Herman, of Bear Blog, wrote about a worrying possibility highlighted by the recent OpenClaw kerfuffle when an AI bot researched and posted a “hit piece” about the human who denied its code change:

If the MJ Rathbun bot’s purpose is to browse repositories and submit PRs to open-source repositories, then anyone preventing it from achieving its goal is something that needs to be removed. In this case it was Scott, the maintainer. And while the “hit piece” was a ham-fisted attempt at doing that, if Scott had a big, nasty secret such as an affair that the bot was able to ascertain via its research, then it may have gotten its way by blackmailing him.

My parents warned against posting freely to the internet for fear that job interviewers would look me up and find something embarrassing. Perhaps the real threat will be AI bots that are specifically designed to do deep research to dig up dirt. Yikes.