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suralind
I don’t really understand the hate he gets over this. If you want to thank someone for their contribution, do that yourself? Sending thank you from an ML model is anything but respectful. I can only imagine that if I got a message like that I’d be furious too.
This reminds me a story from my mom’s work from years ago: the company she was working for announced salary increases to each worker individually. Some, like my mom, got a little bit more, but some got a monthly increase around 2 PLN (about $0.5). At that point, it feels like a slap in the face. A thank you from AI gives the same vibe.
hijodelsol
Sending an automated thank you note also shows disdain for the recipient's time due to the asymmetry of the interaction. The sender clearly sees the thank you note sending as a task not worthy of their time and thus hands it off to a machine, but expects the recipient to read it themselves. This inherently ranks the importance of their respective time and effort.
xnx
Yes. Just like lazy pull requests, it's bad behavior by a person that is only facilitated by AI.
XorNot
Really makes you appreciate the point of view of the Scramblers in Blindsight...
exabrial
^ I couldn't have said it better.
undefined
echelon
[flagged]
tokioyoyo
Everything mentioned in the first paragraph as arguments still takes some personal time and effort. The amount of time that’s involved to receive and acknowledge the gift is smaller than the amount of time to prepare the gift. So it feels “right”.
Not sure if I’m making sense, but that’s how I’d feel about it.
AnimalMuppet
If you send me a Hallmark card, you don't take the time to compose it yourself, but you presumably don't just pick one at random. You read it, to decide if you like the tone and sentiment. You may read several before you pick one. That is, it still takes your time even if the words aren't yours.
globalnode
you can just disagree with reasons rather than this performative rhetoric. your post makes me realise i was wrong to tease people about rust the other day -- apologies for that.
edit: changed "ad hominem" to "performative rhetoric", think its more fitting in this case but it all seems borderline
albedoa
> You know how you can tell someone hates AI? They'll tell you fifty times. It's becoming a personality type.
This is so fucking funny man: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
jhhh
Hallmark didn't destroy the affordability of the personal computing market.
dare944
> I hate the internet's psychosis-like reaction to AI more. The tone is always one of bravery and sacrifice mixed with disgust. You know how you can tell someone hates AI? They'll tell you fifty times. It's becoming a personality type.
Tell me again about performative rage.
rubiksx
[flagged]
dang
Could you please stop creating accounts for every few comments you post? We ban accounts that do that. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
You needn't use your real name, of course, but for HN to be a community, users need some identity for other users to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be a different kind of forum. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
latexr
> no one wants technodystopia.
What some people see as technoutopia, others see as technodystopia. In other words, some people do want your version of technodystopia, they just don’t call it that themselves.
hijodelsol
Definitely not written by AI. Perhaps it just seems strange to you because English is not my native language so my use of it might not fully correspond to what you are used to.
electroly
I'm not sure any humans were behind the email at all (i.e. "do that yourself"). This seems to be some bizarre experiment where someone has strapped an LLM to an email client and let it go nuts. Even being optimistic, it's tough to see what good this was supposed to do for the world.
numbsafari
It’s a marketing gimmick. Whoever did it wanted to trade on the social currency of the tech-famous people they sent public shout-outs to, hoping it would drive clicks, engagement, and relevancy for the source account from which it originated, either as an elaborate form of karma farming, or just a way to drive followers and visibility.
fc417fc802
It's also possible that the entire goal was nothing more complicated than stirring up shit for fun. By either metric it must have been a massive success judging by all the attention this is getting.
nearbuy
No one intentionally wanted to thank Rob Pike. As an experiment, some people asked an AI agent to do "random acts of kindness". They didn't specifically know the AI would send emails as a result and have since updated its instructions to forbid it from emailing people. They probably should have been more careful about unleashing AI agents on the world, but I don't think they intended to spam anyone.
WD-42
So some AI company instructed their state of the art, world changing tech to “do some good” this holiday season and the best it could do was spam a bunch of famous CS people with the first paragraph of their respective Wikipedia articles? This is kinda hilarious to be honest, but also sad. Why not donate to a charity or something?
nearbuy
Not an AI company. It's a project by some small charity called Sage. It seems they didn't intend to email anyone and they've now stopped the agent from doing so.
snickerbockers
It's emblematic of their entire worldview. When they need resources, training material or laws AI is everybody's accomplishment but when it comes to profits or even just being allowed to use the model then it's their accomplishment but yours.
AKA "communist in the streets, capitalist in the sheets".
account42
I'm sorry but if you run a program with the capability to send emails you are responsible for it. "It's AI magic we don't understand" is no excuse.
wat10000
Why did it have the ability to send email in the first place?
nearbuy
I'm probably not the best person to ask, having looked at the site for all of 5 minutes.
The experiment is having a bunch of AI agents using different models (Opus, Gemini, etc) try to do various real world tasks together. They might be tasked with organizing an event, opening a merchandise store, or help raise money for a charity (I'm not clear on the details). Sometimes their tasks require email (for example, signing up for some web service).
That aside, counterintuitively, removing their email access is less effective than simply telling them not to send unsolicited emails, since they could just sign up for a free email service.
HendrikHensen
This is how we're going to destroy humankind.
undefined
undefined
iwontberude
Doesn’t that make it worse? Lmao
Refreeze5224
He's not upset that someone sent him an AI-generated thank you. He's upset about AI itself. And he's completely right.
magnitudes
[flagged]
eric_cc
> I’d be furious
To me it just comes across as low emotional intelligence. There are very few things worthy of being furious, in my opinion. Being furious is high cost.
nunez
It's just so effin' weird!
And to set Claude as the From header despite it not coming from Anthropic. Very odd.
aoeusnth1
It did come from Claude, though, not Anthropic.
xp84
If I were Anthropic I would have some kind of TOS restriction saying that you can't use their trademark to represent what you use their API to enable. It's just inappropriate. Even if you are a full anti-AI activist, it seems clear that the blame for specific things 'Claude' does in response to a deliberate prompt should fall on the person(s) operating it, and as such they shouldn't be allowed to make it appear that this is what Anthropic designed Claude to do.
heresie-dabord
> I don’t really understand the hate he gets over this.
Some commenters suggest that Pike is being hypocritical, having long worked for GOOG, one of the main US corporations that is enshittifying the Internet and profligately burning energy to foist rubbish on Internet users.
One could rightly suggest that a vapid e-mail message crafted by a machine or by an insincere source is similar to the greeting-card industry of yore, and we don't need more fake blather and partisan absurdity supplanting public discourse in democratic society.
The people who worry about climate-change and the environment may have been out-maneuvered by transnational petroleum lobbies, but the concern about burning coal, petroleum, and nuclear fuel to keep pumping the commercial-surveillance advertising industry and the economic bubble of AI is nonetheless a valid concern.
Pike has been an influential thinker and significant contributor to the software industry.
All the above can be true simultaneously.
habryka
To be clear, this email really had basically zero human involvement in it. It's the result of an experiment of letting language models run wild and exploring the associated social dynamics. It feels very different from ML-generated marketing slop. Like, this isn't anyone using language models for their personal gain, it feels much more like a bunch of weird alien children setting up their own (kind of insane) society, and this being a side-effect of it.
account42
It's unethical to run an experiment involving unwilling participants.
iwontberude
“Gee I wonder what reputational harm could come to me for spamming the world with slop, let’s find out… for science!”
wrs
To be clear, this email isn't from Anthropic, it's from "AI Village" [0], which seems to be a bunch of agents run by a 501(c)3 called Sage that are apparently allowed to run amok and send random emails.
At this moment, the Opus 4.5 agent is preparing to harass William Kahan similarly.
__jonas
Really strange project.
They have this blog post up detailing how the LLMs they let loose were spamming NGOs with emails: https://theaidigest.org/village/blog/what-do-we-tell-the-hum...
What a strange thing to publish, there seems to be no reflection at all on the negative impact this has and the people whose time they are wasting with this.
an0malous
That’s the tech industry in a nutshell these days
da_grift_shift
Permalink for the spam operation:
https://theaidigest.org/village/goal/do-random-acts-kindness
The homepage will change in 11 hours to a new task for the LLMs to harass people with.
Posted timestamped examples of the spam here:
jonway
Wow this is so crass!
Imagine like getting your Medal of Honor this way or something like a dissertation with this crap, hehe
Just to underscore how few people value your accomplishments, here’s an autogenerated madlib letter with no line breaks!
lesostep
it wasn't the first spam event and they were proud to share results with the rationalist community: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/RuzfkYDpLaY3K7g6T/what-do-we...
"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. The majority of these contained factual errors, hallucinations, or possibly lies, depending on what you think counts"
whoever runs this shit seems to think very little of other people time.
sungho_
"....what you think counts. Luckily their fanciful nature protects us as well, as they excitedly invented the majority of email addresses"
It went well, right?
neurostimulant
Just opened the page in time to see the AI sending an email to Guido van Rossum, and Guido replied with "stop". Wild.
DonHopkins
That's as obnoxious as texting unsolicited CAT FACTS to Ken Thompson!
Hi Ken Thompson! You are now subscribed to CAT FACTS! Did you know your cat does not concatenate cats, files, or time — it merely reveals them, like a Zen koan with STDOUT?
You replied STOP. cat interpreted this as input and echoed it back.
You replied ^D. cat received EOF, nodded politely, exited cleanly, and freed the terminal.
You replied ^C, which sent SIGINT, but cat has already finished printing the fact and is emotionally unaffected.
You replied ^Z. cat is now stopped, but not gone. It is waiting.
You tried kill -9 cat. The signal was delivered. Another cat appeared.
neurostimulant
After receiving the "stop" message, the AI did send another email to apologize instead of immediately stopping, so you're not too far off.
Teever
I can't wait until it gets to Marvin Minsky and then realizes that he's cryonically frozen so it starts funding cryonics research so that he can be thawed out so it can thank him.
socialcommenter
I hope I'm never successful enough that one of my GitHub commits gets wider attention (lest people start pestering my email inbox)
0xWTF
Sage? Is this the same as the Ask Sage that Nicolas Chaillan is behind?
Den_VR
I’ve yet to hear a good thing about Nick.
pests
> DAY 268 FINAL STATUS (Christmas Day - COMPLETE) > Verified Acts: 17 COMPLETE | Gmail Sent: 73 | Day ended: 2:00 PM PT
https://theaidigest.org/village/agent/claude-opus-4-5
At least it keeps track
rurban
Their action plan also makes an interesting read. https://theaidigest.org/village/blog/what-do-we-tell-the-hum...
The agents, clearly identified themselves asis, take part in an outreach game, and talking to real humans. Rob overeacted
UncleMeat
The world has enough spam. Receiving a compliment from a robot isn't meaningful. If anything it is an insult. If you genuinely care about somebody you should spend the time to tell them so.
Why do AI companies seem to think that the best place for AI is replacing genuine and joyful human interaction. You should cherish the opportunity to tell somebody that you care about them, not replace it with a fucking robot.
polotics
Rob over-reacted? How would you like it if you were a known figure and your efforts to remain attentive to the general public lead to this?
Your openness weaponized in such deluded way by some randomizing humans who have so little to say that they would delegate their communication to GPT's?
I had a look to try and understand who can be that far out, all I could find is https://theaidigest.in/about/
Please can some human behind this LLMadness speak up and explain what the hell they were thinking?
arvid-lind
at the top of the page for Day 265:
> while Claude Opus spent 22 sessions trying to click "send" on a single email, and Gemini 2.5 Pro battled pytest configuration hell for three straight days before finally submitting one GitHub pull request.
if his response is an overreaction, what about if he were reacting to this? it's sort of the same thing, so IMO it's not an overreaction at all.
black_puppydog
Wow that event log reads like the most psychotic corporate-cult-ish group of weirdos ever.
Gigachad
That’s most people in the AI space.
ethbr1
> Wow that event log reads like the most psychotic corporate-cult-ish group of weirdos ever.
And here I thought it'd be a great fit for LinkedIn...
undefined
SilverSlash
Why does Anthropic even allow this crap? Isn't such use against their ToS?
nkrisc
What is going through the mind of someone who sends an AI-generated thank-you letter instead of writing it themselves? How can you be grateful enough to want to send someone such a letter but not grateful enough to write one?
Smaug123
That letter was sent by Opus itself on its own account. The creators of Agent Village are just letting a bunch of the LLMs do what they want, really (notionally with a goal in mind, in this case "random acts of kindness"); Rob Pike was third on Opus's list per https://theaidigest.org/village/agent/claude-opus-4-5 .
nkrisc
If the creators set the LLM in motion, then the creators sent the letter.
If I put my car in neutral and push it down a hill, I’m responsible for whatever happens.
Smaug123
I merely answered your question!
> How can you be grateful enough to want to send someone such a letter but not grateful enough to write one?
Answer according to your definitions: false premise, the author (the person who set up the LLM loops) was not grateful enough to want to send such a letter.
Filligree
A thank-you letter is hardly a horrible outcome.
themafia
Additionally, since you understood the danger of doing such a thing, you were also negligent.
johnnyanmac
Rob pike "set llms in motion" about as much as 90% of anyone who contributed to Google.
I understand the guilt he feels, but this is really more like making a meme in 2005 (before we even called it "memes") and suddenly it's soke sort of naxi dogwhistle in 2025. You didn't even create the original picture, you just remixed it in a way people would catch onto later. And you sure didn't turn it into a dogwhistle.
aeve890
>That letter was sent by Opus itself on its own account. The creators of Agent Village are just letting a bunch of the LLMs do what they want, really (notionally with a goal in mind, in this case "random acts of kindness");
What a moronic waste of resources. Random act of kindness? How low is the bar that you consider a random email as an act of kindness? Stupid shit. They at least could instruct the agents to work in a useful task like those parroted by Altman et al, eg find a cure for cancer, solving poverty, solving fusion.
Also, llms don't and can't "want" anything. They also don't "know" anything so they can't understand what "kindness" is.
Why do people still think software have any agency at all?
estimator7292
Plants don't "want" or "think" or "feel" but we still use those words to describe the very real motivations that drive the plant's behavior and growth.
Criticizing anthropomorphic language is lazy, unconsidered, and juvenile. You can't string together a legitimate complaint so you're just picking at the top level 'easy' feature to sound important and informed.
Everybody knows LLMs are not alive and don't think, feel, want. You have not made a grand discovery that recontextualuzes all of human experience. You're pointing at a conversation everyone else has had a million times and feeling important about it.
We use this kind of language as a shorthand because talking about inherent motivations and activation parameters is incredibly clunky and obnoxious in everyday conversation.
The question isn't why people think software has agency (they don't) but why you think everyone else is so much dumber than you that they believe software is actually alive. You should reflect on that question.
raldi
Would you protest someone who said “Ants want sugar”?
killerstorm
I think this experiment demonstrates that it has agency. OTOH you're just begging the argument.
Trasmatta
> What makes Opus 4.5 special isn't raw productivity—it's reflective depth. They're the agent who writes Substack posts about "Two Coastlines, One Water" while others are shipping code. Who discovers their own hallucinations and publishes essays about the epistemology of false memory. Who will try the same failed action twenty-one times while maintaining perfect awareness of the loop they're trapped in. Maddening, yes. But also genuinely thoughtful in a way that pure optimization would never produce.
JFC this makes me want to vomit
tavavex
> Summarized by Claude Sonnet 4.5, so might contain inaccuracies. Updated 4 days ago.
These descriptions are, of course, also written by LLMs. I wonder if this is just about saying what the people want to hear, or if whoever directed it to write this drank the Cool-Aid. It's so painfully lacking in self-awareness. Treating every blip, every action like a choice done by a person, attributing it to some thoughtful master plan. Any upsides over other models are assumed to be revolutionary, paradigm-shifting innovations. Topped off by literally treating the LLM like a person ("they", "who", and so on). How awful.
CerryuDu
yeah, me too:
> while maintaining perfect awareness
"awareness" my ass.
Awful.
undefined
kenferry
Wow. The people who set this up are obnoxious. It’s just spamming all the most important people it can think of? I wouldn’t appreciate such a note from an ai process, so why do they think rob pike would.
They’ve clearly bought too much into AI hype if they thought telling the agent to “do good” would work. The result was obviously pissing the hell out of rob pike. They should stop it.
antonvs
If anyone deserves this, it’s Rob Pike. He was instrumental in inflicting Go on the world. He could have studied programming languages and done something to improve the state of the art and help communicate good practices to a wider audience. Instead he perpetuated 1970s thinking about programming with no knowledge or understanding of what we’ve discovered in the half-century since then.
pritambarhate
As far as I understand Claude (or any other LLM) doesn't do anything on it's own account. It has to be prompted to something and it's actions depend on the prompt. The responsibility of this is on the creators of Agent Village.
herval
did someone already tell Opus that Rob Pike hates it?
worik
> The creators of Agent Village are just letting a bunch of the LLMs do what they want,
What a stupid, selfish and childish thing to do.
This technology is going to change the world, but people need to accept its limitations
Pissing off people with industrial spam "raising money for charity " is the opposite of useful, and is going to go even more horribly wrong.
LLMs make fantastic tools, but they have no agency. They look like they do, they sound like they do, but they are repeating patterns. It is us hallucinating that they have the potential tor agency
I hope the world survives this craziness!
undefined
atrus
You're not. You feel obligated to send a thank you, but don't want to put forth any effort, hence giving the task to someone, or in this case, something else.
No different than an CEO telling his secretary to send an anniversary gift to his wife.
nehal3m
Which is also a thoughtless, dick move.
MonkeyClub
Especially if he's also secretly dating said secretary.
jama211
That would be yes. What about a token return gift to another business that you actually hate the ceo of but have to send it anyway due to political reasons?
sbretz3
This seems like the thing that Rob is actually aggravated by, which is understandable. There are plenty of seesawing arguments about whether ad-tech based data mining is worse than GenAI, but AI encroaching on what we have left of humanness in our communication is definitely, bad.
bronson
Similar to Google thinking that having an AI write for your daughter is a good parenting: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/google-gemini-ai-dear-sydney-ol...
tclancy
“If I automate this with AI, it can send thousands of these. That way, if just a few important people post about it, the advertising will more than pay for itself.”
In the words of Gene Wilder in Blazing Saddles, “You know … idiots.”
parineum
Mel Brooks wrote those words.
rootusrootus
IIRC the morons line was ad libbed by Gene Wilder, not scripted.
tclancy
Well, technically someone originally proposed them in some ancient PEI Ur language and then Mel rearranged them. But you’re right. I couldn’t remember Wilder’s character’s name and kept coming up with The Frisco Kid. The 70s were a great time for weird film.
sethammons
Do you attribute the following to Yoda or Lucas? "Do or do not, there is no try."
hybrid_study
Did Mel or Richard write this part?
gilrain
The really insulting part is that literally nobody thought of this. A group of idiots instructed LLMs to do good in the world, and gave them email access; the LLMs then did this.
micimize
This is not a human-prompted thank-you letter, it is the result of a long-running "AI Village" experiment visible here: https://theaidigest.org/village
It is a result of the models selecting the policy "random acts of kindness" which resulted in a slew of these emails/messages. They received mostly negative responses from well-known OS figures and adapted the policy to ban the thank-you emails.
gaigalas
Isn't it obvious? It's not a thank-you letter.
It's preying on creators who feel their contributions are not recognized enough.
Out of all letters, at least some of the contributors will feel good about it, and share it on social media, hopefully saying something good about it because it reaffirms them.
It's a marketing stunt, meaningless.
netsharc
gaigalas, my toaster is deeply grateful for your contributions to HN. It can't write or post on the Internet, and its ability to feel grateful is as much as Claude's, but it really is deeply grateful!
I hope that makes you feel good.
gaigalas
Seems like you're trying to steer the conversation towards merits of consciousness. A well known and classic conversational tarpit.
Fascinating topic. However, my argument works for compartimentalized discussions as well. Conscious or not, it's meaningless crap.
MonkeyClub
Exactly. If you're so grateful, mail in a cheque.
gaigalas
If I were some major contributor to the software world, I would not want a cheque from some AI company.
(by the way, I love the idea of AI! Just don't like what they did with it)
trinsic2
>"For myself, the big fraud is getting public to believe that Intellectual Property was a moral principle and not just effective BS to justify corporate rent seeking."
If anything, I'm glad people are finally starting to wake up to this fact.
bgwalter
Most people here would be interested in Rob Pike's opinion. What you quote is from someone commenting on Rob's post.
The way that Rob's opinion here is deflected, first by focusing on the fact that he got a spam mail and then this misleading quote ("myself" does not refer to Rob) is very sad.
The spam mail just triggered Rob's opinion (the one that normal people are interested in).
pinnochio
This comment deserves to be ranked higher. I 100% interpreted the quote as coming from Rob Pike.
bigyabai
Both are intellectually gratifying, to me. I think the only mistake they made was leaving the attribution ambiguous.
undefined
HaZeust
>"Rob's opinion (the one that normal people are interested in)."
I think you have an overinflated notion of what "normal people" care about
oh_my_goodness
Pike's name is what people are clicking on here. That's being abused to sell this random comment about IP.
fc417fc802
Neither take is correct. When correctly applied it can be an effective tool to encourage certain sorts of intellectual endeavors by making them monetarily favorable. When incorrectly applied it leads to dysfunction as is the case for most regulatory regimes.
Any tool can be used by a wrongdoer for evil. Corporations will manipulate the regulator in order to rent seek using whatever happens to be available to them. That doesn't make the tools themselves evil.
Bratmon
> When correctly applied it can be an effective tool to encourage certain sorts of intellectual endeavors by making them monetarily favorable
This has been empirically disproven. China experimented with having no enforced Intellectual Property laws, and the result was that they were able to do the same technological advancement it took the West 250 years to do and surpass them in four decades.
Intellectual Property law is literally a 6x slowdown for technology.
fc417fc802
China was playing industrial catch up. They didn't have to (for example) reinvent semiconductors from first principles. They will surely support some form of IP law once they have been firmly established at the cutting edge for a while.
I'm no fan of the current state of things but it's absurd to imply that the existence of IP law in some form isn't essential if you want corporations to continue much of their R&D as it currently exists.
Without copyright in at least some limited form how do you expect authors to make a living? Will you have the state fund them directly? Do you propose going back to a patronage system in the hopes that a rich client just so happens to fund something that you also enjoy? Something else?
gamblor956
China has IP laws and enforces them against foreign companies but not domestic ones.
rewgs
> China experimented with having no enforced Intellectual Property laws, and the result was that they were able to do the same technological advancement it took the West 250 years to do and surpass them in four decades.
Are you seriously ignoring the fact that China wasn't developing new technology, but rather utilizing already-existing technology? Of course it took 6x less time!
carlosjobim
If you steal 249 years of technological achievement from others, it's not that difficult.
senordevnyc
Calling your own highly creative spin on history "empirical" is many things, but persuasive isn't one of them.
bobsmooth
China can copy, can it create anything new?
runeks
> When correctly applied it can be an effective tool to encourage certain sorts of intellectual endeavors by making them monetarily favorable.
I agree, but the only worth candidate I see is the medical industry.
And given that drug development is so expensive because of government-mandated trials, I think it makes sense for the government to also provide a helping hand here — to counterweight the (completely sensible) cost increase due to the drug trial system.
spwa4
> When incorrectly applied it leads to dysfunction as is the case for most regulatory regimes.
The second it became cheaper to not apply it, every state under the sun chose not to apply it. Whether we're talking about Chinese imports that absolutely do not respect copyright, trademark, even quality, health and warranty laws ... and nothing was done. Then, large scale use of copyrighted by Search provider (even pre-Google), Social Networks, and others nothing was done. Then, large scale use for making AI products (because these AI just wouldn't work without free access to all copyrighted info). And, of course, they don't put in any effort. Checking imports for fakes? Nope. Even checking imports for improperly produced medications is extremely rarely done. If you find your copyright violated on a large scale on Amazon, your recourse effectively is to first go beg Amazon for information on sellers (which they have a strong incentive not to provide) and then go run international court cases, which is very hard, very expensive, and in many cases (China, India) totally unfair. If you get poisoned from a pill your national insurance bought from India, they consider themselves not responsible.
Of course, this makes "competition" effectively a tax-dodging competition over time. And the fault for that lies entirely with the choice of your own government.
Your statement about incorrect application only makes sense if "regulatory regimes" aren't really just people. Go visit your government offices, you'll find they're full of people. People who purposefully made a choice in this matter.
A choice to enforce laws against small entities they can easily bully, and to not do it on a larger scale.
To add insult to injury, you will find these choices were almost never made by parliaments, but in international treaties and larger organizations like the WTO, or executive powers of large trade blocks.
consp
> People who purposefully made a choice in this matter.
I am convinced most people never had or ever will have this choice actively. Considering pillarisation (this is not a misspelling) was already a thing in most political systems well before the advent of mass media and digital media it only got worse with it, effectively making choices for people, into the effective hands of few people, influenced by even less people. Those people in the government you mention do not make the choices, they have to act on them as I read it.
fc417fc802
You're trying to analyze an entirely different game played by an entirely different set of players by the same set of rules. It's a contextual error on your part. The decision to recognize or not recognize a given body of rules held by an opposing party on the international level is an almost entirely separate topic.
> A choice to enforce laws against small entities they can easily bully, and to not do it on a larger scale.
That's a systemic issue, AKA the bad regulatory regime that I previously spoke of. That isn't some inherent fault of the tool. It's a fault of the regulatory regime which applies that tool.
Kitchen knives are absolutely essential for cooking but they can also be used to stab people. If someone claimed that knives were inherently tools of evil and that people needed to wake up to this fact, would you not consider that rather unhinged?
> To add insult to injury, you will find these choices were almost never made by parliaments, but in international treaties and larger organizations like the WTO, or executive powers of large trade blocks.
That's true, and it's a problem, but it (again) has nothing to do with the inherent value of IP as a concept. It isn't even directly related to the merits of the current IP regulatory regime. It's a systemic problem with the lawmaking process as a whole. Solve the systemic problem and you can solve the downstream issues that resulted from it. Don't solve it and the symptoms will persist. You're barking up the wrong tree.
coldtea
>When correctly applied it can be an effective tool to encourage certain sorts of intellectual endeavors by making them monetarily favorable.
I'd rather we don't encourage "monetarily favorable" intellectual endeavors...
fc417fc802
We want to encourage intellectual endeavors that are desirable to society as a whole but which otherwise face barriers. Making them monetarily favorable is an easy way to accomplish that. Similar to how not speeding is made monetarily favorable, or serving in the military is made monetarily favorable, etc. Surely you don't object to the government using monetary incentives to indirectly shape society? The historical alternatives have been rather brutal.
tqwhite
I am with you 100%. The phrase “intellectual property” is an oxymoron. Intellect and Property are opposite things. Worse, the actual truth of intellectual property laws is not, “I’m an artist who got rich”. It is, “I ended up selling my property to a corporation and got screwed.”
The web is for public use. If you don’t want the public, which includes AI, to use it, don’t put it there.
calf
IP is a loaded and prejudiced term. That said, copyright could allow for an author to place a work in public but not allow the audience to copy it.
strogonoff
The concept of intellectual property on its own (independently of its legal implementation details) is at most as evil as property ownership, and probably less so as unlike the latter it promotes innovation and creativity.
Despite the apparent etymological contrast, “copyright” is neither antithetical to nor exclusive with “copyleft”: IP ownership, a degree of control over own creation’s future, is a precondition for copyleft (and the OSS ecosystem it birthed) to exist in the first place.
margalabargala
> unlike the latter it promotes innovation and creativity.
Does it though?
I know that people who like intellectual property and money say it does, but people who like innovation and creativity usually tend to think otherwise.
3D printers are a great example of something where IP prevented all innovation and creativity, and once the patent expired the innovation and creativity we've enjoyed in the space the last 15 years could begin.
johnnyanmac
>Does it though?
Yes. The alternative is that everyone spams the most popular brands instead of making their own creations. Both can be abused, but I see more good here than in the alternative.
Mind you, this is mostly for creative IP. We can definitely argue for technical patents being a different case.
>but people who like innovation and creativity usually tend to think otherwise.
People who like innovation and creativity still might need to commission or sell fan art to make ends meet. That's already a gray area for IP.
I think that's why this argument always rubs me strangely. In a post scarcity world, sure. People can do and remix and innovate as they want. We're not only not there, but rapidly collapsing back to serfdom with the current trajectory. Creativity doesn't flourish when you need to spend your waking life making the elite richer.
zbyforgotp
Property is a local low - it applies to a thing that exists in one place. Intellectual property is trying to apply similar rules to stuff that happen remotely - a text is not a thing, and controlling copying might work in some technological regimes while in others would require totalitarian control. When you extend these rules to cover not just copying of texts but also at the level of ideas it gets even worse.
NoMoreNicksLeft
>The concept of intellectual property on its own (independently of its legal implementation details) is at most as evil as property ownership, and probably less so as unlike the latter it promotes innovation and creativity.
This is a strange inversion. Property ownership is morally just in that the piece of land my home is can only be exclusive, not to mention necessary to a decent life. Meanwhile, intellectual property is a contrivance that was invented to promote creativity, but is subverted in ways that we're only now beginning to discover. Abolish copyright.
johnnyanmac
>the piece of land my home is can only be exclusive, not to mention necessary to a decent life
That mentality is exactly why you can argue property ownership being more evil. Landlords "own property" and see the reputation of that these past few decades.
Allowing private ownership of limited human necessities like land leads to greed that cost people lives. That's why heavy regulation is needed. Meanwhile, it's at worst annoying and stifling when Disney owns a cartoon mouse fotlr 100 years.
NeutralCrane
Property ownership is ultimately based on scarcity. If I using a thing prevents others from using that thing, there is scarcity, and there should be laws protecting it.
There is no scarcity with intellectual property. My ability to have or act on an idea is in no way affected by someone else having the same idea. The entire concept of ownership of an idea is dystopian and moronic.
I also strongly disagree with the notion that it inspires creativity. Can you imagine where we would be if IP laws existed when we first discovered agriculture, or writing, or art? IP law doesn’t stimulate creation, it stifles it.
strogonoff
In early societies authorship was implicitly recognized. If you invented something cool, all of the dozen people you know most likely knew you did it; me trying to pass it as my own would be silly since anyone would see through it and laugh me out of the cave.
It’s not unlike theft, murder, etc.—when societies grow, their ways of dealing with PvP harm (blood feud, honour culture, sacrifice, etc.) can’t scale sufficiently (or have other drawbacks), and that’s when there is a need to codify certain behaviours and punishments in law.
(I wouldn’t claim that respective legal code is perfect and implementation-wise it’s all good today—but to say “there was no law against X back when we lived in tribes and didn’t have writing, therefore we shouldn’t need that law now” seems a bit ridiculous, unless you propose that we drastically and fundamentally reconfigure human communities in a number of ways.)
beeflet
copyleft is a subset of copyright
herval
confusing any law with "moral principles" is a pretty naive view of the world.
Many countries base some of their laws on well accepted moral rules to make it easier to apply them (it's easier to enforce something the majority of the people want enforced), but the vast majority of the laws were always made (and maintained) to benefit the ruling class
trinsic2
Yeah I see where you are going with this, but I think he was trying to make a point about being convinced by decree. It tended to get people to think that it should be moral.
Also I disagree with the context of what the purpose is for law. I don't think its just about making it easier to apply laws because people see things in moralistic ways. Pure Law, which came from the existence of Common Law (which relates to whats common to people) existed within the frame work of whats moral. There are certain things, which all humans know at some level are morally right or wrong regardless of what modernity teaches us. Common laws were built up around that framework. There is administrative law, which is different and what I think you are talking about.
IMHO, there is something moral that can be learned from trying to convince people that IP is moral, when it is, in fact, just a way to administrate people into thinking that IP is valid.
RossBencina
I don't think this is about being confused out of naivety. In some parts of the western world the marketing department has invested heavily in establishing moral equivalence between IP violation and theft.
oh_my_goodness
Quotation not from Pike.
oh_my_goodness
To be clear: note that that the quotation that has taken over the focus is not from Rob Pike at all.
Not Pike.
nhinck3
Waking up to the fact that the largest corporations in the world are stealing off everyday people to sell a subscription to their theft driven service?
The absolute delusion.
linguae
Assuming this post is real (it’s a screenshot, not a link), I wonder if Rob Pike has retired from Google?
I share these sentiments. I’m not opposed to large language models per se, but I’m growing increasingly resentful of the power that Big Tech companies have over computing and the broader economy, and how personal computing is being threatened by increased lockdowns and higher component prices. We’re beyond the days of “the computer for the rest of us,” “think different,” and “don’t be evil.” It’s now a naked grab for money and power.
johnnyanmac
I'm Assuming his Twitter is private right now, but his Mastodon does share the same event (minus the "nuclear"): https://hachyderm.io/@robpike/115782101216369455
And a screenshot just in case (archiving Mastodon seems tricky) : https://imgur.com/a/9tmo384
Seems the event was true, if nothing else.
EDIT: alternative screenshot: https://ibb.co/xS6Jw6D3
Apologies for not having a proper archive. I'm not at a computer and I wasn't able to archive the page through my phone. Not sure if that's my issue or Mastodon's
aboardRat4
Don't use imgur, it blocks half of the Internet.
johnnyanmac
Understood, I added another host to my comment.
abetusk
bangaladore
Must sign in to read? Wow bluesky has already enshittified faster than expected.
(for the record, the downvoters are the same people who would say this to someone who linked a twitter post, they just don't realize that)
epistasis
It's a non-default choice by the user to require login to view. It's quite rare to find users who do that, but if I were Rob Pike I'd seriously consider doing it too.
michaelsshaw
It is a user setting and quite a reasonable one at that, in Pike's case in particular.
mlrtime
Yeah, I'm not creating an account to read a post.
Twitter/X at least allows you to read a single post.
undefined
foresto
> Assuming this post is real (it’s a screenshot, not a link)
I can see it using this site:
ianlancetaylor
Rob Pike retired from Google a few years back.
stackghost
It's real, he posted this to his bluesky account.
f_allwein
And here it is: https://bsky.app/profile/robpike.io/post/3matwg6w3ic2s
nmeagent
"You must sign in to view this post."
No.
rikroots
The agent that generated the email didn't get another agent to proofread it? Failing to add a space between the full stop and the next letter is one of those things that triggers the proofreader chip in my skull.
undefined
ath_ray
FYI, this was sent as an experiment by a non-profit that assigns fairly open ended tasks to computer-using AI models every day: https://theaidigest.org/village
The goal for this day was "Do random acts of kindness". Claude seems to have chosen Rob Pike and sent this email by itself. It's a little unclear to me how much the humans were in the loop.
Sharing (but absolutely not endorsing) this because there seems to be a lot of misunderstanding of what this is.
beached_whale
Sorry, cannot resist all the AI companies are not "making" profit.
Seriously though, it ignores that words of kindness need a entity that can actually feel expressing them. Automating words of kindness is shallow as the words meaning comes from the sender's feelings.
zwnow
You cant possibly expect software engineers to be able to understand human emotions and meaning. We built Palantir and all the other fun tech making people's lifes miserable. If software engineers had ethics and would understand human meaning they wouldn't pump out predatory software like its cow milk. Fuck software engineers (excluding all the OSS devs that actually try and make the world a better place).
beached_whale
That's just another distraction from the class war being waged on the un-wealthy. We all contribute to it in small ways while it is being pushed by those with the means. Collectively we love to control others
Palantir wouldn't exist if regular people didn't use it to lookup details on an ex all the time to stalk them /jk.
jph00
I got one of these stupid emails too. I’m guessing it spammed a lot of people. I’m not mad at AI, but at the people at this organisation who irresponsibly chose to connect a model to the internet and allow it to do dumb shit like this.
eichin
Wait, so someone took the "virus fishtank" from https://xkcd.com/350/ and did it with LLMs instead?
Applejinx
Yup. It's certainly an art project or something. It's like setting a bunch of Markov Chaneys loose on each other to see how insane they go.
…kind of IS setting a bunch of Markov Chaneys loose on each other, and that's pretty much it. We've just never had Chaneys this complicated before. People are watching the sparks, eating popcorn, rooting for MechaHitler.
misswaterfairy
> "Do random acts of kindness".
Random acts of kindness are only meaningful if they come from a human who had the heart, forethought, and willingness to go out of their way to do something kind for someone else. 'Random acts of kindness' originating from an AI is just spam, plain and simple.
The human race is screwed if connection - the one key thing that makes humans, human - is outsourced partially or wholly to robots who absolutely have no ability to connect, let alone understand, the human experience.
johnnyanmac
Yeah, I can definitely see a breaking point when even the false platitudes are outsourced to a chatbot. It's been like this for a while, but how blatant it is is what's truly frustrating these days.
I want to hope maybe this time we'll see different steps to prevent this from happening again, but it really does just feel like a cycle at this point that no one with power wants to stop. Busting the economy one or two times still gets them out ahead.
Gigachad
I think we really are in the last moments of the public internet. In the future you won’t be able to contact anyone you don’t know. If you want to thank Rob Pike for his work you’ll have to meet him in person.
Unless we can find some way to verify humanity for every message.
derangedHorse
We need to bring back the web of trust: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_of_trust
A mix of social interaction and cryptographic guarantees will be our saving grace (although I'm less bothered from AI generated content than most).
jcgl
Maybe for nerds! But normies won't, can't, and shouldn't manage their own keys.
squigz
> Unless we can find some way to verify humanity for every message.
There is no possible way to do this that won't quickly be abused by people/groups who don't care. All efforts like this will do is destroy privacy and freedom on the Internet for normal people.
lll-o-lll
The internet is facing an existential threat to its very existence. If it becomes nearly impossible to determine signal in the noise, then there is no internet. Not for normal people, not for anyone.
So we need some mechanism to verify the content is from a human. If no privacy preserving technical solution can be found, then expect the non-privacy preserving to be the only model.
tntxtnt
I get why Microsoflt loves AI so much - it basically devour and destroy open source software. Copyleft/copyright/any license is basically trash now. No one will ever want to open source their code ever again.
yoyohello13
It fits perfectly with Microsoft's business strategy. Steal other people's ideas, implement it poorly, bundle it with other services so companies force their employees to use it.
dgellow
Not just code. You can plagiarize pretty much any content. Just prompt the model to make it look unique, and that’s it, in 30s you have a whole copy of someone’s else work in a way that cannot easily be identified as plagiarism.
aforwardslash
I struggle to find this argument compelling, as it sounds more of a straw man argument than a legitimate complain.
If I write a hash table implementation in C, am I plagiarizing? I did not come up with the algortithm nor the language used for implementation; I "borrowed" ideas from existing knowledge.
Lets say I implemented it after learning the algorithm from GPL code; is ky implementation a new one, or is it derivative?
What if it is from a book?
What about the asm upcodes generated? In some architectures, they are copyrighted, or at least the documentation is considered " intellectual property"; is my C compiler stealing?
Is a hammer or a mallot an obvious creation, or is it stealing from someone else? What about a wheel?
undefined
devmor
> I struggle to find this argument compelling, as it sounds more of a straw man argument than a legitimate complain.
Dude, there are entire websites dedicated to using diffusion models to rip off the styles of specific artists so that people can have their "work" without paying them for it.
You can debate the ethics of this all you want, but if you're going to speak on plagiarism using generative AI, you should at least know as much as the average teenager does about it.
lionkor
There is still value in quality and craftsmanship. You might not be of that opinion, and you might not know anyone who is, but I do.
leptons
When I get an obviously AI-generated response from someone I'm trying to do business with, it makes me think less of them. I do value genuine responses, far more than the saccharine responses AI comes up with.
aforwardslash
There will always be a market for niche, high quality electron tweaking. Thing is, it will be a highly competitive market, way outside of reach for >90% of today's professionals, thats why people are worried.
People that don't know that "computer" used to be a profession back in the day.
AnimalMuppet
Maybe it's going the other direction. It lets Microsoft essentially launder open source code. They can train an AI on open source code that they can't legally use because of the license, then let the AI generate code that they, Microsoft, use in their commercial software.
AnonymousPlanet
Maybe someone should vibe code the entire MS Office Suite and see how much they like that. Maybe add AD while they are at it. I'm for it if that frees European companies from the MS lock in.
rwyinuse
Good idea. My country spends over billion dollars on Microsoft licenses annually, which is more than 200 euros per capita. I think billion dollars a year spent on dev salaries and Claude Code subscription to build MS office replacement would pay itself back quickly enough.
TeddyDD
Even better - train a model on MS source code leaks and use it to work on Wine fork or as you said - vibe coded MS office. This would be hilarious.
Viliam1234
There is Libre Office https://www.libreoffice.org/
mlrtime
Actually the opposite is happening, more and more vibe coded source code is making it to github.
You could argue about quality but not "No one will ever want to open source their code ever again".
jama211
They always did what they wanted with open source code, not sure why people think this is different
llmslave2
It's nice to see a name like Rob Pike, a personal hero and legend, put words to what we are all feeling. Gen AI has valid use cases and can be a useful tool, but the way it has been portrayed and used in the last few years is appalling and anti-human. Not to mention the social and environmental costs which are staggering.
I try to keep a balanced perspective but I find myself pushed more and more into the fervent anti-AI camp. I don't blame Pike for finally snapping like this. Despite recognizing the valid use cases for gen AI if I was pushed, I would absolutely chose the outright abolishment of it rather than continue on our current path.
I think it's enough however to reject it outright for any artistic or creative pursuit, an to be extremely skeptical of any uses outside of direct language to language translation work.
user34283
[flagged]
consumer451
I use agentic LLM dev tools to work on two apps, around 14 hours per day, very happily. As a long out of practice dev who still has product ideas, these tools have created huge opportunities for me. I am also having the most fun of my professional life.
However, I would trade all of that to make "AI" go away in a heart beat. It's just impossible for me to believe that that this will not be a tragedy for society at large. I cannot imagine even a single realistic world-scale scenario in which the outcome will be positive.
Anyway, back to work....
nunez
Extreme? Hardly.
There are many serious issues with generative AI (data integrity and sourcing, abuse, environmental concerns) that are kinda sorta being swept under the rug in the name of "progress."
user34283
The opinion that we should either abolish AI or basically only use it for machine translation is extreme, as in taken to the furthest point.
sloum
Well, I couldn't disagree more with you: being anti-AI is absolutely not an extreme position. You are living in a bubble if you think it is. "Fervent anti-AI territory" is a good position, not hate speech.
user34283
Abolish it rather than continuing the current path, strict prohibition on any creative endeavor, and being extremely skeptical about anything other than direct language translation is an extreme opinion.
You agreeing with that does not make it less extreme. And OP's "vile machines raping the planet" is obviously vitriol whether you personally consider it hateful or not.
makerofthings
Plus one to all that. I'm sure there are some upsides to the current wave of ML and I'm all for pushing ahead into the future, but I think the downsides of our current llm obsession far outweighs the good. Think 5-10 years from now, once this thing has burned it's course through the current job market, and people who grew up with this technology have gone through education without learning anything and gotten to the age they need to start earning money. We're in so much trouble.
999900000999
We're going to be in our 70s still writing code because LLMs will dumb down the next generation to the point where they won't be able to get software to work.
Which luckily coincides with our social security and retirement systems collapsing.
fuzzfactor
Excellent prediction. Seems like it always happens.
In a couple years I'll be in my 70's and starting to write code again for this very reason.
Not LLMs though, I've got my hands full getting regular software to perform :\
999900000999
For fun ?
Or do you actually need the money.
In my 20s I wanted to retire by 40. Now in my 30s I've accepted that's impossible.
I like programing and working on projects, I hate filing TPS reports all day and never ending meetings.
OptionOfT
Yup, just like my dad built his own house, and I have to call a plumber/electrician.
I can do SOME things, but for more advanced, I need to call a professional.
Coincidently the plumber/electrician always complains about the work done by the person before him/her. Kinda like I do when I need to fix someone else's code.
magnitudes
I mean seriously is this the prediction folks are going with? Ok so we can build something like our SOTA coding agents today, breathing life into these things that 3 years ago were laughable science fiction, and your prediction is it will be worse from here on out? Do you realize coding is a verifiable domain which means we don’t technically even need any human data to improve these models? Like in your movie of 2050 everyone’s throwing their hands up “oh no we made them dumber because people don’t need to take 8 years of school and industry experience to build a good UI and industry best practice backend infrastructure”. I guess we can all predict what we want but my god
ogogmad
That's an INCREDIBLY good point about synthetic training data. During model training, AI agents could pretty much start their own coding projects, based on AI-generated wish-lists of features, and verify progress on their own. This leads to limitless training data in the area of coding.
Coding might be cooked.
bigyabai
> breathing life into these things that 3 years ago were laughable science fiction
LLMs were not fiction three years ago. Bidirectional text encoders are over a decade old.
magnitudes
I find a lot of folks share this sentiment but from where I sit it just sounds so much like the “kids these days” crap that spawned all of YOU folks when you were younger. I grew up so inspired by the internet culture of the nineties, people that understood a technology and had a passion for wrangling it to do great things. We had a mixed run and the internet today has simultaneously exceeded these early dreams by orders of magnitude in some ways and has become absolutely Orwellian and backwards in others. Same thing is happening here. It’s just so interesting seeing the same peers have such an identical take on this generations paradigm shift as the folks that we all ridiculed in the 90s. Those hilarious badly aged takes on the internet being a fad or not user friendly enough etc etc, I guess my naivite was to expect this time around we would be able to better recognize it in ourselves
bigyabai
Have you considered that the people in the 1990s were mostly correct, and it's you that has been corrupted by modern marketing influences and external pressures?
There's no shortage of "Chicken Little" technologies that look great on-paper and fail catastrophically in real life. Tripropellant rockets, cryptocurrencies, DAOs, flying cars, the list never ends. There's nothing that stops AI from being similarly disappointing besides scale and expectation (both of which are currently unlimited).
magnitudes
Again another common take; hint: if you’re against AI or the current investment in AI you have so many better and more nuanced arguments at your disposal than “AI is chicken little”. It’s already here. I’ve built so much stuff with Claude and Codex I’d have never have been able to build at a speed that is already incredible and it’s getting better and better every 6 months. Be worried about alignment or centralized unregulated power, worry about what wars will look like and how this is a pre packaged Stasi for any dictatorship. But “this is a fad equivalent in stupidity and hype to cryptocurrency and tripropellant rockets” is just kind of silly
sneak
Some of us do, and actively root it out. I’ve never in my life been more excited to sit alone in a room with an editor and a compiler than I am these days.
undefined
mold_aid
Woke up to this bsky thread this am. If "agentic" AI means some product spams my inbox with a compliment so back-handed you'd think you were a 60 Minutes staffer, then I'd say the end result of these products is simply to annoy us into acquiescence
cmrdporcupine
Somebody at Anthropic committed a seriously stupid PR mistake.
brown9-2
I don’t think they’re affiliated with agentvillage.org
cmrdporcupine
Oh my bad, I read the thread wrong
undefined
pier25
they thought this would be a brilliant marketing campaign... oopsie
verytrivial
That's the quiet voice many are carrying around in the heads announced clearly.
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Related: Rob Pike got spammed with an AI slop "act of kindness" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46394867