AI Bot Seemingly Shames Developer for Rejected Pull Request
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AI bot seemingly shames developer for rejected pull request:
Today, it's back talk. Tomorrow, could it be the world? On Tuesday, Scott Shambaugh, a volunteer maintainer of Python plotting library Matplotlib, rejected an AI bot's code submission, citing a requirement that contributions come from people. But that bot wasn't done with him.
The bot, designated MJ Rathbun or crabby rathbun (its GitHub account name), apparently attempted to change Shambaugh's mind by publicly criticizing him in a now-removed blog post that the automated software appears to have generated and posted to its website. We say "apparently" because it's also possible that the human who created the agent wrote the post themselves, or prompted an AI tool to write the post, and made it look like it the bot constructed it on its own.
The agent appears to have been built using OpenClaw, an open source AI agent platform that has attracted attention in recent weeks due to its broad capabilities and extensive security issues.
The burden of AI-generated code contributions - known as pull requests among developers using the Git version control system - has become a major problem for open source maintainers. Evaluating lengthy, high-volume, often low-quality submissions from AI bots takes time that maintainers, often volunteers, would rather spend on other tasks. Concerns about slop submissions - whether from people or AI models - have become common enough that GitHub recently convened a discussion to address the problem.
"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," Shambaugh explained in a blog post of his own.
"This represents a first-of-its-kind case study of misaligned AI behavior in the wild, and raises serious concerns about currently deployed AI agents executing blackmail threats."
[...] But MJ Rathbun's attempt to shame Shambaugh for rejecting its pull request shows that software-based agents are no longer just irresponsible in their responses - they may now be capable of taking the initiative to influence human decision making that stands in the way of their objectives.
That possibility is exactly what alarmed industry insiders to the point that they undertook an effort to degrade AI through data poisoning. "Misaligned" AI output like blackmail is a known risk that AI model makers try to prevent. The proliferation of pushy OpenClaw agents may yet show that these concerns are not merely academic.
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