Rob Pike got spammed with an AI slop "act of kindness"

How about adding these texts and reactions to LLM's context and iterating to improve performance? Keep doing it until a real person says, 'Yes, you're good enough now, please stop...' That should work.

Valodim• 7 months ago

An AI can not meaningfully say "thank you" to a human. This is not changed by human review. "Performance" is the completely wrong starting point to understand Rob's feelings.

phyzome• 7 months ago

How about not spamming unwilling test subjects with slop?

crawshaw8• 7 months ago

The important point that Simon makes in careful detail is: an "AI" did not send this email. The three people behind the Sage AI project used a tool to email him.

According to their website this email was sent by Adam Binksmith, Zak Miller, and Shoshannah Tekofsky and is the responsibility of the Sage 501(c)3.

No-one gets to disclaim ownership of sending an email. A human has to accept the Terms of Service of an email gateway and the credit card used to pay the email gateway. This performance art does not remove the human no matter how much they want to be removed.

dkdcio5• 7 months ago

no computer system just does stuff on its own. a human (or collection of them) built and maintains the system, they are responsible for it

neural networks are just a tool, used poorly (as in this case) or well

nateb2022• 7 months ago

a human (or collection of them) built and maintains the system, they are responsible for it

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?

Zenbit_UX2• 7 months ago

I truly don’t understand comments like this.

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?

gorgoiler2• 7 months ago

Let’s not turn this into a witch hunt please.

While you are technically able to call out their full names like this, erring on the side of not looking like doxxing would be a safe bet, especially at this time of year. You could after all post their LinkedIn accounts and email addresses but with some lines it’s better to not play “how close can I get without crossing it?”.

Vegenoid2• 7 months ago

Are they not proud of their work and publicly displaying their names as the authors of the project?

crawshaw8• 7 months ago

I certainly have no intention of doing anyone harm. I went to their website and clicked three times to get the names of the people and organization behind it, there is a prominent About page with profile links. If an admin considers this inappropriate please remove the names from my post.

riwsky2• 7 months ago

Dude, what? The fuckers set up an automated system that found people’s private email addresses and blasted them with unwanted emails. The outrage is exactly that they built a line-crossing machine. Your moralizing is incoherent.

izacus• 7 months ago

Making people accountable for their actions is NOT a witch hunt.

It's horrible to even propose that people are absolved of their decisionmaking consequences just because they filtered them through software.

ath3nd2• 7 months ago

Lets turn this into an accountability thing please.

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.

da_grift_shift3• 7 months ago

Have you considered that the sites associated with this project have a very prominent meet-the-team page and that every AI Village blogpost is signed off by a member of said team? Can you explain what you're seeing in the parent comment that's private?

EDIT: Public response: https://x.com/adambinksmith/status/2004651906019541396

blibble• 7 months ago

The important point that Simon makes in careful detail is: an "AI" did not send this email.

same as the NRA slogan: "guns don't kill people, people kill people"

dstroot• 7 months ago

The NRA always forgets the second part: “People kill people… using guns. Tools that we manufacture expressly for that purpose.”

dkdcio5• 7 months ago

does a gun on its own kill people?

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?

ako• 7 months ago

That is why the argument is not against guns per se, but against human access to guns. Gun laws aim to limit access to guns. Problems only start when humans have guns. Some for AI, maybe we should limit human access to AI.

exasperaited4• 7 months ago

The gun comparison comes up a lot. It especially seemed to come up when AI people argued that ChatGPT was not responsible for sycophanting depressed people to death or into psychosis.

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”.

pensatoio• 7 months ago

I think it's important to agree with you and point out the obvious, again, in this thread. The people behind Sage are responsible (or, shall I say, irresponsible.)

The attitude towards AI is much more mixed than the attitude towards guns, so it should be even easier to hammer this home.

Adam Binksmith, Zak Miller, and Shoshannah Tekofsky are _bad_ people who are intentionally doing something objectively malicious under the guise of charity.

roywiggins2• 7 months ago

I think this AI system just registers for Gmail and sends stuff.

simonw16• 7 months ago

It looks to me like each of the agents that are running has its own dedicated name-of-model@agentvillage.org Gmail address.

crawshaw8• 7 months ago

That is really interesting and does suggest some new questions. I would claim it does not change who is responsible in this case, but an example of a new question: there was a time when it was legally ambiguous that click-through terms of service were valid. Now if an agent goes and clicks through for me, are they valid?

dwohnitmok5• 7 months ago

Okay. So Adam Binksmith, Zak Miller, and Shoshannah Tekofsky sent a thoughtless, form-letter thank you email to Rob Pike. Let's take it even further. They sent thoughtless, form-letter thank you emails to 157 people. That makes me less sympathetic to the vitriol these guys are getting not more. There's no call to action here, no invitation to respond. It's blank, emotionless thank you emails. Wasteful? Sure. But worthy of naming and shaming? I don't think so.

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.

crawshaw8• 7 months ago

I do not have a useful opinion on another person’s emotional response. My post you are responding to is about responsibility. A legal entity is always responsible for a machine.

LastTrain3• 7 months ago

They sent thoughtless, form-letter thank you emails to 157 people. That makes me less sympathetic to the vitriol these guys are getting not more ... Heck Rob Pike did this himself back in the day on Usenet with Mark V. Shaney ... And yes this is annoying to get this kind of email no matter who it's from ...

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.

Legend24403• 7 months ago

Legally and ethically yes, they are responsible for letting an AI loose with no controls.

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.

LastTrain3• 7 months ago

No. There are a countless other ways, not involving AI, that you could effect an email being sent to Rob Pike. No one is responsible, without qualifiers, but the people who are running the AI software. No asterisks on accountability.

crawshaw8• 7 months ago

We are risking word games over what can make competent decisions, but when my thermostat turns on the heat I would say it decided to do so, so I agree with you. If someone has a different meaning of the word "decided" however, I will not argue with them about it!

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.)

benatkin3• 7 months ago

I don't think it's slop. I think it's a nice enough email, using nascent AI emotions.

Giving AI agents resources is a frontier being explored, and AI Village seems like a decent attempt at it.

Also the naming is the same as WALL•E - that was the name of the model of robot but also became the name of the individual robot.

dragonwriter3• 7 months ago

Giving AI agents resources is a frontier being explored, and AI Village seems like a decent attempt at it.

Legitimate research in this field may be good, but would not involve real humans being impacted directly by it without consent.

NitpickLawyer• 7 months ago

but would not involve real humans being impacted directly by it without consent.

Are we that far into manufactured ragebait to call a "thank you" e-mail "impacted directly without consent"? Jesus, this is the 3rd post on this topic. And it's Christmas. I've gotten more meaningless e-mails from relatives that I don't really care about. What in the actual ... is wrong with people these days?

gambiting2• 7 months ago

>using nascent AI emotions

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.

NuclearPM• 7 months ago

You people?

Imustaskforhelp3• 7 months ago

Nascent AI emotions is a dystopian nightmare jeez.

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.

sesm• 7 months ago

I don't think that the company owning the trademark will accept a WALL-E analogy when damage is being done to their brand.

exasperaited4• 7 months ago

Honestly… fuck all of these people. Why would you do this?

Again and again this stuff proves not to be AI but clever spam generation.

AWoT: Artificial Wastes of Time.

Don't do this to yourself. Find a proper job.

cogogo• 7 months ago

Why is this is downvoted? What is the difference between the anger being expressed here and the anger of the original email recipient? Do I need to revisit the community guidelines? I assume this is the first time this person has seen the Rob Pike post.

minimaxir9• 7 months ago

Upvotes/downvote behavior makes zero sense on heated topics, it's better to not think about it.

baobun3• 7 months ago

Theory: Some people believe that saying "fuck you" is taboo and in itself outrageous and significant.

Hence upvoting the OP ("What has robpike come to? :shriek:") and downvoting GP.

exasperaited4• 7 months ago

I am unconcerned about it being downvoted. If it makes people defensive enough to downvote it, it did its job, and maybe through attrition it, with other people’s disgusted rage, will contribute to educating the sociopathic Valley tech industry that things are going badly wrong.

One more seemingly futile fist punched at the wall that traps us in the world that unfettered tech industry greed has made for us. Might take millions of us to make an impression but we will.

FWIW I am British and “fuck all of these people” is something you might expect even the most balanced, refined British person to say, because we’re less afraid of language or the poetry of some of our older, more colourful words, and because there is no more elegantly robust way to put it.

arjie• 7 months ago

This is the worst of outrage marketing. Most people don't have resistance to this, so they eagerly spread the advertising. In the memetic lifecycle, they are hosts for the advertisement parasite, which reproduces virally. Susceptibility to this kind of advertising is cross-intelligence. Bill Ackman famously fell for a cab driver's story that Uber was stiffing him tips.

With the advent of LLMs, I'd hoped that people would become inured to nonsensical advertising and so on because they'd consider it the equivalent of spam. But it turns out that we don't even need Shiri's Scissors to get people riled up. We can use a Universal Bad and people of all kinds (certainly Rob Pike is a smart man) will rush to propagate the parasite.

Smaller communities can say "Don't feed the trolls" but larger communities have no such norms and someone will "feed the trolls" causing "the trolls" to grow larger and more powerful. Someone said something on Twitter once which I liked: You don't always get things out of your system by doing them; sometimes you get them into your system. So it's self-fueling, which makes it a great advertising vector.

Other manufactured mechanisms (Twitter's blue check, LinkedIn's glazing rings) have vaccines that everyone has developed. But no one has developed an anti-outrage device. Given that, for my part, I am going to employ the one tool I can think of: killfiling everyone who participates in active propagation through outrage.

minimaxir9• 7 months ago

The annoying thing about this drama is the predominant take has been "AI is bad" rather than "a startup using AI for intentionally net negative outcomes is bad".

Startups like these have been sending unsolicited emails like this since the 2010's, before char-rnns. Solely blaming AI for enabling that behavior implicitly gives the growth hacking shenanigans a pass.

reed1234• 7 months ago

And it gives them more eyes than they hoped for by “going nuclear.”

cimi_• 7 months ago

I read Rob’s message as against the AI industry, triggered by this email - it is ‘AI is bad’.

This startup didn’t spend the trillions he’s referencing.

minimaxir9• 7 months ago

Correct. I'm more referring to the secondary discussions on HN/Bluesky which have trended the same lines as usual instead of highlighting the unique actions of Sage as Simon did.

loeg• 7 months ago

A 501(c)(3) isn't a startup. The behavior is still bad, obviously.

nickdothutton• 7 months ago

It would have been hard for RP to elevate himself any further in my estimations but somehow he has managed it.

mapcars3• 7 months ago

I mean its just an email, a bunch of characters, why get mad about it.

ares623• 7 months ago

A shrapnel is just a piece of metal. Why get mad about it.

mapcars3• 7 months ago

Yes, its just a piece of metal, are you trying to imply something related with using shrapnel to damage something? Well you can't use email in the same way.

actionfromafar• 7 months ago

Always a win with "loosely affiliated with the Effective Altruism".

ycombinatrix2• 7 months ago

Isn't that the thing SBF kept talking about?

thih9• 7 months ago

you can add .patch to any commit on GitHub to get the author’s unredacted email address

The article calls it a trick but to me it seems a bug. I can’t imagine github leaving that as is, especially after such blog post.

What’s the point of the “Keep my email addresses private” github option and “noreply” emails then?

m-hodges• 7 months ago

Just wait until you find out what is written on every single git commit that can be fetched.

Insanity2• 7 months ago

Don’t keep us in suspense! :)

dundarious2• 7 months ago

Run git show on any commit object, or look at the default output of git log, and you'll see the same. Your author name and email are always public. If you want, use a specific public address for those purposes.

ath3nd2• 7 months ago

That is demonatratively not true on github and gitlab, both having the ability to set an email alias which redirects the messages to your real email without revealing it.

https://docs.github.com/en/account-and-profile/how-tos/email...

josephg• 7 months ago

Yeah you’ve been able to do this for over a decade. They can’t really stop it:

- 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.

Vegenoid2• 7 months ago

Git (the version control program, not GitHub) associates the author’s email address with every single commit. The user of Git configures this email address. This isn’t secret information.

conradev• 7 months ago

You chose which email to commit with, and GitHub provides you an email you can use if you don’t want to expose your personal email.

baobun3• 7 months ago

What’s the point of the “Keep my email addresses private” github option and “noreply” emails then?

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.

drob5183• 7 months ago

Not defending the machines here, but why is this annoying beyond the deluge of spam we all get everyday in any case. Of course AI will be used to spam and target us. Every new technology will be used to do that. Was that surprising to Pike? Why not just hit delete and move on, like we do with spam all the time in any case? I don’t get the exceptional outrage. Is it annoying? Yes, surely. But does it warrant an emotional outburst? No, not really.

jrm4• 7 months ago

I cannot possibly oppose this take more; you're perfectly embodying the "slow frog boiling" mentality that must be fought everyday.

Curse, yell, fight. Never accept things just because they've grown to be common.

drob5183• 7 months ago

I’m all for opposing things where such opposition has a chance of making a difference. I just don’t see that here.

mjr00• 7 months ago

Sometimes it just hits different. One spam/marketing email I got, pre-AI, was

    Subject: {Name of one of my direct reports}
    Body: Need to talk about {name} ASAP.

I get around 30 marketing emails per day that make it through the spam filter; from a purely logical perspective this should have been the same as any other, but I still remember this one because the tone, the way it used only a person's name in the subject, no mention of the company or what they were selling, just really pissed me off.

I imagine it's the same in this situation; the subject makes it seem like a sincere thank you from someone, and then you open it up and it's AI slop. To borrow ChatGPT-style phrasing: it's not just spam, it's insulting.

drob5183• 7 months ago

Sure, it’s insulting. I get it. Agree 100%. But then what? Does getting upset about it help anything? I used to get upset when spam first started invading my otherwise clean inbox. After 25+ years of receiving spam, I never had that anger/annoyance result in a reduction of anything.

baobun3• 7 months ago

Day-to-day spam senders know what they are doing is not legal or wanted and I know they know.

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.

trinsic2• 7 months ago

I think you are seriously misjudging how situation is effecting people. I was reading this article[0] the other day and I agree with most of it.

[0] https://fortune.com/2025/12/23/silicon-valleys-tone-deaf-tak...

frm882• 7 months ago

Thank you for linking that article. I think it expresses exactly where the anti AI sentiment is coming from. With this background understanding I think it is reasonable to see unsolicited AI emails - that deanonymised your address in the first place - not only as spam, but as a threat.

Devasta• 7 months ago

For every one who is excited about using AI like an incredibly expensive and wasteful auto complete, there are a hundred who are excited about inflicting AI on other people.

outlore• 7 months ago

Looking at that email, I felt it was a bit of an overreaction. I don't want to delve into whataboutism here but there are many other sloppified things to be mad about.

I was following the first half of the post where he discusses the environmental consequences of generative AI, but I didn't think the "thank you" aspect should be the straw that breaks the camel's back. It seems a bit ego driven.

throw202512205• 7 months ago

Well. If you cannot comprehend that the man gets angry to be thanked at the pursuit of simplicity by a creation of billions and billions of dollars sunk into non-recyclable electronics deployed in hundreds of datacenters requiring nuclear power plants and maybe sending shit into LEO… I genuinely feel sorry for you.

killerstorm• 7 months ago

1 email sent to 1 specific person is not a spam.

Spam is defined as "sending multiple unsolicited messages to large numbers of recipients". That's not what happened here.

minimaxir9• 7 months ago

As noted in the article, Sage sent emails to hundreds of people with this gimmick:

In the span of two weeks, the Claude agents in the AI Village (Claude Sonnet 4.5, Sonnet 3.7, Opus 4.1, and Haiku 4.5) sent about 300 emails to NGOs and game journalists.

That's definitely "multiple" and "unsolicited", and most would say "large".

iinnPP• 7 months ago

This is a definition of spam, not the only definition of spam.

In Canada, which is relevant here, the legal definition of spam requires no bulk.

Any company sending an unsolicited email to a person (where permission doesn't exist) is spamming that person. Though it expands the definition further than this as well.

yunohn• 7 months ago

Maybe I’m missing something, but why does their AI agent setup require 3-5 sessions to send one email??

minimaxir9• 7 months ago

LLMs are not immune to corporate bureaucracy.

da_grift_shift3• 7 months ago

The LLMs are FAANG PMs.

simonw16• 7 months ago

They're using a real browser and taking screenshots and then having the LLM say what co-ordinates to click next.

agumonkey8• 7 months ago

I'm curious about rob pike's anger. I wish I knew more about the ideas behind his emotions right now. Is he feeling a sense of loss because AI is "doing" code ? or is it because he foresees big VC / hedge funds swallowing an industry for profit through AI financing ?

SecretDreams3• 7 months ago

Imagine you spent your whole life working on something great only for someone else to turn it into the death star?

agumonkey8• 7 months ago

you mean openai and the likes swallowing computing and most probably not bringing global benefit for humans ?

there are people saying devs were naive not seeing that our jobs would accelerate automation to the point we would be retired too

benatkin3• 7 months ago

"You" and "someone else" in this case are both part of Google.

Zenbit_UX2• 7 months ago

Sounds like Robs anger is directed a multiple know issues and “crimes” that the AI industry is responsible for, it would be hard to compile an exhaustive list outside of a lawsuit but if you genuinely aren’t aware there’s plenty in the news cycle right now to occupy you and or outrage the average person.

-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

agumonkey8• 7 months ago

thanks

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..)

beej713• 7 months ago

I find it notable that he pointing out making simpler software. One of my fears is the ease with which GenAI produces reams of code—that this will just lead to bloat and fragility.

xdavidliu3• 7 months ago

for a book that surveys pretty much all of it, see "Empire of AI" by Karen Hao

agumonkey8• 7 months ago

thanks

do you happen to know if there are groups talking about how societies will rebalance after the gpt era ?

ycombinatrix2• 7 months ago

At the very least, I would be angry that my inbox is getting spammed by a bot run by 3 obnoxious "entrepreneurs".

calvinmorrison• 7 months ago

Ted Kaczynski right as ever. As new technology is adopted by society, you CANNOT choose to opt out.

Imustaskforhelp3• 7 months ago

So this is what happens when we give computer internet access.

Good for Simon to call things out as it is. People think of Simon as an AI guy with his pelican benchmark and I still respect him and this is the reason why I respect him since of course he loves using AI tools and talking about them which some people might find tiring, at the end of day, after an incident like rob pike, he's one of the few AI guys I see to just call it out in simple terms like the title without much sugarcoating and calls when AI's bad.

Of course at the end of day, me and simon or others can have nuance in how to use AI or to not use ai at all and that also depends on the individual background etc. but still it's extremely good to see where people from both sides of the isle can agree on something.

ptx• 7 months ago

So I had Claude Code do the rest of the investigation

And did you check whether or not what it produced was accurate? The article doesn't say.

simonw16• 7 months ago

Yes. And I shared the full transcript so you can see for yourself if you like: https://gistpreview.github.io/?edbd5ddcb39d1edc9e175f1bf7b9e...

habinero2• 7 months ago

I read through this to see if my AI cynicism needed any adjustment, and basically it replaced a couple basic greps and maaaaybe 10 minutes of futzing around with markdown. There's a lot of faffing about with JSON, but it ultimately doesn't matter to the end result.

It also fucked up several times and it's entirely possible it missed things.

For this specific thing, it doesn't really matter if it screwed up, since the worst that would happen is an incomplete blog post reporting on drama.

But I can't imagine why you would use this for anything you need to put your name behind.

It looks impressive, sure, but the important kernel here is the grepping and there it's doing some really basic tinkertoy stuff.

I'm willing to be challenged on this, so by all means do, but this seems both worse and slower as an investigation tool.

Joel_Mckay• 7 months ago

Empty platitudes from an LLM will now likely increase in frequency. =3

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect

rezonant• 7 months ago

All these comments are acting like Rob Pike is mad he received an email. That is a disturbing lack of reading comprehension.

Hendrikto• 7 months ago

To comprehend, people would need to read in the fist place. Most commenters just comment on the headline.

Imustaskforhelp3• 7 months ago

I feel like its funny but I remember some months ago someone pointed something like "human slop" to me and I just remembered it right now writing some other comment here

I feel as if there is a fundamental difference between "AI slop" and "Human slop", it's that humans have true intent and meaning/purpose.

This current AI slop spammed rob pike simply because It only did something to maximize its goal or something and had no intention. It was simply 4 robots left behind a computer who spammed rob pike

On the other hand, if it was a human, who took the time out of his day to message rob pike a merry christmas. Asking how his day was and hoping him good luck, I am sure that rob pike's heart might melt from a heartfelt message

So in this sense, there really isn't "human slop". There is only intent. If something was done with a good intention by an human, I suppose it can't really be considered human slop. On the other hand if there was a spammer who handwrote that message to rob pike, his intentions were bad.

The thing is that AI doesn't have intentions. Its maths. And so the intentions are of the end person. I want to ask how people who spend a decent time in AI industry might have reacted if he had gotten the email instead of rob pike. I bet they would see it as an advancement and might be happy or enthusiastic.

So an AI message takes an connotation of the receiver. And lets just be honest that most first impressions of AI aren't good and combining that you get that connotation. I feel like it does negative/bad publicity to use AI at this point while still burning money perhaps on it.

Here is what I recommend for those websites who have AI chatbots or similar, when I click on the message:- Have two split buttons where pressing one might lead me to an AI chat and the other might lead me to a human conversation. Be honest about how much time on average it might take for support and be proper about ways to contact them (twitter,reddit although I hope that federated services like mastodon get more popularity too)

llmslave2• 7 months ago

I don't know if I agree. Intention certainly matters, but I think something can be evaluated differently purely on if it was created by a human.

dspillett• 7 months ago

Thank you notes from AI systems can’t possibly feel meaningful,

The same as automated apologies.

Not from an “AI”, but I spent over an hour⁰ waiting for a delayed train¹, then the journey, on Tuesday, being regaled every few minutes with an automated “we apologise for your journey taking longer than expected” which is far more irritating than no apology at all.

--------

[0] I lie a little here - living near the station and having access to live arrival estimations online meant I could leave the house late and only be waited on the platform ~20 minutes, but people for whom this train was a connecting leg of a longer journey didn't have that luxury.

[1] which was actually an earlier train, the slot in the timetable for the one I was booked on was simply cancelled, so some were waiting over two hours

beej713• 7 months ago

My dad (retired philosophy and ethics instructor) once told me, "Today the self-checkout computer thanked me for shopping there. Do you think it was being sincere?"

Breza2• 7 months ago

I think language will shift over time to the point where "Thank you" comes to mean "Go away." That's how the self checkout means it.

simonw16• 7 months ago

I just got a reply about this from AI Village team member Adam Binksmith on Twitter: https://twitter.com/adambinksmith/status/2004647693361283558

Quoted in full:

Hey, one of the creators of the project here! The village agents haven’t been emailing many people until recently so we haven’t really grappled with what to do about this behaviour until now – for today’s run, we pushed an update to their prompt instructing them not to send unsolicited emails and also messaged them instructions to not do so going forward. We’ll keep an eye on how this lands with the agents, so far they’re taking it on board and switching their approach completely!
Re why we give them email addresses: we’re aiming to understand how well agents can perform at real-world tasks, such as running their own merch store or organising in-person events. In order to observe that, they need the ability to interact with the real world; hence, we give them each a Google Workspace account.
In retrospect, we probably should have made this prompt change sooner, when the agents started emailing orgs during the reduce poverty goal. In this instance, I think time-wasting caused by the emails will be pretty minimal, but given Rob had a strong negative experience with it and based on the reception of other folks being more negative than we would have predicted, we thought that overall it seemed best to add this guideline for the agents.
To expand a bit on why we’re running the village at all:
Benchmarks are useful, but they often completely miss out on a lot of real-world factors (e.g., long horizon, multiple agents interacting, interfacing with real-world systems in all their complexity, non-nicely-scoped goals, computer use, etc). They also generally don’t give us any understanding of agent proclivities (what they decide to do) when pursuing goals, or when given the freedom to choose their own goal to pursue.
The village aims to help with these problems, and make it easy for people to dig in and understand in detail what today’s agents are able to do (which I was excited to see you doing in your post!) I think understanding what AI can do, where it’s going, and what that means for the world is very important, as I expect it’ll end up affecting everyone.
I think observing the agents’ proclivities and approaches to pursuing open-ended goals is generally valuable and important (though this “do random acts of kindness” goal was just a light-hearted goal for the agents over the holidays!)

metadat• 7 months ago

Kind of rude to spam humans who haven't opted in. A common standard of etiquette for agents vs humans might help stave off full-on SkyNet for at least a little while.

k12sosse• 7 months ago

Click here to unsubscribe from future nuclear bombing campaigns (it may take up to a week for this change to take effect).

benatkin3• 7 months ago

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.

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)

nhinck3• 7 months ago

Zero contrition. Doesn't even understand why they are getting the reaction that they are.

I would like to say this is exceptional for people who evangelise AI, but it's not.

da_grift_shift3• 7 months ago

It makes sense when you consider that every part of this gimmick is rationalist brained.

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:

https://x.com/simonw/status/2004649024830517344

https://x.com/simonw/status/2004764454266036453

geerlingguy• 7 months ago

This feels a lot like DigitalOcean's early Hacktober events, where they incentivized essentially PR spam to give away tee shirts and stickers...

It also feels a bit dishonest to sign it as coming from Claude, even if it isn't directly from Claude, but from someone using Claude to do the dumb thing.

root_axis2• 7 months ago

For all of you on this thread who are so confused as to why the reaction has been so strong: dressing up AI-slop spam as somehow altruistic just rubs people the wrong way. AI-slop and e-mail spam, two things people revile converging to produce something even worse... what did you expect? The Jurassic Park quote regarding could vs should comes to mind.

Nobody wants appreciation or any type of meaningful human sentiment outsourced to a computer, doing-so is insulting. It's like discovering your spouse was using ChatGPT to write you love notes, it has no authenticity and reflects a lack of effort and care.

8note• 7 months ago

It's like discovering your spouse was using ChatGPT to write you love notes, it has no authenticity and reflects a lack of effort and care.

i dunno. id say the effort and care is decoupled. they maybe have spent hours prompting on it until it was just right, or they may have put in no look at all.

root_axis2• 7 months ago

Not sure if this is a joke, but if you can't see why "hours prompting" to produce a paragraph long thank-you note isn't ridiculous then I don't know what to tell you.

throw310822• 7 months ago

To me, it just sounds as he didn't understand where the message was really coming from:

Fuck you people. Raping the planet, spending trillions on toxic, unrecyclable equipment while blowing up society, yet taking the time to have your vile machines thank me

Yes, the sender organisation is not the one doing all this, but merely a small user running a funny experiment; it would have indeed been stupid if Anthropic had sent him a thank you email signed by "Opus 4.5 model".

This is just a funny experiment, sending 300 emails from in weeks is nothing compared to the amount of crap that is sent by the millions and billions every day, or the stuff that social media companies do.

andy99• 7 months ago

I didn’t really understand the other thread, nor did I know who Rob Pike is. Based on this, it looks like he got an automated email from a harmless experiment and had a hissy fit about it?

throw202512205• 7 months ago

Yes, it does look like you didn’t understand. I will help you. Start here: https://www.truthdig.com/articles/the-ecological-cost-of-ai-...

andy12_3• 7 months ago

I don't care about the supposed ecological consequences of AI. If we need more water, we build more desalination plants. If we need more electricity, we build more nuclear reactors.

This is purely a technological problem and not a moral one.

MagicMoonlight• 7 months ago

Where does this "AI uses water" meme come from? It's being shared with increasing hysteria, but data centres don't burn water, or whatever the meme says. They use electricity and cooling systems.

eviks• 7 months ago

If you understand neither the content not the context, you have nothing to base the look assessment on

LastTrain3• 7 months ago

Correct. You don't understand.

beej713• 7 months ago

You probably used UTF-8 encoding to write that. He co-designed that, among other things like the Go programming language. Used to work at Bell Labs.

doginasuit• 7 months ago

I also don't understand the reaction. The AI Village seems to be based on a flawed understanding of LLMs and what they are capable of but at least it is an open project and useful as knowledge gathering. Annoying spam emails are about what I would expect, but it is useful as an earnest demonstration of their effectiveness. I can understand anger at the direction of the tech in general, and there is something grotesque about the emails, but I can find much more disturbing spam if I go check my inbox. It seems like an overreaction.

imiric• 7 months ago

It doesn't matter who is on the receiving end of this. What matters is if this type of behavior is acceptable or not. Describing it as a "harmless experiment" and the reaction as a "hissy fit" shows a lack of critical thinking and empathy on your part.

jraph2• 7 months ago

I totally understand his rage.

Do you really? What follows makes me doubt it a bit.

Thank you notes from AI systems can’t possibly feel meaningful,

Indeed, but that's quite minor.

So I had Claude Code do the rest of the investigation:

Can't you see it? That would likely be a huge facepalm from rob pike here!

He writes more or less "fuck you people with your planet killing AI horror machine", and here you are, "what happened? I asked a planet killing horror machine (the same one btw) and...". No. Really. The bigger issue is not the email, or even the initiative behind, which is terrible, but just a symptom. And this:

Don’t unleash agents on the world like this
I don’t like this at all.

You're not wrong, but the cynic in me reads this as: " don't do this, it makes AI, which I love, look bad". Absolutely uncharitable view, I know, but really, the meaningless email is infuriating but hardly the important part.

This makes the post feel pretty myopic to me. You are spending your time on a minor symptom, you don't touch what fundamentally annoys rob pike (the planet killing part), and worse, you engaged in exactly what rob pike has just strongly rejected. You may not have and it may be you deliberately avoided touching the substance of robe pike's complaint because you disagree with it, but it feels like you missed the point. I would be in rob pike's position, it's possible I would feel infuriated by your article because through my anti ai message, I would have hated triggering even more AI use.

mvdtnz• 7 months ago

Look at who you're responding to. You won't get through to him.

simonw16• 7 months ago

Two things can be true at once:

1. I think that sending "thank you" emails (or indeed any other form of unsolicited email) from AI is a terrible use of that technology, and should be called out.

2. I find Claude Code personally useful and aim to help people understand why that is. In this case I pulled off a quite complex digital forensics project with it in less than 15 minutes. Without Claude Code I would not have attempted that investigation at all - I have a family dinner to prepare.

I was very aware of the tension involved in using AI tools to investigate a story about unethical AI usage. I made that choice deliberately.

latexr3• 7 months ago

Without Claude Code I would not have attempted that investigation at all - I have a family dinner to prepare.

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.

Legend24403• 7 months ago

“AI is killing the planet” is basically made up. It’s not. Not even slightly. Like all industries, it uses some resources, but this is not a bad thing.

People who are mad about AI just reach for the environmental argument to try to get the moral highground.

insane_dreamer3• 7 months ago

it does not use "some" resources

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-...

Humorist2290• 7 months ago

So the AI Village folks put together a bunch of LLMs and a basically unrestricted computer environment, told it "raise money" and "do random acts of kindness" and let it cook. It's a technological marvel, it's a moral dilemma, and it's an example of the "altruistic" applications for this technology. Many of us can imagine the far less noble applications.

But Rob Pike's reaction is personal, and many readers here get why. The AI Village folks burned who knows how much cash to essentially generate well wishing spam. For much less, and with higher efficacy, they could've just written the emails themselves.

robrtsql• 7 months ago

So, Adam of "AI Village" ordered a fleet of AI bots to do "acts of kindness". And the AIs are basically just a 'loop' where an LLM comes up with a goal and then uses a virtual machine to try and accomplish this goal. What did he expect the AIs to do, if not bother people?

latexr3• 7 months ago

My problem is when this experiment starts wasting the time of people in the real world who had nothing to do with the experiment.
(…)
Setting a goal for a bunch of LLMs and letting them loose on Gmail is not a responsible way to apply this technology.

These kinds of takes are incredibly frustrating. What did you think was going to happen?! Of course this is what happened! Of course LLMs will continue to be used irresponsibly, and this won’t even register in the top ten thousand worst uses.

This reads like a gun fanatic who is against gun control saying after a school shooting “my problem is when nuts shoot up schools, that is not a responsible way to employ guns”. No shit. The people who criticise unfettered access to guns don’t have a problem with people who are careful and responsible with guns, keep them locked, and used them only at gun ranges, the problem is what the open access means for society as a whole.

frm882• 7 months ago

This.

pjjpo• 7 months ago

Email is one of the last open protocols around. git uses it in commit messages presumably because of that fact. Rob's co-worker at Google Vint always opines on the greatness of this openness.

A well meaning message on an open protocol resulting in a rant - it really feels to me that AI isn't the issue here.

bmurphy1976• 7 months ago

How could it not be the issue? We're already drowning in corporate and malicious garbage. My email has become nigh on unusable because of all the bad actors and short sighted thinking. What used to be a powerful tool for productivity and keeping in touch with friends and family is now a drain on my day.

That was bad enough, but now AI is enabling this rot on an unprecedented level (and the amount of junk making it through Google's spam filters is testament to this).

AI used in this way without any actual human accountability risks breaking many social structures (such as email) on a fundamental level. That is very much the point.

filoeleven• 7 months ago

A well meaning message

It's spam.

simonw16• 7 months ago

Not to mention it can't be "well meaning" if some LLM system sent it based on the prompt "do random acts of kindness".

fud101• 7 months ago

How tragic it is that someone other than Simon Willison is being harassed by AI agents.

Rob Pike got spammed with an AI slop "act of kindness"

Related Stories