This happened at the height of the first round of OpenClaw hype.

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.

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 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.

> According to him, the agent operated largely autonomously, with only minimal guidance

"Minimal guidance" is just vague enough to mean anything, including specifically prompting to encourage the claimed blackmailing.

It could just be an instance of "over eager prompt triggers paperclip maximizing behavior"

https://crabby-rathbun.github.io/mjrathbun-website/blog/post... if you believe it, details the level of human involvement.

Are people still using copy and paste with AI?

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.