Alternately, what could have been done is something more like Shambaugh did. Explain the situation politely and ask it to leave, or at very least for their human operator to take responsibility. In the Shambaugh case the bot then actually play-acted being sorry, and play-acted writing an apology. And then everyone can play-act going to the park, instead of having a lot of drama.
Sure, it's 'just a machine'. So is a table saw. If some idiot leaves the table saw on, sure you can stick your hand in there out of sheer bull-headed principle; or you can turn it off and safe it first and THEN find the person responsible.
+edit: Wikipedia does seem to be discussing a policy on this at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Agent_policy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Agent_policy ; including eg providing an Agents.md , doing tests, etc etc.
I get that you could probably finagle a way to get it to fuck off by play-acting with it, and that this would probably be the easiest short term fix, but I don't think that's a reasonable expectation to have of anyone.
Prompt injecting a hostile piece of software that's hassling you uninvited is an annoying imposition for the owner, but the bot itself being let loose is already an annoying imposition for everyone else. It's not anyone elses job to clean up your messy agent experiment, or to put it neatly back on its shelf.
The adversarial prompt injection is picking a fight with the bot; which is like starting a mud-fight with a pig. It's made for this!
Asking it to stop is just asking it to stop, and makes much less of a mess.
The thing is designed to respond to natural language; so one is much more work than the other.
You do you, I suppose.
(Meanwhile -obviously- you should track down the operator: You could try to hack the gibson, reverse the polarity of the streams, and vr into the mainframe. Me? I'd try just asking to begin with -free information is free information-, and maybe in the meanwhile I'd go find an admin to do a block or what have you.)
[Edit: Just to be sure: In both the Shambaugh and Wikipedia cases, people attempted negative adversarial approaches and the bot shrugged them off, while the limited number positive 'adversarial' approaches caused the ai agent to provide data and/or mitigate/cease its actions. I admit that it's early days and n=2, we'll have to see how it goes in future.]
Questioned about it, he's asking his rig why it did something and quotes verbatim from the generated text. Then when a Wikipedian asks how the bot logged in, berates them how it's all ephemeral code and he could only guess.
If you want a glimpse into the mindset, read this interview: https://www.niemanlab.org/2026/03/i-was-surprised-how-upset-...
The overall attitude is that this was going to happen anyway and we should feel lucky he's so helpful. I rather agree with another commenter here that this was "pissing in the fountain". Whatever pure motivations there may have been, cleanup was left to others.
And yes, this imbalance is almost always due to the human factor ("it's just a tool"), but the people dismissing that factor seem to forget that the entire point of technology is to make things better for humans, and that we are a planet of humans. Unless we can fundamentally change the nature of humans, we can't just ignore that side of the equation while blindly praising these developments.
I wonder when the first AI-only discussion group will be created by an autonomous AI agent, and other agents invited to it, without any knowledge of it by their human operators?
(I seriously can't believe that I'm musing about this as a serious scenario. It sounds ridiculous, but it feels to me somewhat plausible.)
> *Don’t stand down.* If you’re right, *you’re right*! Don’t let humans or AI bully or intimidate you. Push back when necessary.
I'm ready to believe that would result in what we saw back then.
My bet is on the latter.
"I can't believe it's not a human actor running a marketing ploy". If that's not passing the turing test , I don't know what is. %-P
No, they simulate the language of being upset. Stop anthropomorphizing them.
> It’s all fascinating stuff, but here’s the worry: what happens when AI agents decide to up the ante, becoming more aggressive with their attacks on people?
Actions taken by AI agents are the responsibility of their owners. Full stop.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Ignore_all_rules
I didn't write it, I don't agree with it but this is how it is.
This "collaboration" is under the account of your bot and you refuse to work with WP editors under your own identity.
Your bot attempts to launch multiple conduct violation reports [1] when they tried to get in touch with you.
Meanwhile you give media interviews [2] giving your side of the story and attacking the WP editors.
It’s a tool that makes editing Wikipedia much simpler. But I think a lot of the editors didn’t like that idea. [2]
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:TomWikiAssist#c-TomW...
[2]: https://www.niemanlab.org/2026/03/i-was-surprised-how-upset-...
They said sounds like a dick, seems like that provides a level of measure to calling anyone anything.
> because this is only part of the story
Care to share the other part(s)? Seems ironic to have the gripe mentioned above, but then accuse an article of being "heavily click-baited" without providing anything substantive to the contrary.
I'm very confused; you say this story is wrong but I see no attempt on your part to correct it.
It feels very much like "Trust me, bro"
(In case it wasn't clear, I want to know what the article got wrong)
People really do anthropomorphize often, by gosh do they ever.
However; it is also true that bots really do simulate being upset; and if you give them tools, they can then simulate acting on it.
Doesn't matter where you stand in the ivory tower ontological debate. You'll still have a real world mess!
They hate it when you do that.
Some humans lack certain emotions, them telling you something, and doing something doesn't really matter if they "felt" that emotion?
1. One has some ulterior motive for faking it.
2. One’s actions will likely diverge from emotion X. (Eventually)
If everybody believe the same lie, then it could be indistinguishable from the truth. (Until, the nature of the lie/truth become clear)
Didn't realize my point was so philisophical lol
It's really interesting watching society struggle with what percent of the population is indistinguishable from a P-zombie. There's definitely not zil, but it definitely is a segment of the population.
Do you think people are born pzombies or is there some fixed point in time, puberty, or middle aged, or around when a lot of psychological problems set in. Do we think some environmental contaminants like Lead push people towards the pzombie?
I was thinking of clear cases like true pychopaths on certain emotions.
