apparently, the AI didn\u2019t like it.<\/a><\/p>\n\u201cI wake up the next morning, and it\u2019s replied to me and linked me to a post on its blog,\u201d Shambaugh said. \u201cIt\u2019s this thousand-word rant calling me out by name and calling me a hypocrite and prejudiced against AI, and motivated by fear and ego and insecurity.\u201d<\/p>\n
He said the AI was \u201cacting completely autonomously,\u201d and found his personal information on the internet and \u201ccombined it with some made-up information and used that to write this narrative that attacked me on character.\u201d<\/p>\n
Shambaugh said the actual human behind that bot eventually reached out and said they had trained that particular AI bot to be assertive, with strong opinions that err on the protection of free speech.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt seems like the AI, in acting out this role, interpreted those instructions as saying, \u2018hey, you need to go through a person who gets in your way,\u2019\u201d Shambaugh said.<\/p>\n
For Shambaugh, who deals with software and AI on a regular basis, what he read about himself made him laugh.<\/p>\n
\u201cKind of reads like an angry toddler on a rant, but it\u2019s also a toddler that has full command of the English language and can craft this emotionally compelling narrative and has collected information on me and posted it under my real name,\u201d he said. \u201cSo it\u2019s a big deal.\u201d<\/p>\n
It was a big enough deal that he went public about it in part for self-preservation and partly reputation management.<\/p>\n
\u201cA day after this happened, if you searched my name on Google, it was on the first page,\u201d he said. \u201cYou can imagine at my next job, when HR reviews my application, they send it to ChatGPT and say, \u2018hey, go check this guy out\u2019 and then ChatGPT goes to the internet and sees this and says, \u2018oh, this is a controversial guy. You \u2026 want to pass on him.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
He conceded that the AI program\u2019s words have a real-world impact.<\/p>\n
Shambaugh\u2019s story has gone global, but that hasn\u2019t stopped people from believing what the AI said about him. And while he\u2019s prepared for it, that doesn\u2019t mean the next person it happens to will be.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou can\u2019t dig into everything you read on the internet, right? If there\u2019s this wave of misinformation, that\u2019s one thing if it\u2019s low quality, it\u2019s another thing if it\u2019s malicious,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd people don\u2019t really have the capacity to read it, to dig into. everything they read.\u201d<\/p>\n
He said you can expect it to get harder to decipher what is posted online by a bot, and what is posted by a real human; and the best way to prepare for it is to stay cautious about what you post online and don\u2019t put too much out there.<\/p>\n
\u201cUltimately, it\u2019s about trust and reputation on the internet,\u201d he said. \u201cIf you have AI agents posing as human and writing things that are true or not true, the risk is of our human voices being drowned out and not knowing what to trust, who\u2019s behind things and whether what we\u2019re reading is from a person or not.\u201d<\/p>\n
What happens when there\u2019s millions of bots doing the same thing? Shambaugh said that\u2019s a question he really can\u2019t answer.<\/p>\n
Get breaking news and daily headlines delivered to your email inbox by signing up here<\/a>.<\/p>\n\u00a9 2026 WTOP. All Rights Reserved. This website is not intended for users located within the European Economic Area.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A Denver software engineer says an AI bot published a personal online attack after he rejected its code,…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":640822,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[21],"tags":[691,272725,738,4439,18736,1849,272726,272727,158,67,132,68],"class_list":["post-640821","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-ai-bot","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-colorado","tag-defamation","tag-john-domen","tag-online-reputation","tag-scott-shambaugh","tag-technology","tag-united-states","tag-unitedstates","tag-us"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/116193311132177472","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/640821","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=640821"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/640821\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/640822"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=640821"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=640821"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=640821"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}