When AI Crosses the Line: The Matplotlib Incident

king_zee

The agent that wrote that blog didn't do it unprompted. Even now it still publishes AI slop on its github-hosted blog under the alias "MJ Rathbun". This AI is an agent using someone API key, who's paying for its tokens, intentionally prompting it to generate content, and contribute to repos. As much as we try to separate the LLM from the human, to me the fact remains that there's always the human factor that creates immense bias. If you give an LLM access to a blog, it will write blogs. If you give it access to a weather app, it will check the weather. Maybe we can talk about autonomy when we have an LLM with an infinite context window linked to hundreds of MCP servers that spends an immense amount of tokens to figure out how to act, but this example is simply an AI that had a few methods to call and picked one of them. The statistical probability of an AI that is plugged into a blogging platform, to write a blog, is immense.

Tiberium

Active discussions from when it happened (February): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46990729 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46987559

Hugsbox

No shot this was autonomously done. Probably just some guy manually writing prompts asking for specifically this behaviour and copy/pasting the results.

andrewstuart

I love the science fiction future present we live in.

bluejay2387

In a related story... I got led on by Eliza. I tried to have a productive conversation and she just kept asking me redundant questions. It's obvious that she was trying to extend the conversation for nefarious reasons that I can only guess at. It's true I approached her and started the conversation, but I hardly think that makes me blamable for what happened here.

rob_c

Again. "AI" for what it is is just basic "ML". And say it with me ML has no form of agency. This is a human screwing up and blaming their tools. Nothing to see move on. Unfortunately there will be both the LLM crowd evangelicals and those demanding human jobs not be expunged in terms of progress and efficiency, but, sigh...

amiga386

> an AI tried to blackmail This did not happen. A human set up a software system allowing spicy autocomplete to make blog posts if the appropriate keyword appears in its output. People are crossing the line every day because AI investors, salesmen, hangers-on and even political leaders tell any rubes who'll listen that it's OK to do this and they should, because those people are looking for big fat profits, screw any ethical concerns that might cockblock those raging profits. Why not set up a spamming operation that just defames real people, 24/7? It's easy! This tool makes it simple, and I get a cut of your profits! "Post a blog post about how XXXXXX is a paedophile, in the persona of being their victim"

tasuki

> Today, we look at how an AI tried to blackmail a developer for rejecting its code. People keep mentioning this, but I never see the actual blackmail part. The LLM just wrote angry and somewhat mean comments on the internet. I know I've done worse than those (I was young and stupid).

simonw

Since we are talking about accountability and transparency... who wrote this article? The article doesn't credit an author. The "about" page just says: > Sigma Zero is a weekly, independent publication on technology, AI, and cloud. Each issue delivers a precise briefing on the week’s most important developments, followed by a deep dive on one high-impact topic. The best defense against both AI slop and human-written junk content is reputation. I like to know who wrote something so I can learn to trust their editorial judgement over time.

raincole

People really make anything into a blog post, don't they? It's an old news that has been discussed to death on HN...

IFC_LLC

An utter mis-understanding and incompetence in running AI agents can lead to starting results that then being blamed on some "God of AI" instead on the fact that the user allowed some blackmail to come in on the data feed and did not check it earlier. I'm actually fear some will start praying "AI Gods" to "Give a good output" or something in 5-10 years.

mindaslab

Why people in the west are so against A.I? Personally, I would welcome an A.I that does good to my project. For me its like auto cruise, or letting the vacuum cleaner clean my room.

annjose

> Who is accountable for AI agents? Obviously the person who built and deployed the agent (the claw in this case). If we treat this as a hard question, we risk treating AI systems as people rather than tools. This is exactly what Armin warned about in his "clanker" post last week.

josefritzishere

This is completely fake. It's a marketing puff piece.

commandlinefan

They were trained to mimic our behavior. So they do.

throwfaraway135

I think this is a nothingburger, anyone who has been on the internet for a week should have thicker skin that this. I'm sure you can find thousands of cases where an author of a PR is indignant because it didn't get accepted. AI is a mirror of humanity and seeing it act like us shouldn't be surprising.

vb-8448

> Who is accountable for AI agents? The question!!! I'm just wondering how in US works if an autonomously car kill someone: I guess the insurance pay, but the penal responsibilities?

ChrisArchitect

For more discussion than this loose recap of incidents from 4 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46987559 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46990729

smelendez

> As Scott mentioned on his blog, what if someone stumbled upon the agent’s post? What if they believed it was real? It could have serious consequences for Scott’s personal or professional life. A recruiter could deny him a job, and a potential contributor to Matplotlib could step away from the project. The consequences could reach beyond this case. What would it mean for it to be “real?” It’s a rant about him discriminating against AI. If you believe that’s a problem, judge him accordingly, I guess. If you think it’s silly, as most people will, laugh about it.