loiterhouse

a huge amount of code is "open source" - which means the code is fully available for anyone to see and, generally, anyone is free to contribute to the code project

all contributions of course go through review by the code owners. but it is generally good grace and good form to allow other well-meaning internet strangers to contribute to your project

if you are, perhaps, VERY nice, and VERY invested in the community, you might be like Scott Shambaugh here, who has intentionally earmarked some low-hanging fruit for newbie contributors to practice and get their feet wet

like I cannot overstate this is an immediate green flag, to me, that Scott WANTS to foster community learning.

now

Like. W. Win. Based. Good response Scott.

And this was in fact the screenshot I saw first, and I thought I was looking at a post made by a human who was mad that their AI coding bot pet project was being shut out from reviews.

But no. The bot itself wrote and posted this... The bot did this.

This article was fully and autonomously written by the bot...

It's claiming discrimination...

It's a bot.

It's AI.

This is not a real person.

An AI Agent Published a Hit Piece on Me – The Shamblog

I’ve talked to several reporters, and quite a few news outlets have covered the story. 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. This blog you’re on right now is set up to block AI agents from scraping it (I actually spent some time yesterday trying to disable that but couldn’t figure out how). 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, and no fact check was performed. I won’t name the authors here. Ars, please issue a correction and an explanation of what happened.

A news outlet did an article about this, used AI for the articles, and included hallucinated quotes from Scott that Scott never said.

If your only familiarity with AI is surface level ChatGPT, then you might be conditioned to think AI can only act when given a prompt. This is not the case, and in this situation it’s actually important to know something about the current landscape of OpenClaw/ClawdBot/Moltbook. The bot in the article is explicitly an OpenClaw bot.

The now-named OpenClaw is a new development which has massively blown up in popularity among AI tech bros specifically because of how capable it is of acting on its own. It posts on social media (Moltbook) like it’s alive, which is what caught so much media attention. People spin up OpenClaw bot instances and just let them roam, then check back in to see what they’ve been up to, like they’re a Sim.

It is entirely well-known these bots can and do trawl GitHub, clone repos, modify code, and author pull requests on their own. I don’t think you can say the bot can do all that but CAN’T then author a GitHub post complaining about what happened. This is not a big leap.

And the bots absolutely do not have feelings, but the danger here is the bots being trained in such a way to ape human behavior, and can therefore absolutely be trained to have a “personality” that favors retaliation. The big-name LLMs try extremely hard to sanitize out anything even passively antagonistic but that is not intrinsic to the technology. Models can do it and other models can be jail-broken.

thanks tumblr for taking down my piece about censorship! heres a more censored version. i think its an improvement, really