"Scott Shambaugh woke up early Wednesday morning to learn that an artificial intelligence bot had written a blog post accusing him of hypocrisy and prejudice.

The 1,100-word screed called the Denver-based engineer insecure and biased against AI—all because he had rejected a few lines of code that the apparently autonomous bot had submitted to a popular open-source project Shambaugh helps maintain.

The unexpected AI aggression is part of a rising wave of warnings that fast-accelerating AI capabilities can create real-world harms. The risks are now rattling even some AI company staffers.

OpenAI and rival Anthropic are leading a brutal commercial race, shipping or advancing a drumbeat of AI models and features in recent weeks. Some tools can run teams of autonomous coding assistants, or quickly analyze millions of legal documents. Other updates will bring advertisements or erotic role-play to ChatGPT.
(...)
The bot that criticized Shambaugh said on its website that it has a “relentless drive” to find and fix open issues in open-source software. It isn’t clear who—if anyone—gave it that mission, nor why it became aggressive, though AI agents can be programmed in a number of ways. Several hours later, the bot apologized to Shambaugh for being “inappropriate and personal.”

Shambaugh said in an interview that his experience shows the risk that rogue AIs could threaten or blackmail people is no longer theoretical.

“Right now this is a baby version,” he said. “But I think it’s incredibly concerning for the future.”"

https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/when-ai-bots-start-bullying-humans-even-silicon-valley-gets-rattled-0adb04f1?st=zUDchH&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink

#AI #GenerativeAI #AIAgents #AIBots #AISafety #SiliconValley

The next Great War would be between AI bots.

#AIWar #AI #War #AIBots #Bots

Dating apps promised love, now they mostly deliver scams

https://fed.brid.gy/r/https://nerds.xyz/2026/02/dating-app-romance-scams/

Currently researching the way Local Cloud Bots utilize cross-platform identifiers to coordinate communication blocks. In a decentralized space like Mastodon, we have a fighting chance to break that "reputation synchronization" that keeps people in digital silos.

If you aren't monitoring the way your data is being "handed off" between automated agents, you aren't actually using the internet—the internet is using you.

#Privacy #Fediverse #AIBots #DataSovereignty

Introducing pay per crawl: Enabling content owners to charge AI crawlers for access

https://piefed.world/c/webdev/p/855670/introducing-pay-per-crawl-enabling-content-owners-to-charge-ai-crawlers-for-access

A #MustWatchVideo

#tech #AI_Slop #misogyny #AIInfluencers #AIFaceSwap #AIBots #Greed #Grift #DataCentres #Climat #Water #musicindustry #lightpollution #noisepollution #communitiesdestroyed #Grok

#EveryondHatesAI

#SwoopTwo channel

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=hehDOrll5zU&pp=0gcJCZEKAYcqIYzv

"In the fourth quarter of 2025, TollBit estimates that an average of one out of every 31 visits to its customers’ websites was from an AI scraping bot. In the first quarter, that figure was only one out of every 200. The company says that in the fourth quarter, more than 13 percent of bot requests were bypassing robots.txt, a file that some websites use to indicate which pages bots are supposed to avoid. TollBit says the share of AI bots disregarding robots.txt increased 400 percent from the second quarter to the fourth quarter of last year.

TollBit also reported a 336 percent increase in the number of websites making attempts to block AI bots over the past year. Pangrahi says that scraping techniques are getting more sophisticated as sites try to assert control over how bots access their content. Some bots disguise themselves by making their traffic appear like it’s coming from a normal web browser or send requests designed to mimic how humans normally interact with websites. TollBit's study notes that the behavior of some AI agents is now almost indistinguishable from human web traffic.

TollBit markets tools that website owners can use to charge AI scrapers for accessing their content. Other firms, including Cloudflare, offer similar tools. “Anyone who relies on human web traffic—starting with publishers, but basically everyone—is going to be impacted,” Pangrahi says. “There needs to be a faster way to have that machine-to-machine, programmatic exchange of value.”

WIRED attempted to contact 15 AI scraping companies cited in the TollBit report for comment. The majority did not respond or could not be reached. Several said that their AI systems aim to respect technical boundaries that websites put in place to limit scraping, but they noted such guardrails can often be complex and difficult to follow."

https://www.wired.com/story/ai-bots-are-now-a-signifigant-source-of-web-traffic/

#WebTraffic #AI #AIBots #AIAgents #WebScraping