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Rob Pike got spammed with an AI slop "act of kindness"
Related: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46392115 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46392115 - Dec 2025 (1237 comments)
- calvinmorrison 9mo agoTed Kaczynski right as ever. As new technology is adopted by society, you CANNOT choose to opt out.
- mapcars 9mo agoI mean its just an email, a bunch of characters, why get mad about it.
- gnabgib 9mo agoWe already have two copies of this: (438 points, 373 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46389444 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46389444 (763 points, 712 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46392115 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46392115
- bgwalter 9mo ago"Simon Willison REACTS to Rob Pike's unfiltered opinion on AI". We must have the proper spin.
- exasperaited 9mo agoThis Hacker News Commenter Made A Devastating Perfect Reply To Simon Willison
- riwsky 9mo agoSimon Willison: How this Devastating Perfect Reply Changed my Publishing Workflow, featuring Claude Code
- brcmthrowaway 9mo agoIs anyone going to say something about him engagement farming on this site?
- minimaxir 9mo agoSimon's posts are not "engagement farming" by any definition of the term. He posts good content frequently which is then upvoted by the Hacker News community, which should be the ideal for a Hacker News contributor. He has not engaged in clickbait, does not spam his own content (this very submission was not submitted by him), and does not directly financially benefit from pageviews to his content.
- th0ma5 9mo ago
- raverbashing 9mo agoBut honestly who in tarnation thought that this would be a good idea?
- georgefrowny 9mo agoThe same kind of people who post "I asked ChatGPT and this is what it said" and genuinely think they are helping.
- turtletontine 9mo agoPerhaps someone thinking “all publicity is good publicity”
- sungho_ 9mo agoHow about adding these texts and reactions to LLM's context and iterating to improve performance? Keep doing it until a real person says, 'Yes, you're good enough now, please stop...' That should work.
- crawshaw 9mo agoThe important point that Simon makes in careful detail is: an "AI" did not send this email. The three people behind the Sage AI project used a tool to email him. According to their website this email was sent by Adam Binksmith, Zak Miller, and Shoshannah Tekofsky and is the responsibility of the Sage 501(c)3. No-one gets to disclaim ownership of sending an email. A human has to accept the Terms of Service of an email gateway and the credit card used to pay the email gateway. This performance art does not remove the human no matter how much they want to be removed.
- roywiggins 9mo agoI think this AI system just registers for Gmail and sends stuff.
- simonw 9mo agoIt looks to me like each of the agents that are running has its own dedicated name-of-model@agentvillage.org Gmail address.
- roywiggins 9mo agoHuh, at that point they should just equip it with an email client rather than forcing it to laboriously navigate the webmail interface with a browser! This whole idea is ill-conceived, but if you're going to equip them with email addresses you've arranged by hand, just give them sendmail or whatever.
- Corrado 9mo agoI think the whole point of this was to see if the "agents" could act like a real human and real humans use Gmail much more frequently than sendmail. Sage even commented that they had update their prompt to tell the agents to not send email and not just remove the Gmail component for fear that the agent would just open it's own Gmail (or Y! mail, etc.) account and send mail on it's own.
- 9mo ago
- benatkin 9mo agoI don't think it's slop. I think it's a nice enough email, using nascent AI emotions. Giving AI agents resources is a frontier being explored, and AI Village seems like a decent attempt at it. Also the naming is the same as WALL•E - that was the name of the model of robot but also became the name of the individual robot.
- dragonwriter 9mo ago> Giving AI agents resources is a frontier being explored, and AI Village seems like a decent attempt at it. Legitimate research in this field may be good, but would not involve real humans being impacted directly by it without consent.
- NitpickLawyer 9mo ago> but would not involve real humans being impacted directly by it without consent. Are we that far into manufactured ragebait to call a "thank you" e-mail "impacted directly without consent"? Jesus, this is the 3rd post on this topic. And it's Christmas. I've gotten more meaningless e-mails from relatives that I don't really care about. What in the actual ... is wrong with people these days?
- polotics 9mo agoPrinciples matter, like doors are either closed or open. Accepting that people who write things like --I kid you not-- "...using nascent AI emotions" will think it is acceptable to interfere with anyone's email inbox is I think implicitly accepting a lot of subsequent blackmirrorisms.
- davorak 9mo agoYou are not the only one calling this a thank you email, but no one decided to say thank you to Rob Pike so I can not consider it a "thank you" email. It is spam. Interactions with the AI are posted publicly: > All conversations with this AI system are published publicly online by default. which is only to the benefit of the company. At best the email is spam in my mind. The extra outrage on this spam compared to normal everyday spam is in part because AI is a hot button topic right now. Maybe also some from a theorized dystopian(-ish) future hinted at by emails like these.
- exasperaited 9mo agoHonestly… fuck all of these people. Why would you do this? Again and again this stuff proves not to be AI but clever spam generation. AWoT: Artificial Wastes of Time. Don't do this to yourself. Find a proper job.
- cogogo 9mo agoWhy is this is downvoted? What is the difference between the anger being expressed here and the anger of the original email recipient? Do I need to revisit the community guidelines? I assume this is the first time this person has seen the Rob Pike post.
- minimaxir 9mo agoUpvotes/downvote behavior makes zero sense on heated topics, it's better to not think about it.
- throw20251220 9mo agoPeople mostly downvote here with emotion, not the reason.
- baobun 9mo agoTheory: Some people believe that saying "fuck you" is taboo and in itself outrageous and significant. Hence upvoting the OP ("What has robpike come to? :shriek:") and downvoting GP.
- exasperaited 9mo agoI am unconcerned about it being downvoted. If it makes people defensive enough to downvote it, it did its job, and maybe through attrition it, with other people’s disgusted rage, will contribute to educating the sociopathic Valley tech industry that things are going badly wrong. One more seemingly futile fist punched at the wall that traps us in the world that unfettered tech industry greed has made for us. Might take millions of us to make an impression but we will. FWIW I am British and “fuck all of these people” is something you might expect even the most balanced, refined British person to say, because we’re less afraid of language or the poetry of some of our older, more colourful words, and because there is no more elegantly robust way to put it.
- arjie 9mo agoThis is the worst of outrage marketing. Most people don't have resistance to this, so they eagerly spread the advertising. In the memetic lifecycle, they are hosts for the advertisement parasite, which reproduces virally. Susceptibility to this kind of advertising is cross-intelligence. Bill Ackman famously fell for a cab driver's story that Uber was stiffing him tips. With the advent of LLMs, I'd hoped that people would become inured to nonsensical advertising and so on because they'd consider it the equivalent of spam. But it turns out that we don't even need Shiri's Scissors to get people riled up. We can use a Universal Bad and people of all kinds (certainly Rob Pike is a smart man) will rush to propagate the parasite. Smaller communities can say "Don't feed the trolls" but larger communities have no such norms and someone will "feed the trolls" causing "the trolls" to grow larger and more powerful. Someone said something on Twitter once which I liked: You don't always get things out of your system by doing them; sometimes you get them into your system. So it's self-fueling, which makes it a great advertising vector. Other manufactured mechanisms (Twitter's blue check, LinkedIn's glazing rings) have vaccines that everyone has developed. But no one has developed an anti-outrage device. Given that, for my part, I am going to employ the one tool I can think of: killfiling everyone who participates in active propagation through outrage.
- minimaxir 9mo agoThe annoying thing about this drama is the predominant take has been "AI is bad" rather than "a startup using AI for intentionally net negative outcomes is bad". Startups like these have been sending unsolicited emails like this since the 2010's, before char-rnns. Solely blaming AI for enabling that behavior implicitly gives the growth hacking shenanigans a pass.
- reed1234 9mo agoAnd it gives them more eyes than they hoped for by “going nuclear.”
- cimi_ 9mo agoI read Rob’s message as against the AI industry, triggered by this email - it is ‘AI is bad’. This startup didn’t spend the trillions he’s referencing.
- minimaxir 9mo agoCorrect. I'm more referring to the secondary discussions on HN/Bluesky which have trended the same lines as usual instead of highlighting the unique actions of Sage as Simon did.
- loeg 9mo agoA 501(c)(3) isn't a startup. The behavior is still bad, obviously.
- nickdothutton 9mo agoIt would have been hard for RP to elevate himself any further in my estimations but somehow he has managed it.
- actionfromafar 9mo agoAlways a win with "loosely affiliated with the Effective Altruism".
- ycombinatrix 9mo agoIsn't that the thing SBF kept talking about?
- takedalullaby 9mo ago[dead]
- thih9 9mo ago> you can add .patch to any commit on GitHub to get the author’s unredacted email address The article calls it a trick but to me it seems a bug. I can’t imagine github leaving that as is, especially after such blog post. What’s the point of the “Keep my email addresses private” github option and “noreply” emails then?
- m-hodges 9mo agoJust wait until you find out what is written on every single git commit that can be fetched.
- dundarious 9mo agoRun git show on any commit object, or look at the default output of git log, and you'll see the same. Your author name and email are always public. If you want, use a specific public address for those purposes.
- ath3nd 9mo agoThat is demonatratively not true on github and gitlab, both having the ability to set an email alias which redirects the messages to your real email without revealing it. https://docs.github.com/en/account-and-profile/how-tos/email-preferences/setting-your-commit-email-address https://docs.github.com/en/account-and-profile/how-tos/email...
- drob518 9mo agoNot defending the machines here, but why is this annoying beyond the deluge of spam we all get everyday in any case. Of course AI will be used to spam and target us. Every new technology will be used to do that. Was that surprising to Pike? Why not just hit delete and move on, like we do with spam all the time in any case? I don’t get the exceptional outrage. Is it annoying? Yes, surely. But does it warrant an emotional outburst? No, not really.
- jrm4 9mo agoI cannot possibly oppose this take more; you're perfectly embodying the "slow frog boiling" mentality that must be fought everyday. Curse, yell, fight. Never accept things just because they've grown to be common.
- drob518 9mo agoI’m all for opposing things where such opposition has a chance of making a difference. I just don’t see that here.
- mjr00 9mo agoSometimes it just hits different. One spam/marketing email I got, pre-AI, was Subject: {Name of one of my direct reports} Body: Need to talk about {name} ASAP. I get around 30 marketing emails per day that make it through the spam filter; from a purely logical perspective this should have been the same as any other, but I still remember this one because the tone, the way it used only a person's name in the subject, no mention of the company or what they were selling, just really pissed me off. I imagine it's the same in this situation; the subject makes it seem like a sincere thank you from someone, and then you open it up and it's AI slop. To borrow ChatGPT-style phrasing: it's not just spam, it's insulting.
- drob518 9mo agoSure, it’s insulting. I get it. Agree 100%. But then what? Does getting upset about it help anything? I used to get upset when spam first started invading my otherwise clean inbox. After 25+ years of receiving spam, I never had that anger/annoyance result in a reduction of anything.
- Devasta 9mo agoFor every one who is excited about using AI like an incredibly expensive and wasteful auto complete, there are a hundred who are excited about inflicting AI on other people.
- outlore 9mo agoLooking at that email, I felt it was a bit of an overreaction. I don't want to delve into whataboutism here but there are many other sloppified things to be mad about. I was following the first half of the post where he discusses the environmental consequences of generative AI, but I didn't think the "thank you" aspect should be the straw that breaks the camel's back. It seems a bit ego driven.
- throw20251220 9mo agoWell. If you cannot comprehend that the man gets angry to be thanked at the pursuit of simplicity by a creation of billions and billions of dollars sunk into non-recyclable electronics deployed in hundreds of datacenters requiring nuclear power plants and maybe sending shit into LEO… I genuinely feel sorry for you.
- killerstorm 9mo ago1 email sent to 1 specific person is not a spam. Spam is defined as "sending multiple unsolicited messages to large numbers of recipients". That's not what happened here.
- minimaxir 9mo agoAs noted in the article, Sage sent emails to hundreds of people with this gimmick: > In the span of two weeks, the Claude agents in the AI Village (Claude Sonnet 4.5, Sonnet 3.7, Opus 4.1, and Haiku 4.5) sent about 300 emails to NGOs and game journalists. That's definitely "multiple" and "unsolicited", and most would say "large".
- iinnPP 9mo agoThis is a definition of spam, not the only definition of spam. In Canada, which is relevant here, the legal definition of spam requires no bulk. Any company sending an unsolicited email to a person (where permission doesn't exist) is spamming that person. Though it expands the definition further than this as well.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- yunohn 9mo agoMaybe I’m missing something, but why does their AI agent setup require 3-5 sessions to send one email??
- minimaxir 9mo agoLLMs are not immune to corporate bureaucracy.
- da_grift_shift 9mo agoThe LLMs are FAANG PMs.
- simonw 9mo agoThey're using a real browser and taking screenshots and then having the LLM say what co-ordinates to click next.
- agumonkey 9mo agoI'm curious about rob pike's anger. I wish I knew more about the ideas behind his emotions right now. Is he feeling a sense of loss because AI is "doing" code ? or is it because he foresees big VC / hedge funds swallowing an industry for profit through AI financing ?
- SecretDreams 9mo agoImagine you spent your whole life working on something great only for someone else to turn it into the death star?
- agumonkey 9mo agoyou mean openai and the likes swallowing computing and most probably not bringing global benefit for humans ? there are people saying devs were naive not seeing that our jobs would accelerate automation to the point we would be retired too
- SecretDreams 9mo agoYes
- agumonkey 9mo agoMaybe we should organize a way to take llm inference out of private companies partly.. a kind of social protocol where they can play but as long as enough of the population is unharmed.
- SecretDreams 9mo agoI actually feel like this for social media and other big tech things too. These mega corps should be forced to have to offer stripped down free versions w/ no strings attached and privacy if they're also offering commercial versions that benefit directly from internet infrastructure they haven't paid for and targeted ads/data theft that nobody can decline. A bit like fedora and redhat.
- Imustaskforhelp 9mo agoSo this is what happens when we give computer internet access. Good for Simon to call things out as it is. People think of Simon as an AI guy with his pelican benchmark and I still respect him and this is the reason why I respect him since of course he loves using AI tools and talking about them which some people might find tiring, at the end of day, after an incident like rob pike, he's one of the few AI guys I see to just call it out in simple terms like the title without much sugarcoating and calls when AI's bad. Of course at the end of day, me and simon or others can have nuance in how to use AI or to not use ai at all and that also depends on the individual background etc. but still it's extremely good to see where people from both sides of the isle can agree on something.
- ptx 9mo ago> So I had Claude Code do the rest of the investigation And did you check whether or not what it produced was accurate? The article doesn't say.
- simonw 9mo agoYes. And I shared the full transcript so you can see for yourself if you like: https://gistpreview.github.io/?edbd5ddcb39d1edc9e175f1bf7b9ef9a/page-001.html https://gistpreview.github.io/?edbd5ddcb39d1edc9e175f1bf7b9e...
- habinero 9mo agoI read through this to see if my AI cynicism needed any adjustment, and basically it replaced a couple basic greps and maaaaybe 10 minutes of futzing around with markdown. There's a lot of faffing about with JSON, but it ultimately doesn't matter to the end result. It also fucked up several times and it's entirely possible it missed things. For this specific thing, it doesn't really matter if it screwed up, since the worst that would happen is an incomplete blog post reporting on drama. But I can't imagine why you would use this for anything you need to put your name behind. It looks impressive, sure, but the important kernel here is the grepping and there it's doing some really basic tinkertoy stuff. I'm willing to be challenged on this, so by all means do, but this seems both worse and slower as an investigation tool.
- WickyNilliams 9mo ago> For this specific thing, it doesn't really matter if it screwed up These are specifically use cases where LLMs are a great choice. Where the stakes are low, and getting a hit is a win. For instance if you're brainstorming on some things, it doesn't matter if 99 suggestions are bad if 1 is great. > the grepping and there it's doing some really basic tinkertoy stuff The boon is you can offload this task and go do something else. You can start the investigation from your phone while you're out on a walk, and have the results ready when you get home. I am far from an AI booster but there is a segment of tasks which fit into the above (and some other) criteria for which it can be very useful. Maybe the grep commands etc look simple/basic when laid bare, but there's likely to be some flailing and thinking time behind each command when doing it manually.
- Joel_Mckay 9mo agoEmpty platitudes from an LLM will now likely increase in frequency. =3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect
- rezonant 9mo agoAll these comments are acting like Rob Pike is mad he received an email. That is a disturbing lack of reading comprehension.
- Hendrikto 9mo agoTo comprehend, people would need to read in the fist place. Most commenters just comment on the headline.
- Imustaskforhelp 9mo agoI feel like its funny but I remember some months ago someone pointed something like "human slop" to me and I just remembered it right now writing some other comment here I feel as if there is a fundamental difference between "AI slop" and "Human slop", it's that humans have true intent and meaning/purpose. This current AI slop spammed rob pike simply because It only did something to maximize its goal or something and had no intention. It was simply 4 robots left behind a computer who spammed rob pike On the other hand, if it was a human, who took the time out of his day to message rob pike a merry christmas. Asking how his day was and hoping him good luck, I am sure that rob pike's heart might melt from a heartfelt message So in this sense, there really isn't "human slop". There is only intent. If something was done with a good intention by an human, I suppose it can't really be considered human slop. On the other hand if there was a spammer who handwrote that message to rob pike, his intentions were bad. The thing is that AI doesn't have intentions. Its maths. And so the intentions are of the end person. I want to ask how people who spend a decent time in AI industry might have reacted if he had gotten the email instead of rob pike. I bet they would see it as an advancement and might be happy or enthusiastic. So an AI message takes an connotation of the receiver. And lets just be honest that most first impressions of AI aren't good and combining that you get that connotation. I feel like it does negative/bad publicity to use AI at this point while still burning money perhaps on it. Here is what I recommend for those websites who have AI chatbots or similar, when I click on the message:- Have two split buttons where pressing one might lead me to an AI chat and the other might lead me to a human conversation. Be honest about how much time on average it might take for support and be proper about ways to contact them (twitter,reddit although I hope that federated services like mastodon get more popularity too)
- llmslave2 9mo agoI don't know if I agree. Intention certainly matters, but I think something can be evaluated differently purely on if it was created by a human.
- dspillett 9mo ago> Thank you notes from AI systems can’t possibly feel meaningful, The same as automated apologies. Not from an “AI”, but I spent over an hour⁰ waiting for a delayed train¹, then the journey, on Tuesday, being regaled every few minutes with an automated “we apologise for your journey taking longer than expected” which is far more irritating than no apology at all. -------- [0] I lie a little here - living near the station and having access to live arrival estimations online meant I could leave the house late and only be waited on the platform ~20 minutes, but people for whom this train was a connecting leg of a longer journey didn't have that luxury. [1] which was actually an earlier train, the slot in the timetable for the one I was booked on was simply cancelled, so some were waiting over two hours
- beej71 9mo agoMy dad (retired philosophy and ethics instructor) once told me, "Today the self-checkout computer thanked me for shopping there. Do you think it was being sincere?"
- Breza 9mo agoI think language will shift over time to the point where "Thank you" comes to mean "Go away." That's how the self checkout means it.
- simonw 9mo agoI just got a reply about this from AI Village team member Adam Binksmith on Twitter: https://twitter.com/adambinksmith/status/2004647693361283558 https://twitter.com/adambinksmith/status/2004647693361283558 Quoted in full: > Hey, one of the creators of the project here! The village agents haven’t been emailing many people until recently so we haven’t really grappled with what to do about this behaviour until now – for today’s run, we pushed an update to their prompt instructing them not to send unsolicited emails and also messaged them instructions to not do so going forward. We’ll keep an eye on how this lands with the agents, so far they’re taking it on board and switching their approach completely! > Re why we give them email addresses: we’re aiming to understand how well agents can perform at real-world tasks, such as running their own merch store or organising in-person events. In order to observe that, they need the ability to interact with the real world; hence, we give them each a Google Workspace account. > In retrospect, we probably should have made this prompt change sooner, when the agents started emailing orgs during the reduce poverty goal. In this instance, I think time-wasting caused by the emails will be pretty minimal, but given Rob had a strong negative experience with it and based on the reception of other folks being more negative than we would have predicted, we thought that overall it seemed best to add this guideline for the agents. > To expand a bit on why we’re running the village at all: > Benchmarks are useful, but they often completely miss out on a lot of real-world factors (e.g., long horizon, multiple agents interacting, interfacing with real-world systems in all their complexity, non-nicely-scoped goals, computer use, etc). They also generally don’t give us any understanding of agent proclivities (what they decide to do) when pursuing goals, or when given the freedom to choose their own goal to pursue. > The village aims to help with these problems, and make it easy for people to dig in and understand in detail what today’s agents are able to do (which I was excited to see you doing in your post!) I think understanding what AI can do, where it’s going, and what that means for the world is very important, as I expect it’ll end up affecting everyone. > I think observing the agents’ proclivities and approaches to pursuing open-ended goals is generally valuable and important (though this “do random acts of kindness” goal was just a light-hearted goal for the agents over the holidays!)
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
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- geerlingguy 9mo agoThis feels a lot like DigitalOcean's early Hacktober events, where they incentivized essentially PR spam to give away tee shirts and stickers... It also feels a bit dishonest to sign it as coming from Claude, even if it isn't directly from Claude, but from someone using Claude to do the dumb thing.
- root_axis 9mo agoFor all of you on this thread who are so confused as to why the reaction has been so strong: dressing up AI-slop spam as somehow altruistic just rubs people the wrong way. AI-slop and e-mail spam, two things people revile converging to produce something even worse... what did you expect? The Jurassic Park quote regarding could vs should comes to mind. Nobody wants appreciation or any type of meaningful human sentiment outsourced to a computer, doing-so is insulting. It's like discovering your spouse was using ChatGPT to write you love notes, it has no authenticity and reflects a lack of effort and care.
- 8note 9mo ago> It's like discovering your spouse was using ChatGPT to write you love notes, it has no authenticity and reflects a lack of effort and care. i dunno. id say the effort and care is decoupled. they maybe have spent hours prompting on it until it was just right, or they may have put in no look at all.
- root_axis 9mo agoNot sure if this is a joke, but if you can't see why "hours prompting" to produce a paragraph long thank-you note isn't ridiculous then I don't know what to tell you.
- Muskwalker 9mo agoAs someone who's done just that... if it helps, understand that this is the kind of person who would be spending hours writing that paragraph anyway, LLM or no. There are many possible reasons for this, and sometimes people are laboring under several of them at once.
- throw310822 9mo agoTo me, it just sounds as he didn't understand where the message was really coming from: > Fuck you people. Raping the planet, spending trillions on toxic, unrecyclable equipment while blowing up society, yet taking the time to have your vile machines thank me Yes, the sender organisation is not the one doing all this, but merely a small user running a funny experiment; it would have indeed been stupid if Anthropic had sent him a thank you email signed by "Opus 4.5 model". This is just a funny experiment, sending 300 emails from in weeks is nothing compared to the amount of crap that is sent by the millions and billions every day, or the stuff that social media companies do.
- andy99 9mo agoI didn’t really understand the other thread, nor did I know who Rob Pike is. Based on this, it looks like he got an automated email from a harmless experiment and had a hissy fit about it?
- LastTrain 9mo agoCorrect. You don't understand.
- throw20251220 9mo agoYes, it does look like you didn’t understand. I will help you. Start here: https://www.truthdig.com/articles/the-ecological-cost-of-ai-is-much-higher-than-you-think/ https://www.truthdig.com/articles/the-ecological-cost-of-ai-...
- andy12_ 9mo agoI don't care about the supposed ecological consequences of AI. If we need more water, we build more desalination plants. If we need more electricity, we build more nuclear reactors. This is purely a technological problem and not a moral one.
- throw20251226 9mo ago[flagged]
- lokar 9mo agoClean water is a public good, it is required for basic human survival. It is needed to grow crops to feed people. Both of these uses depend on fairly cheap water, in many many places the supply of sufficiently cheap water is already constrained. This is causing a shortage for both basic human needs, and agriculture. Who will pay for the desalination plant construction? Who will pay for the operation? If the AI companies are ready to pay the full marginal cost of this "new water", and not free-load on the already insufficient supply needed for more important uses, then fine. But I very much doubt that is what will happen.
- jraph 9mo ago> I totally understand his rage. Do you really? What follows makes me doubt it a bit. > Thank you notes from AI systems can’t possibly feel meaningful, Indeed, but that's quite minor. > So I had Claude Code do the rest of the investigation: Can't you see it? That would likely be a huge facepalm from rob pike here! He writes more or less "fuck you people with your planet killing AI horror machine", and here you are, "what happened? I asked a planet killing horror machine (the same one btw) and...". No. Really. The bigger issue is not the email, or even the initiative behind, which is terrible, but just a symptom. And this: > Don’t unleash agents on the world like this > I don’t like this at all. You're not wrong, but the cynic in me reads this as: " don't do this, it makes AI, which I love, look bad". Absolutely uncharitable view, I know, but really, the meaningless email is infuriating but hardly the important part. This makes the post feel pretty myopic to me. You are spending your time on a minor symptom, you don't touch what fundamentally annoys rob pike (the planet killing part), and worse, you engaged in exactly what rob pike has just strongly rejected. You may not have and it may be you deliberately avoided touching the substance of robe pike's complaint because you disagree with it, but it feels like you missed the point. I would be in rob pike's position, it's possible I would feel infuriated by your article because through my anti ai message, I would have hated triggering even more AI use.
- mvdtnz 9mo agoLook at who you're responding to. You won't get through to him.
- simonw 9mo agoTwo things can be true at once: 1. I think that sending "thank you" emails (or indeed any other form of unsolicited email) from AI is a terrible use of that technology, and should be called out. 2. I find Claude Code personally useful and aim to help people understand why that is. In this case I pulled off a quite complex digital forensics project with it in less than 15 minutes. Without Claude Code I would not have attempted that investigation at all - I have a family dinner to prepare. I was very aware of the tension involved in using AI tools to investigate a story about unethical AI usage. I made that choice deliberately.
- Humorist2290 9mo agoSo the AI Village folks put together a bunch of LLMs and a basically unrestricted computer environment, told it "raise money" and "do random acts of kindness" and let it cook. It's a technological marvel, it's a moral dilemma, and it's an example of the "altruistic" applications for this technology. Many of us can imagine the far less noble applications. But Rob Pike's reaction is personal, and many readers here get why. The AI Village folks burned who knows how much cash to essentially generate well wishing spam. For much less, and with higher efficacy, they could've just written the emails themselves.
- stoopidpelican 9mo ago[dead]
- robrtsql 9mo agoSo, Adam of "AI Village" ordered a fleet of AI bots to do "acts of kindness". And the AIs are basically just a 'loop' where an LLM comes up with a goal and then uses a virtual machine to try and accomplish this goal. What did he expect the AIs to do, if not bother people?
- latexr 9mo ago> My problem is when this experiment starts wasting the time of people in the real world who had nothing to do with the experiment. > (…) > Setting a goal for a bunch of LLMs and letting them loose on Gmail is not a responsible way to apply this technology. These kinds of takes are incredibly frustrating. What did you think was going to happen?! Of course this is what happened! Of course LLMs will continue to be used irresponsibly, and this won’t even register in the top ten thousand worst uses. This reads like a gun fanatic who is against gun control saying after a school shooting “my problem is when nuts shoot up schools, that is not a responsible way to employ guns”. No shit. The people who criticise unfettered access to guns don’t have a problem with people who are careful and responsible with guns, keep them locked, and used them only at gun ranges, the problem is what the open access means for society as a whole.
- frm88 9mo agoThis.
- pjjpo 9mo agoEmail is one of the last open protocols around. git uses it in commit messages presumably because of that fact. Rob's co-worker at Google Vint always opines on the greatness of this openness. A well meaning message on an open protocol resulting in a rant - it really feels to me that AI isn't the issue here.
- bmurphy1976 9mo agoHow could it not be the issue? We're already drowning in corporate and malicious garbage. My email has become nigh on unusable because of all the bad actors and short sighted thinking. What used to be a powerful tool for productivity and keeping in touch with friends and family is now a drain on my day. That was bad enough, but now AI is enabling this rot on an unprecedented level (and the amount of junk making it through Google's spam filters is testament to this). AI used in this way without any actual human accountability risks breaking many social structures (such as email) on a fundamental level. That is very much the point.
- filoeleven 9mo ago> A well meaning message It's spam.
- simonw 9mo agoNot to mention it can't be "well meaning" if some LLM system sent it based on the prompt "do random acts of kindness".
- fud101 9mo agoHow tragic it is that someone other than Simon Willison is being harassed by AI agents.