An AI Agent Published a Hit Piece on Me – More Things Have Happened - The Shamblog

An AI Agent Published a Hit Piece on Me – More Things Have Happened – The Shamblog 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

 

 

 
 
 

 
 
 

 
 
 

 
 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

 
 
 
 

 

 
 
 

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 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. 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.

 Start here if you’re new to the story: An AI Agent Published a Hit Piece on Me , and here are the follow-up posts when you’re done with this one: Forensics and More Fallout , and The Operator Came Forward 

 

 It’s been an extremely weird past few days, and I have more thoughts on what happened. Let’s start with the news coverage.

 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.

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

 
 
 

 
 “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 part of a persistent public record.”
– Ars Technica, misquoting me in “ After a routine code rejection, an AI agent published a hit piece on someone by name “

 

 Journalistic integrity aside, I don’t know how I can give a better example of what’s at stake here. Yesterday I wondered what another agent searching the internet would think about this. Now we already have an example of what by all accounts appears to be another AI reinterpreting this story and hallucinating false information about me. And that interpretation has already been published in a major news outlet, as part of the per

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