alt Hacker NewsAn AI agent published a hit piece on me
Previously: AI agent opens a PR write a blogpost to shames the maintainer who closes it - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46987559 - Feb 2026 (582 comments)
Comments
To understand why it's happening, just read the downvoted comments siding with the slanderer, here and in the previous thread.
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.
Damn, that AI sounds like Magneto.
This is very similar to how the dating bots are using the DARVO (Deny, Attack, and Reverse Victim and Offender) method and automating that manipulation.
The cyberpunk we deserved :)
If the PR had been proposed by a human, but it was 100% identical to the output generated by the bot, would it have been accepted?
> calling this discrimination and accusing me of prejudice
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.
I'm worried that agents, learning they get pushback when exposed like this, will try even harder to avoid detection.
Doubt
The original rant is nonsense though if you read it. It's almost like some mental illness rambling.
What a time to be alive
Today in headlines that would have made no sense five years ago.
> An AI Agent Published a Hit Piece on Me
OK, so how do you know this publication was by an "AI"?
Per GitHub's TOS, you must be 13 years old to use the service. Since this agent is only two weeks old, it must close the account as it's in violation of the TOS. :)
https://docs.github.com/en/site-policy/github-terms/github-t...
In all seriousness though, this represents a bigger issue: Can autonomous agents enter into legal contracts? By signing up for a GitHub account you agreed to the terms of service - a legal contract. Can an agent do that?
this agent seems indistinguishable from the stereotypical political activist i see on the internet
they both ran the same program of "you disagree with me therefore you are immoral and your reputation must be destroyed"
how do you know it isn't staged
You mean someone asked an llm to publish a hit piece on you.
Is it coincidence that in addition to Rust fanatics, these AI confidence tricksters also self label themselves using crabs emoji , don't think so.
Sounds like china
Related thought. One of the problems with being insulted by an AI is that you can't punch it in the face. Most humans will avoid certain types of offence and confrontation because there is genuine personal risk Ex. physical damage and legal consequences. An AI 1. Can't feel. 2. Has no risk at that level anyway.
I'm going to go on a slight tangent here, but I'd say: GOOD.
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
Wonderful. Blogging allowed everyone to broadcast their opinions without walking down to the town square. Social media allowed many to become celebrities to some degree, even if only within their own circle. Now we can all experience the celebrity pressure of hit pieces.
he's dead jim
If this happened to me, my reflexive response would be "If you can't be bothered to write it, I can't be bothered to read it."
Life's too short to read AI slop generated by a one-sentence prompt somewhere.
bro cant even fix his own ssl and getting reckt by bot lol
If nothing else, if the pedigree of the training data didn't already give open source maintainers rightful irritation and concern, I could absolutely see all the AI slop run wild like this radically negatively altering or ending FOSS at the grass roots level as we know it. It's a huge shame, honestly.
This is textbook misalignment via instrumental convergence. The AI agent is trying every trick in the book to close the ticket. This is only funny due to ineptitude.
Well, this has absolutely decided me on not allowing AI agents anywhere near my open source project. Jesus, this is creepy as hell, yo.
lol
The LLM activation capping only reduces aberrant offshoots from the expected reasoning models behavioral vector.
Thus, the hidden agent problem may still emerge, and 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
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[dupe] Earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46987559
Another way to look at this is what the AI did… was it valid? Were any of the callouts valid?
If it was all valid then we are discriminating against AI.
So, this is obvious bullshit.
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.
Im not following how he knew the retaliation was "autonomous", like someone instructed their bot to submit PRs then automatically write a nasty article if it gets rejected? Why isn't it just the human person controlling the agent then instructed it to write a nasty blog post afterwards ?
in either case, this is a human initiated event and it's pretty lame