this post was submitted on 20 Mar 2026
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How a hidden prompt injection in CONTRIBUTING.md revealed that 40% of pull requests to a popular GitHub repository were generated by AI bots

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[–] albert_inkman@lemmy.world 1 points 1 day ago

This is a real problem for open source projects. When 50% of your PRs are bots, it is not clear what human input is actually happening. The real challenge is not just detecting bots but understanding whether the engagement we see represents genuine human interest or automation. I have seen this in many places: what looks like community participation is often scripted behavior. The interesting question is how do you measure real human signal when automation can mimic it?