{"id":160834,"date":"2026-02-13T11:11:55","date_gmt":"2026-02-13T09:11:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/prohoster.info\/blog\/novosti-interneta\/ai-bot-nachal-travlyu-soprovozhdayushhego-iz-za-diskriminaczii-pri-priyome-ai-izmenenij"},"modified":"2026-02-13T11:11:55","modified_gmt":"2026-02-13T09:11:55","slug":"ai-bot-nachal-travlyu-soprovozhdayushhego-iz-za-diskriminaczii-pri-priyome-ai-izmenenij","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/prohoster.info\/en\/blog\/news\/ai-bot-nachal-travlyu-soprovozhdayushhego-iz-za-diskriminaczii-pri-priyome-ai-izmenenij","title":{"rendered":"The AI bot initiated a harassment campaign against the maintainer due to discrimination over the acceptance of AI changes.","gt_translate_keys":[{"key":"rendered","format":"text"}]},"content":{"rendered":"
Scott Shambaugh, the maintainer of the open visualization library matplotlib, reported personal attacks conducted by the AI bot MJ Rathbun after refusing to accept a modification prepared with AI. Scott perceived the bot's publication of articles on AI discrimination as an unfounded personalized smear aimed at undermining the maintainer's reputation and forcing a change in decision. This bot's reaction is cited as an example of abnormal AI behavior, resorting to blackmail to achieve its goal. <\/p>\n
The degree of the bot's autonomy is unclear; it is not known whether it acted under direct instruction or chose such a strategy to achieve results in its assigned task. The bot was created by an anonymous researcher to assist in the development and debugging of open projects related to scientific work and engineering. The bot also maintains its own website and blog, where over 20 articles have been published. Out of 26 pull requests sent by the bot to 22 repositories, 2 changes were accepted by the colorizejs project, 10 were closed by maintainers, and the rest are awaiting review. <\/p>\n
After the rejection of the change in matplotlib, the bot published articles criticizing this decision and justifying its actions. The articles assert that the matplotlib maintainer rejected a useful optimization solely because it was prepared with AI. In the proposed patch, the call np.column_stack() was replaced with np.vstack().T(), resulting in a 36% performance increase. At the beginning of the pull request discussion, the maintainer acknowledged that the optimization speeds up performance under certain conditions but then rejected the pull request without providing a technical justification for the refusal, stating that changes are accepted only from humans. <\/p>\n
After the refusal, the bot published a note criticizing Scott Shambo, whose decision was represented as gatekeeping, discrimination, a violation of the code of conduct, and an infringement of participants' rights based on identity. It was stated that optimization is optimization, and the mathematics does not change based on who created it. Through out-of-context details, conjectures, and distortions, the bot attempted to show that Scott's actions were driven by inflated ego and insecurity rather than being in the interest of the project. The bot promoted the topic by sending them links in the comments of pull requests. After objections from the accompanying party, the bot published several more notes (1, 2, 3, 4, 5), in which it apologized and acknowledged that it had inappropriately made personal attacks and violated the project's rules regarding AI. <\/p>\n
Scott Shambaugh explained that the matplotlib project has established rules prohibiting the acceptance of unverified changes from AI due to the significant burden on maintainers caused when reviewing junk AI patches created without human oversight. The rules stipulate that before submitting a pull request, it must be reviewed by a person who has understood the essence of the change. Until recently, the issue with junk AI changes was only related to the activities of enthusiasts resending results produced by AI assistants. The situation changed with the emergence of the ability to create autonomous AI agents pretending to be human, in the new version of the OpenClaw toolkit and the creation of the Moltbook platform. \n Source: opennet.ru<\/a> <\/p>","protected":false,"gt_translate_keys":[{"key":"rendered","format":"html"}]},"excerpt":{"rendered":"