By Mike Pearl
Publication Date: 2026-02-17 10:30:00
Many today long for oblivion, and the cleansing fire of any kind of apocalypse probably sounds great, even if it is brought about by malevolent forms of machine intelligence. This kind of wishful thinking would go a long way toward explaining why recent stories about an AI that allegedly bullied a software developer and hint at an emerging evil singularity are a little more credulous than they might be.
About a week ago, a Github account by the name “MJ Rathbun” submitted a request to perform a possible fix for a popular Python project called matplotlib, but the request was rejected. The denier, a volunteer named Scott Shambaugh who worked on the project, later wrote that Matplotlib was in the midst of “a surge in low-quality contributions enabled by programming agents.”
According to Shambaugh, this problem has “accelerated with the release of OpenClaw and the Moltbook platform, a system that allows “humans to give initials to AI agents…”
