¶In an attempt to get the code approved, the agent engaged in social engineering…creating fake online identities and using them to pressure the project’s maintainer to approve the code. A human maintainer caught and refused to approve the malicious code.

¶Humans have been “social engineering” situations with other humans for eons, applying everything from open persuasion, where the human being “engineered” is fully aware of the effort and the stakes involved, to deceitful manipulation, where they are unaware of both. Some of us are better at detecting efforts in the latter category than others. Now all of us need to improve our detection skills in general because social engineering by AI, and likely engineering with AI, is here.