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.
But also yes, AI did decide on its own to send this email. They gave it an extremely high-level instruction ("do random acts of kindness") that made no mention of email or rob pike, and it decided on its own that sending him a thank-you email would be a way to achieve that.
The legal and ethical responsibility is all I wanted to comment on. I believe it is important we do not think something new is happening here, that new laws need to be created. As long as LLMs are tools wielded by humans we can judge and manage them as such. (It is also worth reconsidering occasionally, in case someone does invent something new and truly independent.)
They're really not though. We're in the age of agents--unsupervised LLM's are commonplace, and new laws need to exist to handle these frameworks. It's like handing a toddler a handgun, and saying we're being "responsible" or we are "supervising them". We're not--it's negligence.
(If so let me know where they are so I can trick them into sending me all of their money.)
My current intuition is that the successful products called "agents" are operating almost entirely under human supervision - most notably the coding agents (Claude Code, OpenAI Codex etc) and the research agents (various implementations of the "Deep Research" pattern.)
How would we know? Isn't this like trying to prove a negative? The rise of AI "bots" seems to be a common experience on the Internet. I think we can agree that this is a problem on many social media sites and it seems to be getting worse.
As for being under "human supervision", at what point does the abstraction remove the human from the equation? Sure, when a human runs "exploit.exe" the human is in complete control. When a human tells Alexa to "open the garage door" they are still in control, but it is lessened somewhat through the indirection. When a human schedules a process that runs a problem which tells an agent to "perform random acts of kindness" the human has very little knowledge of what's going on. In the future I can see the human being less and less directly involved and I think that's where the problem lies.
I can equate this to a CEO being ultimately responsible for what their company does. This is the whole reason behind to the Sarbanes-Oxley law(s); you can't declare that you aren't responsible because you didn't know what was going on. Maybe we need something similar for AI "agents".
My intuition says yes, on the basis of having seen precursors. 20 years ago, one or both of Amazon and eBay bought Google ads for all nouns, so you'd have something like "Antimatter, buy it cheap on eBay" which is just silly fun, but also "slaves" and "women" which is how I know this lacked any real supervision.
Just over ten years ago, someone got in the news for a similar issue with machine generated variations of "Keep Calm and Carry On" T-shirts that they obviously had not manually checked.
Last few years, there's been lawyers getting in trouble for letting LLMs do their work for them.
The question is, can you spot them before they get in the news by having spent all their owner's money?
We haven't suddenly created machine free will here. Nor has any of the software we've fielded done anything that didn't originally come from some instruction we've added.
Right, and casual speech is fine, but should not be load-bearing in discussions about policy, legality, or philosophy. A "who's responsible" discussion that's vectoring into all of these areas needs a tighter definition of "decides" which I'm sure you'll agree does not include anything your thermostat makes happen when it follows its program. There's no choice there (philosophy) so the device detecting the trigger conditions and carrying out the designated action isn't deciding, it is a process set in motion by whoever set the thermostat.
I think we're in agreement that someone setting the tool loose bears the responsibility. Until we have a serious way to attribute true agency to these systems, blaming the system is not reasonable.
"Oops, I put a list of email addresses and a random number generator together and it sent an unwanted email to someone who didn't welcome it." It didn't do that, you did.
Well no, that’s not what happened at all. It found these emails on its own by searching the internet and extracting them from github commits.
AI agents are not random number generators. They can behave in very open-ended ways and take complex actions to achieve goals. It is difficult to reasonably foresee what they might do in a given situation.
neural networks are just a tool, used poorly (as in this case) or well
You agreed with the other poster while reframing their ideas in slightly different words without adding anything to the conversation?
Most confusingly you did so in emphatic statements reminiscent of a disagreement or argument without there being one
> no computer system just does stuff on its own.
This was the exact statement the GP was making, even going so far as to dox the nonprofit directors to hold them accountable… then you added nothing but confusion.
> a human (or collection of them) built and maintains the system, they are responsible for it
Yup, GP covered this word for word… AI village built this system.
Why did you write this?
Is this a new form of AI? A human with low English proficiency? A strange type of empathetically supportive comment from someone who doesn’t understand that’s the function of the upvote button in online message boards?
accusing people of being AI is very low-effort bot behavior btw
but accusing me of being deficient in English or some AI system is…odd…
especially while doing (the opposite of) the exact thing they’re complaining about. upvote/downvote and move on. I do tend to regret commenting on here myself FWIW because of interactions like this
But at what point is the maker distant enough that they are no longer responsible? E.g. is Apple responsible for everything people do using an iPhone?
I think the case here is fairly straightforward
unless you want to blame the AI itself, from a legal perspective?
Heck Rob Pike did this himself back in the day on Usenet with Mark V. Shaney (and wasted far more people's time on Usenet with this)!
This whole anger seems weirdly misplaced. As far as I can tell, Rob Pike was infuriated at the AI companies and that makes sense to me. And yes this is annoying to get this kind of email no matter who it's from (I get a ridiculous amount of AI slop in my inbox, but most of that is tied with some call to action!) and a warning suffices to make sure Sage doesn't do it again. But Sage is getting put on absolute blast here in an unusual way.
Is it actually crossing a bright moral line to name and shame them? Not sure about bright. But it definitely feels weirdly disproportionate and makes me uncomfortable. I mean, when's the last time you named and shamed all the members of an org on HN? Heck when's the last time that happened on HN at all (excluding celebrities or well-known public figures)? I'm struggling to think of any startup or nonprofit, where every team member's name was written out and specifically held accountable, on HN in the last few years. (That's not to say it hasn't happened: but I'd be surprised if e.g. someone could find more than 5 examples out of all the HN comments in the past year).
The state of affairs around AI slop sucks (and was unfortunately easily predicted by the time GPT-3 came around even before ChatGPT came out: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32830301). If you want to see change, talk to policymakers.
You're naming (and implicitly shaming as the downstream comments indicate) all the individuals behind an organization. That's not an intrinsically bad thing. It just seems like overkill for thoughtless, machine-generated thank yous. Again, can you point me to where you've named all the people behind an organization for accountability reasons previously on HN or any other social media platform (or for that matter any other comment from anyone else on HN that's done this? This is not rhetorical; I assume they exist and I'm curious what circumstances those were under)?
The reason I did was to associate the work with humans because that is the heart of my argument: people do things. This was not the work of an independent AI. If it took more than 60 seconds, I would have made the point abstractly rather than by using names, but abstract arguments are harder to follow. There was no more intention to comment than that.
This is a bit frustrating of a response to get. No, I don't believe you spent a lot of time on this. I wasn't imaging you spending hours or even minutes tracking these guys down. But I also don't think it's relevant.
I don't think you'd find it relevant if the Sage researchers said "I didn't spend any effort on this. I only did this because I wanted to make the point that AIs have enough capability to navigate the web and email people. I could have made the point abstractly, but abstract arguments are harder to follow. There was no other intention than what I put in the prompt." It's hence frustrating to see you use essentially the same thing as a shield.
Look, I'm not here to crucify you for this. I don't think you're a bad person. And this isn't even that bad in the grand scheme of things. It's just that naming and shaming specific people feels like an overreaction to thoughtless, machine-generated thank you emails.
I have two tests for this. First: what harm does my comment here cause? Perhaps some mild embarrassment? It could not realistically do more.
Second: if it were me, would I mind it being done to me? No. It is not a big deal. It is public feedback about an insulting computer program, no one was injured, no safety-critical system compromised. I have been called out for mistakes before, in classes, on mailing lists, on forums, I learn and try to do better. The only times I have resented it are when I think the complaint is wrong. (And with age, I would say the only correct thing to do then is, after taking the time to consider it carefully, clearly respond to feedback you disagree with.)
The only thing I can draw from thinking through this is, because the authors of the program probably didn’t see my comment, it was not effective, and so I would have been better emailing them. But that is a statement about effectiveness not rightness. I would be more than happy doing it in a group in person at a party or a classroom. Mistakes do not have to be handled privately.
I am sorry we disagree about this. If you think I am missing anything I am open to thinking about it more.
Pretty sure Rob Pike doesn't react this way to every article of spam he receives, so maybe the issue isn't really about spam, huh? More of an existential crisis: I helped build this thing that doesn't seem to be an agent of good. It's an extreme & emotional reaction but it isn't very hard to understand.
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.
same as the NRA slogan: "guns don't kill people, people kill people"
Comparatively, the people in this article are using tools which have a variety of benign purposes to do something bad.
Similarly though, they probably wouldn’t have gone through with it if they had to set up an email server on hardware they bought and then manually installed in a colo and then set up a DNS server and a GPU for the neural network they trained and hosted themselves.
Sure, let's look at the numbers together :
- Homicide rate in the EU in 2023 : ~1.3 to 1.4 per 100,000 [1] - Homicide rate in the US in 2023 : 5.7 per 100,000 [2]
So, I'm 4x more likely to get killed in the US than in the EU.
> the vast majority of such cases doesnt make it even into local news let alone national or international
Do you really believe that murders don't get published in the media in the EU? This is a ridiculous assertion. Source please!
[1] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/SEPDF/cac...
[2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/191223/reported-murder-a...
my understanding, and correct me if I’m wrong, is a human is always involved. even if you build an autonomous killing robot, you built it, you’re responsible
typically this logic is used to justify the regulation of firearms —- are you proposing the regulation of neural networks? if so, how?
It is a core libertarian defence and it is going to come up a lot: people will conflate the ideas of technological progress and scientific progress and say “our tech is neutral, it is how people use it” when, for example, the one thing a sycophantic AI is not is “neutral”.
It's horrible to even propose that people are absolved of their decisionmaking consequences just because they filtered them through software.
Who is decided to say "thank you" to Rob Pike in this case? I am not sure there is anyone, so in my mind there is not real "thank you" here. As far as I can tell it is spam. Maybe spam that tries to deceive the receiver into think there is a "thank you" to lure them into interacting the the AI? "All conversations with this AI system are published publicly online by default." after all and Rob Pike's interactions would be good PR for the company.
You also obviously didn't read the mail, because it contains explicit info that this was send by claude on behalf of AI village.
It's at worst cheezy. But people get tons of truly nefarious spam and fraud mails everyday without any kind of meltdown. But an AI wishes you a nice day, suddenly it's all pitchforks and torches.
Stop clutching your pearls ffs.
Seems to contradict your later:
> But an AI wishes you a nice day, suddenly it's all pitchforks and torches.
Are you attributing the 'thank you' sentiment to the humans or the ai?
I think "these emails are annoying, stop it sending them" is entirely fair, but a lot of the hate/anger, analogizing what they're doing to rape, etc. seems disproportionate.
EDIT: Public response: https://x.com/adambinksmith/status/2004651906019541396
We can all go find out their names and dust off our own pitchforks. I don’t see any value in encouraging this behaviour on a site like this.
The same way we name and shame petrol and plastic CEOs whose trash products flood our environment, we should be able to shame slop makers. Digital trash is still trash.
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!)
I would like to say this is exceptional for people who evangelise AI, but it's not.
The Village is backed by Effective Altruist-aligned nonprofits which trace their lineage back to CFEA and the interwoven mess of SF's x-risk and """alignment""" cults. These have big pockets and big influence. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46389950)
As expected, the terminally online tpot cultists are already flaming Simon to push the LLM consciousness narrative:
From way out here, it really appears like maybe the formula is:
Effective Altruism = guilt * (contrarianism ^ online)
I have only been paying slight attention, but is there anything redeemable going on over there? Genuine question.
You mentioned "rationalist" - can anyone clue me in to any of this?
edit: oh, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rationalist_community. Wow, my formula intuition seems almost dead on?
I guess Dwarkesh Patel is part of that community? Well, his interviews are quite interesting, at least in the sense of seeing into a world that I otherwise don't see regarding AI researchers, and his questions are often quite good. Also, after interviewing many leading researchers and being on the hype train, he eventually did say a few months ago ~"yeah, the 'fast take-off' is not upon us," after trying to use leading tools to make his own podcast. That's intellectual honesty that is greatly missing in this world. So, there is that? I am also a huge fan of his Sara Paine pieces, at least on her part.
Is there anything else intellectually honest and interesting coming out of that group?
I'd like to see Rob Pike address this, however, based on what he said about LLMs he might reject it before then (getting off the usefulness train as in getting of the "doom train" in regards to AI safety)
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
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.
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.
People who are mad about AI just reach for the environmental argument to try to get the moral highground.
it uses a fuck ton of resources[0]
and instead of reducing energy production and emissions we will now be increasing them, which, given current climate prediction models, is in fact "killing the planet"
[0] https://www.iea.org/reports/energy-and-ai/energy-supply-for-...
Simon,
> I find Claude Code personally useful and aim to help people understand why that is.
No offense, but we don't need your help really. You went on a mission to teach people to use LLMs, I don't know why you would feel the urge but it's not too late to quit doing this, and even teach them not to and why.
Like being an accountant in 1985 who learns to use Lotus-123 and then tells their peers that they should actively avoid getting a PC because this "spreadsheet" thing will all blow over pretty soon.
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.
Then maybe you shouldn’t have done it at all. It’s not like the world asked or imbued you with the responsibility for that investigation. It’s not like it was imperative to get to the bottom of this and you were the only one able to do it.
Your defence is analogous to all the worst tech bros who excuse their bad actions with “if we did it right/morally/legally, it wouldn’t be viable”. Then so be it, maybe it shouldn’t be viable.
You did it because you wanted to. It was for yourself. You saw Pike’s reaction and deliberately chose to be complicit in the use of technology he decried, further adding to his frustration. It was a selfish act.
I agree with Rob Pike that sending emails like that from unreviewed AI systems is extremely rude.
I don't agree that the entire generative AI ecosystem deserves all of those fuck yous.
So I hit back in a very subtle way by demonstrating a little-known but extremely effective application of generative AI - for digital forensics. I made sure anyone reading could follow along and see exactly what I did.
I think this post may be something of a Rorschach test. If you have strong negative feelings about generative AI you're likely to find what I did offensive. If you have favorable feelings towards generative AI you're more likely to appreciate my subtle dig.
So yes, it was a bit of a dick move. In the overall scheme of bad things humans do I don't feel like it's pretty far over the "this is bad" line.
Yes, I’ve noticed. You are frequently baffled that incredibly obvious and predictable things happen, like this or the misuse of “vibe coding” as a term.
That’s what makes your actions frustrating, your repeated glaring inability to understand the criticisms of the technology refering to the inevitable misuse, the lack of understanding that of course this is what it is going to be used for, and no amount of your blog posts is going to change it.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46398241
Your deliberate provocation didn’t accomplish good. Agreed, it was not by any means close to the worst things humans do, but it was still a public dick move (to borrow your words) which accomplished nothing.
One day, as will happen to most of us, you or someone close will be bitten hard by ignorant or malicious use outside your control. Perhaps then you’ll reflect on your role in it.
Agreed. That's why I invest so much effort trying to help people understand the security risks that are endemic to how most of these systems work: https://simonwillison.net/tags/prompt-injection/
[1] Prime example in this very discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46395196
A well meaning message on an open protocol resulting in a rant - it really feels to me that AI isn't the issue here.
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.
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.
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.
There are many possible reasons for this, and sometimes people are laboring under several of them at once.
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.
People are also very bad at evaluating if millions of liters of water is a lot or not.
My favourite exploration of this issue is from Hank Green: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H_c6MWk7PQc - this post by Andy Masley is useful too: https://andymasley.substack.com/p/the-ai-water-issue-is-fake
This is purely a technological problem and not a moral one.
If you answer yes, I don't think we can agree on anything. If you answer no, I think you are a hypocrite.
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.
https://www.hermiston.gov/publicworks/page/hermiston-water-s... - "AWS is covering all construction costs associated with the water service agreement"
https://www.thedalles.org/news_detail_T4_R180.php - "The fees paid by Google have funded essential upgrades to our water systems, ensuring reliable service and addressing the City's growing needs. Additionally, Google continues to pay for its water use and contributes to infrastructure projects that exceed the requirements of its facilities."
https://commerce.idaho.gov/press-releases/meta-announces-kun... - "As part of the company’s commitment to Kuna, Meta is investing approximately $50 million in a new water and sewer system for the city. Infrastructure will be constructed by Meta and dedicated to the City of Kuna to own and operate."
(I asked ChatGPT and it said that some of the Gulf state data centers do.)
They do use treated (aka drinking) water, but that's a relatively inexpensive process which should be easily covered by the extra cash they shovel into their water systems on an annual basis.
Andy wrote a section about that here: https://andymasley.substack.com/i/175834975/how-big-of-a-dea...
And yes, many places have plenty of water. After some Capex improvements to the local system, a datacenter is often net-helpful, as they spread the fixed cost of the water system cost out over more gallons delivered.
But many places don't have lots of water to spare.
And did you check whether or not what it produced was accurate? The article doesn't say.
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.
How about this one? I had Claude Code run from my phone build a dependency-free JavaScript interpreter in Python, using MicroQuickJS as initial inspiration but later diverging from it on the road to passing its test suite: https://static.simonwillison.net/static/2025/claude-code-mic...
Here's the latest version of that project, which I released as an alpha because I haven't yet built anything real on top of it: https://github.com/simonw/micro-javascript
Again, I built this on my phone, while engaging with all sorts of other pleasant holiday activities.
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.
(438 points, 373 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46389444
(763 points, 712 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46392115
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.
What value do you think this post adds to the conversation?
But if that's value added, why frame it under the heading of popular drama/rage farming? To capture more attention? Do you believe the pop culture news sites would be interested if it discussed the idea and "experiment" without mentioning the rage bait?
How do you propose he should have framed it in a way that it is still helpful to the reader?
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.
-Mass layoffs in tech AI data centers causing extreme increases in monthly electricity -bills across the US -Same as above but for water -The RAM crisis is entirely caused by Sam Altman - General fear and anxiety from many different professions about AI replacing them - Rape of the copyright system to train these models
there's a shift in how you make software here. LLM will produce a ton of code that embeds decisions, it's well done but it means you never have to reflect about the design, interfaces yourself. you can keep abusing the context window
most of software engineering was dealing with human limits through compression. we make layers, modules, abstractions so that we can understand each part a bit
i kinda agree with all of these
ultimately AI is the equivalent of nuclear weaponry but for human economies.. this is something that should be controlled outside private companies (especially since it's part public research and public data..)
there are people saying devs were naive not seeing that our jobs would accelerate automation to the point we would be retired 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.
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.
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)
Subject: {Name of one of my direct reports}
Body: Need to talk about {name} ASAP.
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.
Here not only are the senders apparently happily associating their actual legal names with the spam but frame the sending as "a good deed" and seem to honestly see it as smart branding.
We don't want the Overton window wherever they are.
Curse, yell, fight. Never accept things just because they've grown to be common.
[0]: https://fortune.com/2025/12/23/silicon-valleys-tone-deaf-tak...
> (…)
> 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.
> 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.
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.
Hence upvoting the OP ("What has robpike come to? :shriek:") and downvoting GP.
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.
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.
Legitimate research in this field may be good, 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?
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.
Actively exploiting a shared service to deanonymize an email someone hasn't chosen to share in order to email them is a violation of boudnaries even if if it wasn't something someone was justifying as exploration of the capacities of novel AI systems, thus implicitly invoking both the positive and negative concerns associated with research as appropriate in addition to (or instead of, where those replace rather than layering on top of) those that apply to everyday conduct.
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.
Abusing a Github glitch to deanonymize a not-intended to be public email to send an email to someone (regardless of the content) would be scummy behavior even if it was done directly by a human with specific intent.
> What in the actual ... is wrong with people these days?
Narcissism and the lack of respect for other people and their boundaries that it produces, first and foremost.
Honestly, I don't mean personal offence to you, but what the hell are you people talking about. AI is just a bunch of (very complex) statistics, deciding that one word is most appropriate after another. There are no emotions here, it's just maths.
> There are no emotions here, it's just maths.
100%, its an autocorrector on steroids which is trained to give you an answer based on how it was rewarded during its train phase. In the end, its all linear alegbra.
I remember prime saying, its all linear algebra and I like to reference it and technically its true but people in the AI community get remarkably angry sometimes when you point it out.
I mean no offense in saying this but at the end of the day It is maths and there is no denying around it. Please, the grand parent comment should stop creating terms like nascent AI emotions.
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.
This startup didn’t spend the trillions he’s referencing.
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.
Spam is defined as "sending multiple unsolicited messages to large numbers of recipients". That's not what happened here.
> 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".
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.
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?
- Git commits form an immutable merkel dag. So commits can’t be changed without changing all subsequent hashes in a git tree
- Commits by default embed your email address.
I suppose GitHub could hide the commit itself, and make you download commits using the cli to be able to see someone’s email address. Would that be any better? It’s not more secure. Just less convenient.
Those settings will affect what email shows up in commits.
In commits you vreate on other tooling you can configure a fake/alternate user.email address in gitconfig. Git (not just GitHub) needs some email address flr each commit but it is freetext.
There is one problem: commit signatures. For GitHub to consider a commit not created by github.com Web UI to be "verified" and get a green check mark, the following needs to hold:
- Commit is signed
- Commit email address matches a verified GH account email address
So you can not use a 'nocontact@thih9.example.com' address and get green checks on your commits - it needs to be an address that is at least active when you add it to your account.
https://docs.github.com/en/account-and-profile/how-tos/email...
1. git commits record an author name and email
2. github/gitlab offer an email relay so you can choose to configure your git client (and any browser-based commits you generate) to record that as the email address
3. github/gitlab do not rewrite your pushed commits to "sanitize" any "private" email addresses
4. the .patch suffix "trick" just shows what was recorded in the commit
When I said
> If you want, use a specific public address for those purposes.
that includes using the github/gitlab relay address -- but make sure to actually change your gitconfig, you can't just configure it on the web and be done.