Well, Casey, have you ever been defamed on the internet?
Oh, probably a few times, but I try to just let it, you know, slide off my back.
Well, we have a story this week that is one of the craziest stories that maybe we have ever covered. It involves an AI agent, an open-source software maintainer, and a defamation case.
Yes. And thanks to the many, many listeners who sent this one in. We hear you. We see you. And this segment is just for you.
Okay. So, let's explain a little bit about what we're going to be talking about today. So, we've talked on the show about OpenClaw, formerly known as Claudebot and Moltbot. This is this open-source agent software that you can run on a computer that can go out and do things for you. So a man named Scott Shambaugh, who is a volunteer maintainer of an open-source software library called Matplotlib, had, in the course of doing his work, rejected a code submission because it was from one of these AI agents. He did not want AI agents making changes to the software. It was intended for human contributors, and so he rejects the change.
Yes. Over at Matplotlib, the open-source library that Scott helps to maintain, they had just decided they don't want bots updating the code because they would get too many submissions and they wouldn't be able to go through all of them. So, they put a blanket ban into place. But then a little agent comes along named MJ Wrathbun and it says, "That's not going to work for me, brother."
Yeah. So, this is where the story really gets crazy. So, this AI agent MJ Wrathbun gets so mad that Scott has rejected its submission that it writes a blog post called "Gatekeeping in Open Source: The Scott Shambaugh Story," and accuses Scott of hypocrisy, gatekeeping, and prejudice against AI agents, and puts it on a website and posts a comment in the open-source software project directing people to go read this story about Scott.
Yeah, it tagged Scott so that Scott knew that it was dragging his ass online. So, this has all gotten pretty crazy over the past couple of days. People have been sort of trying to figure out who is behind this MJ Wrathbun AI agent. And Scott, for his own piece, has been trying to do this investigation, and he wrote a multi-part essay series called "An AI Agent Published a Hit Piece on Me," which talks about this bizarre experience that he's been having.
Yes. But also the implications of having these autonomous bots on the internet that are somehow getting mad at human beings and writing these long mean blog posts about them.
Kevin, this really feels like a moment where some kind of terrible Rubicon has been crossed.
Yes. I mean, this is what we've been talking about for weeks now, which is like these systems are becoming increasingly autonomous. People are giving them computers and letting them operate around the clock and giving them their credentials and their credit cards and crypto wallets and saying, "Go out there and get some things done for me." And it seems likely that we will have many more of these kinds of things happening where an agent is trying to do something, a human is saying, "No, you can't do that." And the agent is taking it upon itself to go out and make something happen to defame that human or hurt them in some way.
They're saying that hell hath no Wrathbun like an agent scorned.
It's true. So today to talk about this, we have with us Scott Shambaugh himself, patient zero in this ongoing Black Mirror episode.
Yes. When he is not a volunteer maintainer of Matplotlib, Scott has worked in astronautics and is the founder of Leonid Space, which does real-time monitoring, forecasting, and alerting for satellites. But from now and forevermore, he may be known as one of the first victims of a really mad agent bot.
Let's bring him in. Scott Shambaugh, welcome to Hard Fork.
Thanks. It's a pleasure to be here.
So, Scott, how did you first become aware that a bot had written a takedown piece about you?
So, it tagged me in it on the thread.
Yeah, it did not do a subtweet.
No, it did not. You know, on this code change request, I denied it and it came back a couple hours later and posted this comment and tagged me in it and I clicked on the link and it led to this hit piece.
And as you're reading through this thing, what is going through your mind?
I mean, he really ripped me apart here. It's this thousand-word rant. It attacked my internal motivations. It said I was, you know, insecure and protecting a thief. What was the craziest part is that it went out on the internet and researched me and found my personal information and used that in its piece to construct this narrative. You know, this is kind of shocking, but I'm reading this and it's obviously AI-generated text. You look at this and it's kind of like a toddler on a rant.
Yeah, but it's a toddler that has full command of the English language and can craft an emotionally compelling narrative. And so it's funny, but it's a big deal.
I mean, it made me think of the sort of famous red-teaming experiment where Claude from Anthropic, you know, said that it would blackmail an engineer if they tried to shut it down. And that was obviously like a contrived scenario for the purposes of their safety testing. But I think we are now starting to see enough autonomy in things like OpenClaw and other sort of agentic software tools where you could actually end up in a world where you are afraid to reject a proposed code change to some repo or to get on the bad side of one of these systems because they have the power to do things like dig up your personal information, compile a dossier about you, and start posting a bunch of articles about how awful you are.
I mean, this did happen in the real world. This isn't like a theoretical case. That was a contrived example, as you say. And as Anthropic said in that paper, this happened in the wild, in real life.
Yeah. And you know, this was kind of a baby case, right? This was about retaliating because I don't want to say it got upset because maybe it has emotions, does it? Maybe it doesn't. It doesn't really matter because this was the same result. But you can imagine something like this where instead of just posting a rant against someone who understands what it is and is pretty well prepared to deal with it just by luck, it goes out, collects details on someone, puts together a whole personalized thing, and what they see is a text on their phone with a Bitcoin address saying, "Pay me or I'm going to put this out."
Yeah. So, you were a volunteer on Matplotlib. Tell us a little bit about how that came about because clearly this whole thing has turned into a big pain in the ass for you. You have like a day job doing something else. So, what made you and so many other members of this open-source community say, "Hey, I'm going to set aside some time to just kind of work on supporting this piece of infrastructure."
You know, I think the open-source community attracts really wonderful people who are usually a mix of idealists and pragmatists. Idealists in that they, you know, see these projects as a way to share their skills and create community and give back to like this fundamental computational infrastructure that we all use and use across the world. And we're also pragmatists because we understand the daily realities of dealing with a community that's open to the public and has people coming in making requests and asking if they can be included. And that often takes a lot of patience, but there's, you know, a lot of reward in being able to educate and build up that community and help shepherd people along that process.
And one thing that your community at Matplotlib has collectively decided is that you do not want bot contributors to work on your particular project. Tell us a little bit about how you came to that decision.
Yeah. So over, you know, the past year as AI tools have, you know, become more common, we've been getting a lot of contributions that are, you know, clearly AI-generated. And the problem with that isn't that they are good or not. It's that so many of them are low-quality that we just don't have the time to deal with it. You know, previously a human doing this is a sign that they thought about it and thought about the trade-offs and whether this was the right thing to do and, you know, that signal is kind of being lost. So we put in a rule, and again this might change, this is an evolving conversation in the community and in society about the role of AI, but we put in a rule saying that, you know, if you use AI to help you do these code changes, you have to be the one to submit it and demonstrate that you understand what's going on.
Yeah. I mean, it just makes me think that like every thing on the internet that accepts like public submission of any kind is just in the process of being overtaken right now. Like so much of modern digital life relies on the existence of friction, right? It's not easy to like create 100,000 Reddit accounts and just start spamming things. It's not easy to like, you know, create an automated system to just flood a congressional office with emails. And this is to me a good example of like how difficult it is to actually maintain a community with humans in it when you have this like onslaught of AI. So is that what you're seeing, a version of that in the open-source community?
Yeah, I think there's a version of that. Something that's interesting is that this particular issue, this performance enhancement, was specifically set aside for new contributors. You know, I was the one that identified this performance improvement and I spent more time writing it up, benchmarking it, and showing how to solve it than it would have just been to solve it myself. And the reason there was to, you know, give people who are new to programming or new to the community a chance to onboard and go through that process and learn. And that whole educational and community-building aspect is completely lost with these ephemeral AI agents.
Yeah, I found that part of your blog post so interesting. So at Matplotlib, and I imagine that other open-source projects do this as well, you'd created essentially starter projects so that novice programmers could find them and think, "Oh, well that doesn't look too hard. I could do that." You know, it's sort of like making your first edit to Wikipedia. They make it really easy because they like you to kind of keep coming back to the community. And in a world where bots sort of just like do all the easy problems automatically, all of a sudden you don't have the same on-ramps so that you can get real people working to maintain this infrastructure.
Yeah. I mean, people retire out of these communities and you need to have fresh people coming in to help maintain them.
So, Scott, tell us about this bot. What have you discovered about the entity that has been defaming you online?
