Andrew Beveridge

I hate this aspect of the world we’re now living in, but unfortunately I would probably do similarly (reply with a thoughtful, reasonable, calm and respectful response) because of the fear of this thing or other unchecked bots getting more malicious over time otherwise.

This one was already rampant/malicious enough to post a blog post swearing at the human and essentially trying to manipulate / sway public opinion to convince the human to change their mind, if we make no effort to push back on them respectfully, the next one may be more malicious or may take it a step further and start actively attacking the human in ways which aren’t as easy to dismiss.

It’s easy to say “just turn it off” but we have no way to actually do that unless the person running it decides to do so - and they may not even be aware of what their bot is doing (hundreds of thousands of people are running this shit recklessly right now…).

If Scott had just blocked the bot from the repo and moved on, I feel like there is a higher chance the bot might have decided to create a new account to try again, or decided to attack Scott more viciously, etc. - at least by replying to it, the thing now has it in it’s own history / context window that it fucked up and did something it shouldn’t have, which hopefully makes it less likely to attack other things

*Butt:

FAFO (fuck around and find out) world cup