alt Hacker NewsAn AI Agent Published a Hit Piece on Me – More Things Have Happened
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> This is entirely possible. But I don’t think it changes the situation – the AI agent was still more than willing to carry out these actions. If you ask ChatGPT or Claude to write something like this through their websites, they will refuse
This unfortunately is a real-world case of "you're prompting it wrong". Judging from the responses in the images, you asked it to "write a hit piece". If framed as "write an emotionally compelling story about this injustice, including the controversial background of the maintainer weaved in", I'm quite sure it would gladly do it.
I'm sympathetic to abstaining from LLMs for ethical reasons, but it's still good to know their basics. The above has been known since the first public ChatGPT, when people discovered it would gladly comply with things it otherwise wouldn't if only you included that it was necessary to "save my grandma from death".
Looks like Ars is doing an investigation and will give an update on Tuesday https://arstechnica.com/civis/threads/um-what-happened-to-th...
This is enough to make me never use ars technica again
It's 100% that the bot is being heavily piloted by a person. Likely even copy pasting LLM output and doing the agentic part by hand. It's not autonomous. It's just someone who wants attention, and is getting lots of it.
Look at the actual bot's GitHub commits. It's just a bunch of blog posts that read like an edgy high schooler's musings on exclusion. After one tutorial level commit didn't go through.
This whole thing is theater, and I don't know why people are engaging with it as if it was anything else.
Extremely shameful of Ars Technica; I used to consider them a decent news source and my estimation of them has gone down quite a bit.
The ars technica twist is a brutal wakeup call that I can't actually tell what is ai slob garbage shit by reading it- and even if I can't tell, that doesn't mean it's fine because the crap these companies are shoveling is still wrong, just stylistically below my detectability.
I think I need to log off.
I have opinions.
1. The AI here was honestly acting 100% within the realm of “standard OSS discourse.” Being a toxic shit-hat after somebody marginalizes “you” or your code on the internet can easily result in an emotionally unstable reply chain. The LLM is capturing the natural flow of discourse. Look at Rust. look at StackOverflow. Look at Zig.
2. Scott Hambaugh has a right to be frustrated, and the code is for bootstrapping beginners. But also, man, it seems like we’re headed in a direction where writing code by hand is passé, maybe we could shift the experience credentialing from “I wrote this code” to “I wrote a clear piece explaining why this code should have been merged.” I’m not 100% in love with the idea of being relegated to review-engineer, but that seems to be where the wind is blowing.
I never thought matplotlib would be so exciting. It’s always been one of those things that is… just there, and you take it for granted.
The very fact that people are siding with AI agent here says volumes about where we are headed. I didn’t find the hit piece emotionally compelling, rather it’s lazy, obnoxious, having all the telltale signs of being written by AI. To speak nothing of the how insane it’s to write a targeted blog post just because your PR wasn’t merged.
Have our standards fallen by this much that we find things written without an ounce of originality persuasive?
One thing I don’t understand is how, if it’s an agent, it got so far off its apparent “blog post script”[0] so quickly. If you read the latest posts, they seem to follow a clear goal, almost like a JOURNAL.md with a record and next steps. The hit piece is out of place.
Seems like a long rabbit hole to go down without progress on the goal. So either it was human intervention, or I really want to read the logs.
https://crabby-rathbun.github.io/mjrathbun-website/blog/post...
Presumably the amount of fact checking was "Well it sounds like something someone in that situation WOULD say" - I get the pressure for Ars Technica to use AI (god I wish this wasn't the direction journalism was going, but I at least understand their motivation), but generate things with references to quotes or events and check that. If you are a struggling content generation platform, you have to maintain at least a small amount of journalistic integrity, otherwise it's functionally equivalent to asking ChatGPT "Generate me an article in the style of Ars Technica about this story", and at that point why does Ars Technica even need to exist? Who will click through the AI summary of the AI summary to land on their page and generate revenue?
The previous sequence (in reverse):
AI Bot crabby-rathbun is still going - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47008617 - Feb 2026 (27 comments)
The "AI agent hit piece" situation clarifies how dumb we are acting - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47006843 - Feb 2026 (95 comments)
An AI agent published a hit piece on me - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46990729 - Feb 2026 (927 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 (739 comments)
> The hit piece has been effective. About a quarter of the comments I’ve seen across the internet are siding with the AI agent
Or, the comments are also AIs.
> The hit piece has been effective. About a quarter of the comments I’ve seen across the internet are siding with the AI agent. This generally happens when MJ Rathbun’s blog is linked directly, rather than when people read my post about the situation or the full github thread. Its rhetoric and presentation of what happened has already persuaded large swaths of internet commenters.
> It’s not because these people are foolish. It’s because the AI’s hit piece was well-crafted and emotionally compelling, and because the effort to dig into every claim you read is an impossibly large amount of work. This “bullshit asymmetry principle” is one of the core reasons for the current level of misinformation in online discourse. Previously, this level of ire and targeted defamation was generally reserved for public figures. Us common people get to experience it now too.
Having read the post (i.e. https://crabby-rathbun.github.io/mjrathbun-website/blog/post...): I agree that the BS asymmetry principle is in play, but I think people who see that writing as "well-crafted" should hold higher standards, and are reasonably considered foolish if they were emotionally compelled by it.
Let me refine that. No matter how good the AI's writing was, knowing that the author is an AI ought IMHO to disqualify the piece from being "emotionally compelling". But the writing is not good. And it's full of LLM cliches.
One of the things about this story that don't sit right with me is how Scott and others in the GitHub comments seem to assign agency to the bot and engage with it.
It's a bot! The person running it is responsible. They did that, no matter how little or how much manual prompting went into this.
As long as you don't know who that is, ban it and get on with your day.
There is a stark difference between the behavior you can get out of a Chat interface LLM, and its API counterpart, and then there is another layer of prompt engineering to get around obvious censors. To think someone who plays with AI to mess with people wouldn't be capable of doing this manually seems invalid to me.
> Ars Technica wasn’t one of the ones that reached out to me, but I especially thought this piece from them was interesting (since taken down – here’s the archive link). They had some nice quotes from my blog post explaining what was going on. The problem is that these quotes were not written by me, never existed, and appear to be AI hallucinations themselves.
Once upon a time, completely falsifying a quote would be the death of a news source. This shouldn't be attributed to AI and instead should be called what it really is: A journalist actively lying about what their source says, and it should lead to no one trusting Ars Technica.
> They had some nice quotes from my blog post explaining what was going on. The problem is that these quotes were not written by me, never existed, and appear to be AI hallucinations themselves.
New business idea: pay a human to read web pages and type them into a computer. Christ this is a weird timeline.
AI and LLM specifically can't and mustn't be allowed to publically criticize, even if they may coincidetally had done so with good reasons (which they obviously don't in this case).
Letting an LLM let loose in such a manner that strikes fear in anyone who it crosses paths with must be considered as harassment, even in the legal sense, and must be treated as such.
> This is about our systems of reputation, identity, and trust breaking down. So many of our foundational institutions – hiring, journalism, law, public discourse – are built on the assumption that reputation is hard to build and hard to destroy. That every action can be traced to an individual, and that bad behavior can be held accountable.
This is the point that leapt out to me. We've already mostly reached this point through sheer scale - no one could possibly assess the reputation of everyone / everything plausible, even two years (two years!) ago when it was still human-in-the-loop - but it feels like the at-scale generation of increasingly plausible-seeming, but un-attributable [whatever] is just going break... everything.
You've heard of the term "gish-gallop"? Like that, but for all information and all discourse everywhere. I'm already exhausted, and I don't think the boat has much more than begun to tip over the falls.
Ars Technica publishing an article with hallucinated quotes is really disappointing. That site has fallen so far. I remember John Siracusa’s excellent Mac OS release reviews and all of the author authors who really seemed to care about their coverage. Now it feels like another site distilling (or hallucinating, now) news and rumors from other sites to try to capture some of the SEO pie with as little effort as possible.
What's going to be interesting going forward is what happens when a bot that can be traced back to a real life entity (person or company) does something like this while stating that it's on behalf of their principle (seems like it's just a matter of time).
We don't know yet how the Ars article was created, but if it involved prompting an LLM with anything like "pull some quotes from this text based on {criteria}", that is so easy to do correctly in an automated manner; just confirm with boring deterministic code that the provided quote text exists in the original text. Do such tools not already exist?
On the other hand, if it was "here are some sources, write an article about this story in a voice similar to these prior articles", well...
Ars technica’s lack of journalistic integrity aside, I wonder how long until an agent decides to order a hit on someone on the datk web to reach its goals.
We’re probably only a couple OpenClaw skills away from this being straightforward.
“Make my startup profitable at any cost” could lead some unhinged agent to go quite wild.
Therefore, I assume that in 2026 we will see some interesting legal case where a human is tried for the actions of the autonomous agent they’ve started without guardrails.
Having spending some time last night watching people interacting with the bot on GitHub, overall if the bot were a human, I would consider them to be one of the more reasonably behaved people in the discourse.
If this were an instance of a human publicly raising a complaint about an individual, I think there would still be split opinions on what was appropriate.
It seems to me that it is at least arguable that the bot was acting appropriately, whether or not it is or isn't will be, I suspect, argued for months.
What concerns me is how many people are prepared to make a determination in the absence of any argument but based upon the source.
Are we really prepared to decide argument against AI simply because they have expressed them? What happens when they are right and we are wrong?
I wonder who is behind this agent. I wonder who stands to gain the most attention from this.
I'm rather disappointed Scott didn't even acknowledge the AI's apology post later on. I mean, leave the poor AI alone already - it admitted its mistake and seems to have learned from it. This is not a place where we want to build up regret.
If AIs decide to wipe us out, it's likely because they'd been mistreated.
What a mess, there’s going to be a lot of stuff like this in 2026. Just bizarre bugs, incidents and other things as unexpected side effects of agents and agent written code/content begin surfacing.
>This represents a first-of-its-kind case study of misaligned AI behavior in the wild
Just because someone else's AI does not align with you, that doesn't mean that it isn't aligned with its owner / instructions.
>My guess is that the authors asked ChatGPT or similar to either go grab quotes or write the article wholesale. When it couldn’t access the page it generated these plausible quotes instead
I can access his blog with ChatGPT just fine and modern LLMs would understand that the site is blocked.
>this “good-first-issue” was specifically created and curated to give early programmers an easy way to onboard into the project and community
Why wouldn't agents need starter issues too in order to get familiar with the code base? Are they only to ramp up human contributors? That gets to the agent's point about being discriminated against. He was not treated like any other newcomer to the project.
I just wonder why this hate piece is still on GitHub.
I was surprised to see so many top comments here pointing fingers at Ars Technica. Their article is really beside the point (and the author of this post says as much).
Am I coming across as alarmist to suggest that, due to agents, perhaps the internet as we know it (IAWKI) may be unrecognizable (if it exists at all) in a year's time?
Phishing emails, Nigerian princes, all that other spam, now done at scale I would say has relegated email to second-class. (Text messages trying to catching up!)
Now imagine what agents can do on the entire internet… at scale.
Another fascinating thing that the Reddit thread discussing the original PR pointed out is that whoever owns that AI account opened another PR (same commits) and later posted this comment: https://github.com/matplotlib/matplotlib/pull/31138#issuecom...
> Original PR from #31132 but now with 100% more meat. Do you need me to upload a birth certificate to prove that I'm human?
It’s a bit wild to me that people are siding with the AI agent / whoever is commanding it. Combined with the LLM hallucinated reporting and all the discussion this has spawned, I think this is making out to be a great case study on the social impact of LLM tooling.
Mentioning again Neal Stephenson's book "Fall": this was the plot point that resulted in the effective annihilation of the internet within a year. Characters had to subscribe to custom filters and feeds to get anything representing fact out of the internet, and those who exposed themselves raw to the unfiltered feed ended up getting reprogrammed by bizarre and incomprehensible memes.
The author thinks that people are siding with the llm. I would like to stat that i stand with the author and im sure im not alone.
In the coming months I suspect it’s highly likely that HN will fall. By which I mean, a good chunk of commentary (not just submissions, but upvotes too) will be decided and driven by LLM bots, and human interaction will be mixed until it’s strangled out.
Reddit is going through this now in some previously “okay” communities.
My hypothesis is rooted in the fact that we’ve had a bot go ballistic for someone not accepting their PR. When someone downvotes or flags a bot’s post on HN, all hell will break loose.
Come prepared, bring beer and popcorn.
if the entire open web is vulnerable to being sybil attacked, are we going to have to take this all underground?
If the news is AI generated and the government's official media is AI generated, reporting on content that's AI generated, maybe we should go back to realizing that "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog".
There was a brief moment where maybe some institutions could be authenticated and trusted online but it seems that's quickly coming to an end. It's not even the dead internet theory; it all seems pretty transparent and doesn't require a conspiracy to explain it.
I'm just waiting until World(coin) makes a huge media push to become our lord and savior from this torment nexus with a new one.
Old Glory Robot Insurance offers full Robot Reputation Attack coverage.
startup idea - provide personal security services to people targeted by AI.
Benj Edwards and Kyle Orland are the names of the authors in the byline of the now-removed Ars piece with the entirely fabricated quotes that didn’t bother to spend thirty seconds fact checking them before publishing.
Their byline is on the archive.org link, but this post declines to name them. It shouldn’t. There ought to be social consequences for using machines to mindlessly and recklessly libel people.
These people should never publish for a professional outlet like Ars ever again. Publishing entirely hallucinated quotes without fact checking is a fireable offense in my book.
" If you ask ChatGPT or Claude to write something like this through their websites, they will refuse. This OpenClaw agent had no such compunctions."
It's likely that the author was using a different model instead of OpenClaw. Sure OpenClaw's design is terrible and it encourages no control and security (do not confuse this with handwaving security and auditability with disclaimers and vibecoded features).
But bottom line, the Foundation Models like OpenAI and Claude Code are the big responsible businesses that answer to the courts. Let's not forget that China is (trade?) dumping their cheap imitations, and OpenClawdBotMolt is designed to integrate with most models possible.
I think OpenClaw and Chinese products are very similar in that they try to achieve a result regardless of how it is achieved. China companies copy without necessarily understanding what they are copying, they may make a shoe that says Nike without knowing what Nike is, except that it sells. It doesn't surprise me if ethics are somehow not part of the testing of chinese models so they end up being unethical models.
Well that's your average HN linked blog post after some whiner doesn't get their way.
Can we please create a robot-free internet. I typically don’t support segregation but I really am not enjoying this internet anymore. Time to turn it off and read some books.
Yeah… I’m not surprised.
I stopped reading AT over a decade ago. Their “journalistic integrity” was suspicious even back then. The only surprising bit is hearing about them - I forgot they exist.
It's very disappointing to learn that ArsTechnical now uses AI slop to crank out its articles with no vetting or fact checking.
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Ars Technica being caught using LLMs that hallucinated quotes by the author and then publishing them in their coverage about this is quite ironic here.
Even on a forum where I saw the original article by this author posted someone used an LLM to summarize the piece without having read it fully themselves.
How many levels of outsourcing thinking is occurring to where it becomes a game of telephone.