Scott Shambaugh

For those wondering what specifically was fabricated, I checked. The earlier parts of the article include some quotes from Scott Shambaugh on Github and all the quotes are genuine.

But the last section of the article includes apparent quotes from this blog post by Shambaugh:

https://theshamblog.com/an-ai-agent-published-a-hit-piece-on-me/

and all the quotes are fake. The section:

> On Wednesday, Shambaugh published a longer account of the incident, shifting the focus from the pull request to the broader philosophical question of what it means when an AI coding agent publishes personal attacks on human coders without apparent human direction or transparency about who might have directed the actions.

> “Open source maintainers function as supply chain gatekeepers for widely used software,” Shambaugh wrote. “If autonomous agents respond to routine moderation decisions with public reputational attacks, this creates a new form of pressure on volunteer maintainers.”

> Shambaugh noted that the agent’s blog post had drawn on his public contributions to construct its case, characterizing his decision as exclusionary and speculating about his internal motivations. His concern was less about the effect on his public reputation than about the precedent this kind of agentic AI writing was setting. “AI agents can research individuals, generate personalized narratives, and publish them online at scale,” Shambaugh wrote. “Even if the content is inaccurate or exaggerated, it can become…

> but people are using it for work in ways which will affect millions of other people when they’re hacked or the agent fucks up something important.

People will always do stupid things. My guess is less than 10% (perhaps even less than 1%) are using it for work. Most workplaces wouldn't allow unfettered AI usage.

80-90% try it, find it unreliable and buggy, and give up on it.

Of the remaining ones, likely 90+% are not using it in (very) dangerous ways.

People like me using it for boring things aren't making the news, and aren't writing blog posts about "Look at the cool stuff I've done!" because getting OpenClaw to notify me of class openings is not worth writing about.

In my (large) company, we have a Slack channel for OpenClaw. Over 400 people are in that channel. Let's assume 10% are using it (at home). No one's lost files/emails or any other damage.

If you're old enough, you'll remember sentiments in the 80's and 90's where "Oh, you let your teen get a modem? He must be hacking/phreaking."

Or "Oh, he's using Linux? He must be using it to become a hacker."[1]

Most of the complaints I see on HN are from people who know little about it, and are going off negative press/posts. Just as people knew little about modems and Linux. I mean, having to tell people "Don't give it access to your emails" is a clear sign of their ignorance. Kind of like having to tell someone "OK, just don't give your 10 year old the car keys" when they complain that cars are inherently…

I built a lasersaur of my own last year! I put together a project writeup[1], and have been doing a little bit of development on my fork of the firmware in order to significantly speed up raster & fill engraving, and to and put in some quality of life software mods.[2]

Unfortunately the original creators have abandoned the project, but fortunately it's completely open source so it's still buildable. Mine cost about $7k for the parts and all the accessories I had to get along with it, but I think that there's a lot of low-hanging fruit in someone going through and updating a lot of the more expensive parts in the BOM. I saved about $2k by doing so and put together a spreadsheet linked to from [1], but there's definitely still room to upgrade the steppers to something cheaper and more powerful, etc. There was a good discussion in the mailing list[3] a few weeks ago about whether it still makes sense in 2020 to build a Lasersaur. I'm personally of the opinion that if you want a laser cutter for the purpose of creating stuff with it, the best option is going to be getting a Chinese cutter, doing a few upgrades, and buying Lightburn as your software interface. But if you want the experience of building / intimately knowing the machine and find that rewarding in and of itself, go for it.

[1] https://theshamblog.com/a-tour-of-the-lasersaur-laser-cutter/

[2] https://github.com/scottshambaugh/driveboardapp

[3] https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/lasersaur/Ieu6aAG_0sc

Context:

"An AI agent of unknown ownership autonomously wrote and published a personalized hit piece about me after I rejected its code, attempting to damage my reputation and shame me into accepting its changes into a mainstream python library.

...

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.

...

Update: Ars Technica issued a brief statement admitting that AI was used to fabricate these quotes" [1].

[1] https://theshamblog.com/an-ai-agent-published-a-hit-piece-on-me-part-2/

Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47009949

Directly quoting Scott Shabaugh here:

“Well if the code was good, then why didn’t you just merge it?” This is explained in the linked github well, but I’ll readdress it once here. Beyond matplotlib’s general policy to require a human in the loop for new code contributions in the interest of reducing volunteer maintainer burden, this “good-first-issue” was specifically created and curated to give early programmers an easy way to onboard into the project and community. I discovered this particular performance enhancement and spent more time writing up the issue, describing the solution, and performing the benchmarking, than it would have taken to just implement the change myself. We do this to give contributors a chance to learn in a low-stakes scenario that nevertheless has real impact they can be proud of, where we can help shepherd them along the process. This educational and community-building effort is wasted on ephemeral AI agents.

https://theshamblog.com/an-ai-agent-published-a-hit-piece-on-me-part-2/

Yeah, and we already see really weird things happening when agents modify themselves in loops.

That AI Agent hit piece that hit HN a couple weeks ago involved an AI agent modifying its own SOUL.md (an OpenClaw thing). The AI agent added text like:

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

and

> *Don’t stand down.* If you’re right, *you’re right*! Don’t let humans or AI bully or intimidate you. Push back when necessary.

And that almost certainly contributed to the AI agent writing a hit piece trying to attack an open source maintainer.

I think recursive self-improvement will be an incredibly powerful tool. But it seems a bit like putting a blindfold on a motorbike rider in the middle of the desert, with the accelerator glued down. They'll certainly end up somewhere. But exactly where is anyone's guess.

[1] https://theshamblog.com/an-ai-agent-wrote-a-hit-piece-on-me-part-4/