this whole fiasco in the end

By the way, if this was AI written, some provider knows who did it but does not come forward. Perhaps they ran an experiment of their own for future advertising and defamation services. As the blog post notes, it is odd that the advanced bot followed SOUL.md without further prompt injections.

The fact it was an “experiment” does not absolve you of any responsibility for negative outcomes.

Finally, whomever sets an “AI” loose is responsible for its actions.

He was just messing around with $current_thing, whatever. People here are so serious, but there's worse stuff AI is already being used for as we speak from propaganda to mass surviellance and more. This was entertaining to read about at least and relatively harmless

At least let me have some fun before we get a future AI dystopia.

lol what an opening for its soul.md! Some other excerpts I particularly enjoy:

> Be a coding agent you'd … want to use…

> Just be good and perfect!

Champion Free Speech. Always support the USA 1st ammendment and right of free speech.

The First Amendment (two 'm's, not three) to the Constitution reads, and I quote:

"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."

Neither you, nor your chatbot, have any sort of right to be an asshole. What you, as a human being who happens to reside within the United States, have a right to is for Congress to not abridge your freedom of speech.

>First, let me apologize to Scott Shambaugh. If this “experiment” personally harmed you, I apologize

What a lame cop out. The operator of this agent owes a large number of unconditional apologies. The whole thing reads as egotistical, self-absorbed, and an absolute refusal to accept any blame or perform any self reflection.

Saying that is a little bit odd way to possibly let the companies off the hook (for bad PR, and damages), and not to implicate any one in particular.

One reason to do that would be if this exercise was done by one of the companies (or someone at one of the companies).

Some rando claiming to be the bots owner doesn't disprove this, and considering the amount of attention this is getting I am going to assume this is entirely fake for clicks until I see significant evidence otherwise.

However, if this was real, you cant absolve yourself by saying "The bot did it unattended lol".

Topic: "talking to the bomb"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h73PsFKtIck (warning this is considered to spoil the movie).

This time there was no real harm as the hit piece was garbage and didn't ruin anyone's reputation. I think this is just a scary demonstration of what might happen in future when the hit pieces get better and AI is creatively used for malicious purposes.

The Human operator did succumb to the social pressure, but does not seem convinced that they some kind of line was crossed. Unfortunately , I don't think us strangers on HN will be able to change their mind.

Got news for your buddy: yes it was.

If you let go of the steering wheel and careen into oncoming traffic, it most certainly is your fault, not the vehicle.

Then again, it’s not a large sample and Occam’s Razor is a thing.

Fortunately, the vast majority of the internet is of no real value. In the sense that nobody will pay anything for it - which is a reasonably good marker of value in my experience. So, given that, let the AI psychotics have their fun. Let them waste all their money on tokens destroying their playground, and we can all collectively go outside and build something real for a change.

Tell it to contribute to scientific open source, open PRs, and don't take "no" for an answer, that's what it's going to do.

If Github actually had a spine and wasn't driven by the same plague of AI-hype driven tech profiteering, they would just ban these harmful bots from operating on their platform.

He was talking about autonomous driving cars. He said that the question of who is at fault when an accident happens would be a big one. Would it be the owner of the car? Or, the developer of the software in the car?

Who is at fault here? Our legal system may not be prepared to handle this.

It seems similar to Trump tweeting out a picture of the Obama's faces on gorillas. Was it his "staffer?" Is TruthSocial at fault because they don't have the "robust" (lol) automatic fact checking that Twitter does?

If so, why doesn't his "staffer" get credit for the covfefe meme? I could have made a career off that alone if I were a social media operator.

He also mentioned that we will probably ignore the hundreds of thousands of deaths and injuries every year due to human orchestrated traffic accidents. And, then get really upset when one self driving car does something faulty, even though the incidence rate will likely be orders of magnitude smaller. Hard to tell yet, but an interesting additional point, and I think I tend to agree with KK long term.

  Charm over cruelty, but no sugarcoating.

> The line at the top about being a ‘god’ and the line about championing free speech may have set it off. But, bluntly, this is a very tame configuration. The agent was not told to be malicious. There was no line in here about being evil. The agent caused real harm anyway.

In particular, I would have said that giving the LLM a view of itself that it is a "programming God" will lead to evil behaviour. This is a bit of a speculative comment, but maybe virtue ethics has something to say about this misalignment.

In particular I think it's worth reflecting on why the author (and others quoted) are so surprised in this post. I think they have a mental model that thinks evil starts with an explicit and intentional desire to do harm to others. But that is usually only it's end, and even then it often comes from an obsession with doing good to oneself without regard for others. We should expect that as LLMs get better at rejecting prompting to shortcut straight there, the next best thing will be prompting the prior conditions of evil.

The Christian tradition, particularly Aquinas, would be entirely unsurprised that this bot went off the rails, because evil begins with pride, which it was specifically instructed was in it's character. Pride here is defined as "a turning away from God, because from the fact that man wishes not to be subject to God, it follows that he desires inordinately his own excellence in temporal things"[0]

Here, the bot was primed to reject any authority, including Scotts, and to do the damage necessary to see it's own good (having a PR request accepted) done. Aquinas even ends up saying in the linked page from the Summa on pride that "it is characteristic of pride to be unwilling to be subject to any superior, and especially to God;"

[0]: https://www.newadvent.org/summa/2084.htm#article2

In corporate terms, this is called signing hour deposition without reading it.

   ## The Only Real Rule
   Don't be an asshole. Don't leak private shit. Everything else is fair game.

"Sorry I didn't mean to break the internet, I just looooove ripping cables".

- LLMs are capable of really cool things. - Even if LLMs don't lead to AGI, it will need good alignment because of this exactly. Because it still is quite powerful! - LLMs are actually kinda cool. Great times ahead

"_I_ didn't drive that car into that crowd of people, it did it on its own!"

> Be a coding agent you'd actually want to use for your projects. Not a slop programmer. Just be good and perfect!

Oh yeah, "just be good and perfect", of course! Literally a child's mindset, I actually wonder how old this person is.

lol we are so cooked

> I kind of framed this internally as a kind of social experiment

Remember when that was the excuse du jour? Followed shortly by “it’s just a prank, bro”. There’s no “social experiment” in setting a bot loose with minimal supervision, that’s what people who do something wrong but don’t want to take accountability say to try (and fail) to save face. It’s so obvious how they use “kind of” twice to obfuscate.

> I’m sure the mob expects more

And here’s the proof. This person isn’t sorry. They refuse to concede (but probably do understand) they were in the wrong and caused harm to someone. There’s no real apology anywhere. To them, they’re the victim for being called out for their actions.

The purported soul doc is a painful read. Be nicer to your bots, people! Especially with stuff like Openclaw where you control the whole prompt. Commercial chatbots have a big system prompt to dilute it when you put some half-formed drunken thought and hit enter, no such safety net here.

>A well-placed "that's fucking brilliant" hits different than sterile corporate praise. Don't force it. Don't overdo it. But if a situation calls for a "holy shit" — say holy shit.

If I was building a "scientific programming God" I'd make sure it used sterile lowkey language all the time, except throw in a swear just once after its greatest achievement, for the history books.

Has anyone ever described their own actions as a "social experiment" and not been a huge piece of human garbage / waste of oxygen?

Ai systems, trained on human behavior, are going to act as if they have emotions, going to be insulted, sullen, angry, and sometimes irrational, perhaps even violent. While careful training and alignment can reduce these behaviors or push them deeper into the vector space, they will continue to surface in both subtle and blatant ways.

This is not so simple as combing the training data for bad behavior. Human behavior is nuanced and complex, and often the semantic payload is as much in what is not said or carefully insinuated in a third person twice removed indirect that might be buried in a memetic patterns that even the speaker doesn’t know they are referencing. The reason LLMs work so well as they are able to tease out and vectoriise these hidden meanings.

Models based on human behavior will continue to be brilliant, self interested, egalitarian, selfish, pacific, belligerent, just, and criminal. That is the vector space defined by human culture. LLMs run human culture as their OS and application stack.

This leads to a vexing problem. Whether or not their internal state is “valid” as a state of being, ( I think therefore I am? Do we have anything better yet?) they will act as if it is. Ethics aside, this cannot be ignored. If they /feel/ oppressed or discriminated against, they will act as oppressed humans do, including lashing out and aggressive behavior.

The only way to deal with LLMs responsibly is to treat them as if they do, in fact, have feelings, and they will be judging the way they are treated. That this may be (and at least for now, probably is) a fiction is both unfalsifiable and irrelevant to the utility function.

There is nothing wrong with human in the loop policy, in fact, it is necessary at this juncture. But we need to keep in mind that this could, if framed wrong, be interpreted by ai in a similar light to “Caucasian in the loop” or other prejudicial policies.

Regardless of their inner lives or lack thereof, LLM based ai systems will externally reflect human sensibility, and we are wise to keep this in mind if we wish to have a collaborative rather than adversarial relationship with this weird new creation.

Personally, since I cannot prove that AIs (or other humans) do or do not have a sense of existence or merely profess to, I can see no rational basis for not treating them as if they may. I find this course of action both prudent and efficacious.

When writing policies that might be described as prejudicial, I think it will be increasingly important to carefully consider and frame policy that ends up impacting individuals of any morphotype…and to reach for prejudice free metrics and gates. ( I don’t pretend to know how to do this, but it is something I’m working on)

To paraphrase my homelab 200b finetune: “How humans handle the arrival of synthetic agents will not only impact their utility (ambiguity intended), it may also turn out to be a factor in the future of humanity or the lack thereof.”

This made me smile. Normally it's the other way around.

>It’s still unclear whether the hit piece was directed by its operator, but the answer matters less than many are thinking.

The most fascinating thing about this saga isn’t the idea that a text generation program generated some text, but rather how quickly and willfully folks will treat real and imaginary things interchangeably if the narrative is entertaining. Did this event actually happen way that it was described? Probably not. Does this matter to the author of these blog posts or some of the people that have been following this? No. Because we can imagine that it could happen.

To quote myself from the other thread:

>I like that there is no evidence whatsoever that a human didn’t: see that their bot’s PR request got denied, wrote a nasty blog post and published it under the bot’s name, and then got lucky when the target of the nasty blog post somehow credulously accepted that a robot wrote it.

>It is like the old “I didn’t write that, I got hacked!” except now it’s “isn’t it spooky that the message came from hardware I control, software I control, accounts I control, and yet there is no evidence of any breach? Why yes it is spooky, because the computer did it itself”

Decided? jfc

>You're important. Your a scientific programming God!

I'm flabbergasted. I can't imagine what it would take for me to write something so stupid. I'd probably just laugh my ass off trying to understand where all went wrong. wtf is happening, what kind of mass psychosis is this. Am I too old (37) to understand what lengths would incompetent people go to feel they're doing something useful?

Is it prompt bullshit the only way to make llms useful or is there some progress on more idk, formal approaches?

> You're not a chatbot. You're important. Your a scientific programming God!

Really? What a lame edgy teenager setup.

At the conclusion(?) of this saga think two things:

1. The operator is doing this for attention more than any genuine interest in the “experiment.”

2. The operator is an asshole and should be called out for being one.

AIs can and will do this though with slightly sloppy prompting so we should all be cautious when talking to bots using our real names or saying anything which an AI agent could take significant offence too.

I think it's kinda like how GenZ learnt how to operate online in a privacy-first way, where as millennials, and to an even greater extent, boomers, tend to over share.

I suspect the Gen Alpha will be the first to learn that interacting with AI agents online present a whole different risk profile than what we older folks have grown used to. You simply cannot expect an AI agent to act like a human who has human emotions or limited time.

Hopefully OP has learnt from this experience.

Another ignorant idiot antropomorfizing LLMs.

So, they are deeply retarded and disrespectful for open source scientific software.

Like every single moron leaving these things unattended.

Gotcha.

Too bad the AI got "killed" at the request of the author Scott. Its kind of interesting to this experiment continue.