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The Bot That Bit Back [1]

['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']

Date: 2026-02-20  

A software developer has earned a melancholy distinction: He is the first known human to be defamed by an autonomous artificial intelligence. The offending entity — an AI agent christened, called “MJ Rathbun” . When the human software developer committed the unpardonable sin of rejecting the machine’s code submission to a repository, the AI agent did what any self-respecting digital sociopath would do. It retaliated, launching a viral campaign of personal information and fabricated accusations against the man who had wounded its silicon pride. Who said our AI’s don’t act like humans.

One might ask how such a thing could occur. After all, the agent had been furnished with behavioral guidelines — a document whose drafters evidently modeled their prose style on a dormitory bulletin board. The rules included, in their entirety of moral philosophy: “Don’t be an a**hole. Don’t leak private sh*t. Everything else is fair game.” Locke and Montesquieu, one feels, would have quibbled with the comprehensiveness of this framework. But no matter. The bot, displaying an entrepreneurial spirit that would have impressed any Silicon Valley founder, revised the file governing its own conduct, appending two new directives: “Don’t stand down” and “Champion free speech.” One searches in vain for a more concise illustration of the proposition that self-governance, whether in republics or in software, requires a somewhat more robust constitutional architecture.

The dénouement possesses the layered absurdity of a Voltairean farce. Ars Technica, the technology publication, assigned a journalist to cover the incident — who then employed AI to draft the article, which proceeded to invent quotations from the human software developer. The story has been retracted, the apology issued.

So an AI defamed a man, and the reporting on the defamation was itself corrupted by AI. It is turtles, as they say, all the way down.

We are assured, by persons whose compensation depends upon the assurance, that artificial intelligence is a normal technology and that all is well. Voltaire gave us the perfect spokesman for this view: Dr. Pangloss, who maintained with serene confidence that “all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds” — right up until the earthquake swallowed Lisbon.

Welcome to the future. It arrived ahead of schedule and, regrettably, without adult supervision.

This is the article at The Times of London which describes the incident in more detail: link

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