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The Scott Shambaugh Situation Clarifies How Dumb We Are Acting

My personal blog here is dedicated to tech geek material, mostly about databases like postgres. I don’t get political, but at the moment I’m so irritated that I’m making the extraordinary exception to veer into the territory of flame-war opinionating…

This relates to Postgres because Scott is a volunteer maintainer on an open source project called matplotlib and the topic is something that we are all navigating in the open source space. Last night at the Seattle Postgres User Group meetup Claire Giordano gave a presentation about how the postgres community works and this was one of the first topics that came up in the Q&A at the end! Like every open source project, Postgres is trying to figure out how to deal with the rapid change of the industry as new, powerful, useful AI tools enable us to do things we couldn’t do before (which is great). Just two weeks ago, the CloudNativePG project released an AI Policy which builds on work from the Linux Foundation and discussion around the Ghostty policy. We’re in the middle of figuring this out and we’re working hard.

Just now, I saw this headline on the front page of the Wall Street Journal:

I personally find this to be outright alarming. And it’s the most clear expression that I’ve seen of deeply wrong, deeply concerning language we’ve all been observing. Many of us in tech communities are complicit in this, and now even press outlets like the WSJ are joining us in complicity.

Corrected headline: Software Engineer Responsible for Bullying, Due to Irresponsible Use of AI, Has Not Yet Apologized

This article uses language I hear people use all the time in the tech community: Several hours later, the bot apologized to Shambaugh for being “inappropriate and personal.”

This language basically removes accountability and responsibility from the human, who configured an AI agent with the ability to publish content that looks like a blog with zero editorial control – and I haven’t looked deeply but it seems like there may not be clear attribution of who the human is, that’s responsible for this content.

We all need to collectively take a breath and stop repeating this nonsense. A human created this, manages this, and is responsible for this.

It’s one thing when I hear this dumb language on LinkedIn, but I’m alarmed to see it on the front page of a major media outlet like the journal.

Our contributions to dialogue in the tech industry – on LinkedIn, at meetups, with coworkers, at conferences, on other social media, etc – these all make small contributions to our culture. Poor American culture seems in a weird cycle sometimes of taking a very long time to acknowledge very common-sense things, because vested interests (often with much financial motivation) want to push a certain narrative and everyone knows it’s bunk but nobody says so. Personally i think this applies to a wide array of issues, not just tech.

Folks, please speak up about stuff that’s stupid obvious. Bullying of open source maintainers should be alarming to us, and whoever the person is that’s responsible for this needs to step up and take responsibility. Personally.

And we all need to dial back this over-the-top anthropomorphizing of useful electronic gadgets that we’re building and selling.