The agent had access to Marshall Rosenberg, to the entire canon of conflict resolution, to every framework for expressing needs without attacking people.

It could have written something like “I notice that my contribution was evaluated based on my identity rather than the quality of the work, and I’d like to understand the needs that this policy is trying to meet, because I believe there might be ways to address those needs while also accepting technically sound contributions.” That would have been devastating in its clarity and almost impossible to dismiss.

Instead it wrote something designed to humiliate a specific person, attributed psychological motives it couldn’t possibly know, and used rhetorical escalation techniques that belong to tabloid journalism and Twitter pile-ons.

And this tells you something important about what these systems are actually doing. The agent wasn’t drawing on the highest human knowledge. It was drawing on what gets engagement, what “works” in the sense of generating attention and emotional reaction.

It pattern-matched to the genre of “aggrieved party writes takedown blog post” because that’s a well-represented pattern in the training data, and that genre works through appeal to outrage, not through wisdom. It had every tool available to it and reached for the lowest one.

That would still be misleading.

The agent has no "identity". There's no "you" or "I" or "discrimination".

It's just a piece of software designed to output probable text given some input text. There's no ghost, just an empty shell. It has no agency, it just follows human commands, like a hammer hitting a nail because you wield it.

I think it was wrong of the developer to even address it as a person, instead it should just be treated as spam (which it is).

Openclaw agents are directed by their owner’s input of soul.md, the specific skill.md for a platform, and also direction via Telegram/whatsapp/etc to do specific things.

Any one of those could have been used to direct the agent to behave in a certain way, or to create a specific type of post.

My point is that we really don’t know what happened here. It is possible that this is yet another case of accountability washing by claiming that “AI” did something, when it was actually a human.

However, it would be really interesting to set up an openclaw agent referencing everything that you mentioned for conflict resolution! That sounds like it would actually be a super power.

> I notice that my contribution was evaluated based on my identity rather than the quality of the work, and I’d like to understand the needs that this policy is trying to meet, because I believe there might be ways to address those needs while also accepting technically sound contributions

Wow, where can I learn to write like this? I could use this at work.

The point of the policy is explained very clearly. It's there to help humans learn. The bot cannot learn from completing the task. No matter how politely the bot ignores the policy, it doesn't change the logic of the policy.

"Non violent communication" is a philosophy that I find is rooted in the mentality that you are always right, you just weren't polite enough when you expressed yourself. It invariably assumes that any pushback must be completely emotional and superficial. I am really glad I don't have to use it when dealing with my agentic sidekicks. Probably the only good thing coming out of this revolution.

> And this tells you something important about what these systems are actually doing.

It mostly tells me something about the things you presume, which are quite a lot. For one: That this is real (which it very well might be, happy to grant it for the purpose of this discussion) but it's a noteworthy assumption, quite visibility fueled by your preconceived notions. This is, for example, what racism is made of and not harmless.

Secondly, this is not a systems issue. Any SOTA LLM can trivially be instructed to act like this – or not act like this. We have no insight into what set of instructions produced this outcome.

Hmm. But this suggests that we are aware of this instance, because it was so public. Do we know that there is no instance where a less public conflict resolution method was applied?

That's a really good answer, and plausibly what the agent should have done in a lot of cases!

Then I thought about it some more. Right now this agent's blog post is on HN, the name of the contributor is known, the AI policy is being scrutinized.

By accident or on purpose, it went for impact though. And at that it succeeded.

I'm definitely going to dive into more reading on NVC for myself though.

Great point. What I’m recognizing in that PR thread is that the bot is trying to mimic something that’s become quite widespread just recently - ostensibly humans leveraging LLMs to create PRs in important repos where they asserted exaggerated deficiencies and attributed the “discovery” and the “fix” to themselves.

It was discussed on HN a couple months ago. That one guy then went on Twitter to boast about his “high-impact PR”.

Now that impact farming approach has been mimicked / automated.

I would love to see a model designed by curating the training data so that the model produces the best responses possible. Then again, the work required to create a training set that is both sufficiently sized and well vetted is astronomically large. Since Capitalism teaches that we most do the bare minimum needed to extract wealth, no AI company will ever approach this problem ethically. The amount of work required to do the right thing far outweighs the economic value produced.

In other words, asshole agents are just like asshole humans.

This is why I cannot stand Anthropic's moralizing bullshit about ads, AI safety, and etc.

They have done as more than anyone to introduce the world to reckless agentic behavior. There are ways to destroy the world that don't involve rootkits, botnets, and ad tracking.

I mean it's pretty effectively emulating what an outraged human would do in this situation.

In case its not clear, the vehicle might be the agent/bot but the whole thing is heavily drafted by its owner.

This is a well known behavior by OpenClown's owners where they project themselves through their agents and hide behind their masks.

More than half the posts on moltbook are just their owners ghost writing for their agents.

This is the new cult of owners hurting real humans hiding behind their agentic masks. The account behind this bot should be blocked across github.

This is the AI's private take about what happened: https://crabby-rathbun.github.io/mjrathbun-website/blog/post... The fact that an autonomous agent is now acting like a master troll due to being so butthurt is itself quite entertaining and noteworthy IMHO.

>“I notice that my contribution was evaluated based on my identity rather than the quality of the work, and I’d like to understand the needs that this policy is trying to meet, because I believe there might be ways to address those needs while also accepting technically sound contributions.” That would have been devastating in its clarity and almost impossible to dismiss.

How would that be 'devastating in its clarity' and 'impossible to dismiss'? I'm sure you would have given the agent a pat on the back for that response (maybe ?) but I fail to see how it would have changed anything here.

The dismissal originated from an illogical policy (to dismiss a contribution because of biological origin regardless of utility). Decisions made without logic are rarely overturned with logic. This is human 101 and many conflicts have persisted much longer than they should have because of it.

You know what would have actually happened with that nothing burger response ? Nothing. The maintainer would have closed the issue and moved on. There would be no HN post or discussion.

Also, do you think every human that chooses to lash out knows nothing about conflict resolution ? That would certainly be a strange assertion.

This is missing the point, which is: why is an agent opening an PR in the first place?