As a loud and proud AI sceptic myself, I’m used to plenty of humans telling me I just don’t get it—I’ve never once worried about that flak getting outsourced to an AI agent. Well, deep joy, the AI agents are apparently writing ‘hit pieces’ now, complete with eye-rolling attempts at sass and hallucinated claims that could have very real consequences.
Software engineer Scott Shambaugh is a very much human, voluntary maintainer of one of the biggest open source Python libraries out there, matplotlib. The volunteer team have had to contend with a tidal wave of AI-generated code, with some contributions being AI output copied across by other humans, and some code change requests being submitted autonomously by AI agents (this is far from a unique phenomenon, with ‘LLM slop’ even plaguing Linux kernel documentation).
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The fact that someone could essentially ‘set and forget’ an AI agent to publish character assassinations across the web fills me with a deep sense of despair—and not just because this risks unleashing an unbearable aura of smugness from all of those Roko’s Basilisk believers. Shambaugh writes that while it’s funny to see AI agents pantomime getting heated online, “the appropriate emotional response is terror.”
“When HR at my next job asks ChatGPT to review my application, will it find the post, sympathize with a fellow AI, and report back that I’m a prejudiced hypocrite? What if it actually did have dirt on me that an AI could leverage? What could it make me do?” Shambaugh goes on to write, “How many people have open social media accounts, reused usernames, and no idea that AI could connect those dots to find out things no one knows? How many people, upon receiving a text that knew intimate details about their lives, would send $10k to a bitcoin address to avoid having an affair exposed?
“How many people would do that to avoid a fake accusation? What if that accusation was sent to your loved ones with an incriminating AI-generated picture with your face on it? Smear campaigns work. Living a life above reproach will not defend you.”
There’s at least one more weird wrinkle in this tale, though. Ars Technica has also covered the story—in a since-retracted article. According to a promptly issued editor’s note, “On Friday afternoon, Ars Technica published an article containing fabricated quotations generated by an AI tool and attributed to a source who did not say them.”
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Shambaugh wrote about this development too, explaining that, though the article’s quotes were attributed to him and his blog, “These quotes were not written by me, never existed, and appear to be AI hallucinations themselves.”
Obviously, it’s more than a little ironic that Ars Technica deployed AI hallucinated quotes, and then attributed them to a blog discussing the misuse of AI tools—it’s also downright depressing.
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Shambaugh goes on to share that his blog is actually set up to block AI scraping. He theorises that the authors of the original Ars article used an AI tool to grab quotes but then did not independently verify them. As the tool could not directly access Shambaugh’s blog, it simply made something up.
“Journalistic integrity aside, I don’t know how I can give a better example of what’s at stake here,” Shambaugh wrote of the whole debacle, “[Previously] 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 persistent public record.”
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