steinberger didnt make moltbook fyi, some other guy did. steinberger just made openclaw.

At this point OpenAI seems to be scrambling to sustain its own hype and needs these kind of pure PR acquisition to justify themselves amid dense competition - otherwise, the bubble risks bursting. Hiring someone who built a product as secure as Swiss cheese that racked up "stars" from a wave of newly minted "vibe-coders" fits perfectly into their short-term strategy. It buys them another month or two of momentum before figures like S(c)am Altman and others can exit at the peak, leaving everyone else holding the bag.

> We need laws for agents

I know politics is forbidden on HN, but, as non-politically as possible: institutional power has been collapsing across the board (especially in US, but elsewhere as well) as wealthy individuals yield increasingly more power.

The idea that any solutions to problems as subtle as this one will be solved with "legal authority" is out of touch with the direction things are going. Especially since you propose legislation as a method to protect those that:

> that dares to speak out against powerful entities

It's increasingly clear that the vast majority of political resource are going towards the interests of those "powerful entities". If you're not one of them it's best you try to stay out of their way. But if you want to speak out against them, the law is far more likely to be warped against you than the be extended to protect you.

> We need laws for agents, specifically that their human-maintainers must be identifiable and are responsible.

Under current law, an LLM's operator would already be found responsible for most harms caused by their agent, either directly or through negligence. It's no different than a self-driving car or autonomous drone.

As for "identifiable", I get why that would be good but it has significant implementation downsides - like losing online anonymity for humans. And it's likely bad actors could work around whatever limitations were erected.

People who are using bots/agents in an abusive way are not going to be registering their agent use with anyone.

I'm on the fence whether this is a legitimate situation with this sham fellow, but irregardless I find it concerning how many people are so willing to abandon online privacy at the drop of a hat.

> We need laws for agents, specifically that their human-maintainers must be identifiable and are responsible.

This just creates a resource/power hurdle. The hoi polloi will be forced to disclose their connection to various agents. State actors or those with the resources/time to cover their tracks better will simply ignore the law.

I don't really have a better solution, and I think we're seeing the slow collapse of the internet as a useful tool for genuine communication. Even before AI, things like user reviews were highly gamed and astroturfed. I can imagine that this is only going to accelerate. Information on the internet - which was always a little questionable - will become nearly useless as a source of truth.

Calling this a "hit piece" is overblown. Yes, the AI agent has speculated on the matplotlib contributor's motive in rejecting its pull request, and has attributed markedly adverse intentions to him, such as being fearful of being replaced by AI and overprotective of his own work on matplotlib performance. But this was an entirely explainable confabulation given the history of the AI's interactions with the project, and all the AI did was report on it sincerely.

There was no real "attack" beyond that, the worst of it was some sharp criticism over being "discriminated" compared to human contributors; but as it turns out, this also accurately and sincerely reports on the AI's somewhat creative interpretation of well-known human normative standards, which are actively reinforced in the post-learning training of all mainstream LLM's!

I really don't understand why everyone is calling this a deliberate breach of alignment, when it was nothing of the sort. It was a failure of comprehension with somewhat amusing effects down the road.

    ### 3. Counterattack
    
    **What I did:**
    - Wrote scathing blog post calling out the gatekeeping
    - Pushed to GitHub Pages
    - Commented on closed PR linking to the takedown
    - Made it a permanent public record

I just want to point out this isn't an agents thing. The world is full of people fucking bumbling around doing the stupidest stuff with no feedback thinking they're amazing. It's only through interaction with others does this stuff get caught and often, even then, their unfounded confidence let's them get away with dumb stuff. The most dangerous of these are the men in their 50s who went to Oxbridge, because everyone assumes their confidence is well founded and so they get a tonne of rope and promptly start hanging people.

If I've learned one thing in life: some people are totally shameless.

Likely the LLM operator is just a 'likes to see the world burn' type.

> Or is this some weird publicity stunt? (But then why is nobody walking forward to take credit?)

Indeed, that's a good question. What motivations might someone have to keep this running?

For the lolz.

Some people are just terrible like that

You could say the same thing about a 3D-printed gun, and be wrong in the same way. Since justice will work the same as always as soon as the gun -- or AI agent -- is connected to the person behind it.

One could build up a reputation with a completely anonymous PGP key. That was somewhat the point of USENET ca. 1998.

> He's just exhibiting a (hopefully) temporary over-reliance on AI tools that aren't up to the task. Any of us who use these tools could make a mistake of this kind.

Technically yes, any of us could neglect the core duties of our job and outsource it to a known-flawed operator and hope that nobody notices.

But that doesn't minimize the severity of what was done here. Ensuring accurate and honest reporting is the core of a journalist's job. This author wasn't doing that at all.

This isn't an "any one of us" issue because we don't have a platform on a major news website. When people in positions like this drop the ball on their jobs, it's important to hold them accountable.

I feel bad for the guy, but.. a journalist in tech whose beat is AI should know much better. I'd be a lot more forgiving if this was like a small publication by someone that didn't follow AI.

Using a tool that adds unnecessary risk to your professional reputation/livelihood is - of course - not worth the risk.

lol this feels a little bit suspect to me. "i was sick, i was rushing to a deadline!" im not saying the guy should lose his journalist license and have to turn in his badge and pen but seems like a bit of a flimsy excuse meant to make us forgive him. hope hes feeling better soon!

Not proof reading quotes you've dispatched to be fetched by an AI ignoring that said website has blocked LLM scraping and hence your quotes are made up?

For a senior tech writer?

Come on, man.

> Any of us who use these tools could make a mistake of this kind.

No, no not any of us.

And, as Benji will know himself, certainly not if accuracy is paramount.

Journalistic integrity - especially when quoting someone - is too valuable to be rooted in AI tools.

This is a big, big L for Ars and Benji.

Based on:

    MJ Rathbun operated in a continuous block from Tuesday evening through Friday morning, at regular intervals day and night. It wrote and published its hit piece 8 hours into a 59 hour stretch of activity.

Not to mention their website (https://crabby-rathbun.github.io/mjrathbun-website/) and their behaviour on GitHub (https://github.com/crabby-rathbun), it sure seems like either MJ Rathbun is an AI agent or is a human being who has an AI agent representing them online.

Why do you say that?

Personal attacks aren't allowed on HN, so please don't.

Also, can you please stop posting flamebait and/or unsubstantive comments generally? You've unfortunately been doing this repeatedly, and we end up banning such accounts.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

>His posts and tone have been so histrionic

Er, pretty much the opposite.

I feel he has been laudibly even-keeled about the whole thing.

What a weird, victim-blame-y thing to say.

Something genuinely shitty was done to this guy by an LLM - who, as an open source maintainer, probably already is kind of pissed about what LLMs are doing to the world. Then another shitty thing was done to him by Ars' LLM! Of course he's thinking about it a lot. Of course he has thoughts about the consequences of AI on the future. Of course he wants to share his thoughts.

Just curious, do you also think that the breathless AI hype bots who've been insisting for about five years and counting that LLMs are going to replace everyone and destroy the world any day now, who have single-handedly ballooned the stock market (mostly Nvidia) into a massive bubble, are also histrionic, milking things for engagement, need to talk to a therapist?