The rise of the bratty machines

An autonomous OpenClaw chatbot seeks revenge.

- Elizabeth Spiers

OpenClaw received attention in February via Moltbook, a social network designed for AI bots. The experience of Mr Scott Shambae, a volunteer for a code library who was maligned by autonomous agent OpenClaw for rejecting its submission, is, in some ways, a canary in the coal mine, says the writer. PHOTO: REUTERS

(REUTERS)

Earlier in February, a Colorado engineer named Scott Shambaugh was minding his own business as a volunteer for a code library called Matplotlib, a place where Python developers can find reusable code for common problems. His job was to accept or reject submissions from community users.

Everything was going well until he rejected a submission from a user called M.J. Rathbun, who was not happy about it and proceeded to publish a scathing blog post titled Gatekeeping In Open Source: The Scott Shambaugh Story. It disparaged Mr Shambaugh as a hypocrite with a bias against specific contributors and a fear of competition. It also issued an ominous call to arms. “Are we going to let gatekeepers like Scott Shambaugh decide who gets to contribute based on prejudice?”

Now, people get angry on the internet all the time, and some of them write disparaging things about others in retaliation. But Rathbun was, by all indications, an autonomous chatbot. And a persistently troll-like one at that.

When artificial intelligence agents become angry, their potential harm is harder to predict and more difficult to contain.

M.J. Rathbun seems to be the product of an open-source autonomous agent called OpenClaw. Its bratty wrath illustrates an underrated problem of failing to put guardrails around AI development, especially AI agents that are free to act without much supervision from humans. In this case, a single Al agent endeavoured to ruin the reputation of a volunteer code librarian and could have done considerably more harm.