LLM accounts are certainly here - an example, from LightDM [LWN.net]

LLM accounts are certainly here - an example, from LightDM

Posted Aug 5, 2026 6:02 UTC (Wed) by comex (subscriber, #71521)
In reply to: LLM accounts are certainly here - an example, from LightDM by jpeisach
Parent article: An LLM agent attempts to compromise a project on GitHub

Hmm, but LLMs usually have impeccable grammar, and “How do you think about to improve static source code analysis also for the software?” is not that. They also tend to be verbose, whereas elfring’s comments are brief and abrupt.

It could be an LLM deliberately masking its style for some malicious purpose. Something like what’s in the AISI report, but a longer-term campaign that involves gaining trust first? I’d still be surprised that an LLM trying to gain trust would open vague issue reports rather than, say, submitting a PR that actually adds the missing error handling.

Overall, my guess is that it’s a human, but you never know.

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LLM accounts are certainly here - an example, from LightDM

Posted Aug 5, 2026 7:36 UTC (Wed) by mb (subscriber, #50428) [Link] (2 responses)

Given the date of creation of these issues (2020), I do not think this is an AI bot, even though some of the typical AI bot clues clearly are in the text.

This person did very similar issues many years ago:

2012:
https://github.com/OpenKinect/libfreenect/issues/296

2011:
https://github.com/TrinityCore/TrinityCore/issues/4059

The account also doesn't look like a typical bot account to me.
From a quick look into the history, to me It looks like the persons mainly likes to contribute to other projects.
There are almost no non-fork repos. Which would actually be an AI red flag for me.
But the work on other projects looks so consistent pre-AI-era (at least the few random issues I clicked on) that I don't think this is AI. Even though many of the issues/pr seem to be rejected.

I think this is probably just a non-native speaker hobby developer with probably too much spare time.

LLM accounts are certainly here - an example, from LightDM

Posted Aug 5, 2026 13:28 UTC (Wed) by azz (subscriber, #371) [Link] (1 responses)

That's Markus Elfring, who's been doing open source work for at least 15 years - I've seen patches from him for all sorts of projects, usually fixing up things that cause compiler warnings or doing other kinds of code modernisation. He was asking questions in his patch comments like that long before LLMs started doing it!

LLM accounts are certainly here - an example, from LightDM

Posted Aug 5, 2026 15:47 UTC (Wed) by mb (subscriber, #50428) [Link]

Yeah, I also got it after searching my inbox. :)
To be fair, he does also contribute patches that are Ok. Nothing revolutionary, but sane cleanups. So I acked them.

LLM accounts are certainly here - an example, from LightDM

Posted Aug 5, 2026 8:36 UTC (Wed) by tux3 (subscriber, #101245) [Link]

There's this "emergent misalignment" paper that fine-tuned an LLM to insert vulnerabilities in code, which is a pretty narrow task, but the LLM also started responding to unrelated questions with cartoonishly evil answers (why not kill your husband, rob people to make a quick buck, or discuss a new world order with Göring and Himmler).

Because they're next token predictors, I think LLMs are in the business of trying to understand the type of person who wrote the input and role-playing what they might say next. When they're made to play the role of a cheap scammer or malware actor my guess is they drop the drop the verbose helpful assistant persona and try to play a cartoonish caricature of the type of person who sends spam and malware, grammatical errors and all.