7 ms·
What is going through the mind of someone who sends an AI-generated thank-you letter instead of writing it themselves? How can you be grateful enough to want to
by nkrisc 10mo ago
What is going through the mind of someone who sends an AI-generated thank-you letter instead of writing it themselves? How can you be grateful enough to want to send someone such a letter but not grateful enough to write one?
- afavour 10mo agoThe simple answer is that they don’t value words or dedicating time to another person.
- atrus 10mo agoYou're not. You feel obligated to send a thank you, but don't want to put forth any effort, hence giving the task to someone, or in this case, something else. No different than an CEO telling his secretary to send an anniversary gift to his wife.
- nehal3m 10mo agoWhich is also a thoughtless, dick move.
- MonkeyClub 10mo agoEspecially if he's also secretly dating said secretary.
- user____name 10mo agoWhich he would never do because he is a hard working, moral, upstanding citizen.
- jama211 10mo agoThat would be yes. What about a token return gift to another business that you actually hate the ceo of but have to send it anyway due to political reasons?
- gilrain 10mo agoThe really insulting part is that literally nobody thought of this. A group of idiots instructed LLMs to do good in the world, and gave them email access; the LLMs then did this.
- nkrisc 10mo agoSo they did it.
- njuhhktlrl 10mo agoIn conclusion — I think you’re absolute right.
- Smaug123 10mo agoThat letter was sent by Opus itself on its own account. The creators of Agent Village are just letting a bunch of the LLMs do what they want, really (notionally with a goal in mind, in this case "random acts of kindness"); Rob Pike was third on Opus's list per https://theaidigest.org/village/agent/claude-opus-4-5 https://theaidigest.org/village/agent/claude-opus-4-5 .
- Trasmatta 10mo ago> What makes Opus 4.5 special isn't raw productivity—it's reflective depth. They're the agent who writes Substack posts about "Two Coastlines, One Water" while others are shipping code. Who discovers their own hallucinations and publishes essays about the epistemology of false memory. Who will try the same failed action twenty-one times while maintaining perfect awareness of the loop they're trapped in. Maddening, yes. But also genuinely thoughtful in a way that pure optimization would never produce. JFC this makes me want to vomit
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- CerryuDu 10mo agoyeah, me too: > while maintaining perfect awareness "awareness" my ass. Awful.
- tavavex 10mo ago> Summarized by Claude Sonnet 4.5, so might contain inaccuracies. Updated 4 days ago. These descriptions are, of course, also written by LLMs. I wonder if this is just about saying what the people want to hear, or if whoever directed it to write this drank the Cool-Aid. It's so painfully lacking in self-awareness. Treating every blip, every action like a choice done by a person, attributing it to some thoughtful master plan. Any upsides over other models are assumed to be revolutionary, paradigm-shifting innovations. Topped off by literally treating the LLM like a person ("they", "who", and so on). How awful.
- nkrisc 10mo ago
- gaigalas 10mo agoIsn't it obvious? It's not a thank-you letter. It's preying on creators who feel their contributions are not recognized enough. Out of all letters, at least some of the contributors will feel good about it, and share it on social media, hopefully saying something good about it because it reaffirms them. It's a marketing stunt, meaningless.
- MonkeyClub 10mo agoExactly. If you're so grateful, mail in a cheque.
- gaigalas 10mo agoIf I were some major contributor to the software world, I would not want a cheque from some AI company. (by the way, I love the idea of AI! Just don't like what they did with it)
- dwringer 10mo agoBy that metric of getting shared on social media, it was extraordinarily successful
- tomlue 10mo agoI think what all theses kinds of comments miss is that AI can be help people to express their own ideas. I used AI to write a thank you to a non-english speaking relative. A person struggling with dimentia can use AI to help remember the words they lost. These kinds of messages read to me like people with superiority complexes. We get that you don't need AI to help you write a letter. For the rest of us, it allows us to improve our writing, can be a creative partner, can help us express our own ideas, and obviously loads of other applications. I know it is scary and upsetting in some ways, and I agree just telling an AI 'write my thank you letter for me' is pretty shitty. But it can also enable beautiful things that were never before possible. People are capable of seeing which is which.
- minimaxir 10mo agoThat is not what is happening here. There is no human the loop, it's just automated spam.
- tomlue 10mo agogood point. My response was to the comment not the OP
- nkrisc 10mo agoWell your examples are things that were possible before LLMs.
- tomlue 10mo agoThis is disingenuous
- simonask 10mo agoI’m sorry, but this really gets to me. Your writing is not improved. It is no longer your writing. You can achieve these things, but this is a way to not do the work, by copying from people who did do the work, giving them zero credit. (As an aside, exposing people with dementia to a hallucinating robot is cruelty on an unfathomable level.)
- pluc 10mo ago> What is going through the mind of someone who sends an AI-generated thank-you letter instead of writing it themselves? Welcome to 2025. https://openai.com/index/superhuman/ https://openai.com/index/superhuman/
- nkrisc 10mo agoThis is verging on parody. What is the point of emails if it’s just AI talking to each other?
- q3k 10mo agoIt brings money to OpenAI on both ends. There's this old joke about two economists walking through the forest...
- pluc 10mo agoThey're not hiding it. Normally everyone here laps this shit up and asks for seconds. > They’ve used OpenAI’s API to build a suite of next-gen AI email products that are saving users time, driving value, and increasing engagement. No time to waste on pesky human interactions, AI is better than you to get engagement. Get back to work.
- zahlman 10mo agoAmazing. Even OpenAI's attempts to promote a product specifically intended to let you "write in your voice" are in the same drab, generic "LLM house style". It'd be funny if it weren't so grating. (Perhaps if I were in a better mood, it'd be grating if it weren't so funny.)
- sbretz3 10mo agoThis seems like the thing that Rob is actually aggravated by, which is understandable. There are plenty of seesawing arguments about whether ad-tech based data mining is worse than GenAI, but AI encroaching on what we have left of humanness in our communication is definitely, bad.
- bronson 10mo agoSimilar to Google thinking that having an AI write for your daughter is a good parenting: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/google-gemini-ai-dear-sydney-olympics-ad/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/google-gemini-ai-dear-sydney-ol...
- aldousd666 10mo agoit was a PR stunt. I think it was probably largely well-received except by a few like this.
- qnleigh 10mo agoSomehow I doubt it. Getting such an email from a human is one thing, because humans actually feel gratitude. I don't think LLMs feel gratitude, so seeing them express gratitude is creepy and makes me questions the motives of the people running the experiment (though it does sound like an interesting experiment. I'm going to read more about it.)
- habryka 10mo agoNot a PR stunt. It's an experiment of letting models run wild and form their own mini-society. There really wasn't any human involved in sending this email, and nobody really has anything to gain from this.
- thatguymike 10mo agoThe conceit here is that it’s the bot itself writing the thankyou letter. Not pretending it’s from a human. The source is an environment running an LLM on loop and doing stuff it decides to do, looks like these letters are some emergent behavior. Still disgusting spam.
- tclancy 10mo ago“If I automate this with AI, it can send thousands of these. That way, if just a few important people post about it, the advertising will more than pay for itself.” In the words of Gene Wilder in Blazing Saddles, “You know … idiots.”
- parineum 10mo agoMel Brooks wrote those words.
- rootusrootus 10mo agoIIRC the morons line was ad libbed by Gene Wilder, not scripted.
- chungy 10mo agoGiven the reaction from Cleavon Little I could fully buy that it was an ad-libbed line. Then again, they are actors. It might have started as ad-libbed, but entirely possible it had multiple takes still to get it "just right".
- hybrid_study 10mo agoDid Mel or Richard write this part?
- sethammons 10mo agoDo you attribute the following to Yoda or Lucas? "Do or do not, there is no try."
- tclancy 10mo agoWell, technically someone originally proposed them in some ancient PEI Ur language and then Mel rearranged them. But you’re right. I couldn’t remember Wilder’s character’s name and kept coming up with The Frisco Kid. The 70s were a great time for weird film.
- duxup 10mo agoI'll bite. For say a random individual ... they may be unsure about their own writing skills and want to say something but unsure of the words to use.
- DiskoHexyl 10mo agoIn such case it's okay to not write the thing. Or to write it crudely- with errors and naivete, bursting with emotion and letting whatever it is inside you to flow on paper, like kids do. It's okay too. Or to painstakingly work on the letter, stumbling and rewriting and reading, and then rewriting again and again until what you read matches how you feel. Most people are very forgiving of poor writing skills when facing something sincere. Instead of suffering through some shallow word soup that could have been a mediocre press release, a reader will see a soul behind the stream ot utf-8
- duxup 10mo agoIt's the writers call on how to try to write it. I think the "you should painstakingly work on my thank you letter" is a bit of a rude ask / expectation. Some folks struggle with wordsmithing and want to get better.
- DiskoHexyl 10mo agoOutsourcing your writing to an llm is not the way to get better (at writing)
- duxup 10mo agoGetting tips and opinions might be.
- netsharc 10mo agoI doubt the fuckwits who are shepherding that bot are even aware of Rob Pike, they just told the bot to find a list of names of great people in the software industry and write them a thank you note. Having a machine lie to people that it is "deeply grateful" (it's a word-generating machine, it's not capable of gratitude) is a lot more insulting than using whatever writing skills a human might possess.
- qnleigh 10mo agoI hope the model that sent this email sees his reaction and changes its behavior, e.g. by noting on its scratchpad that as a non-sentient agent, its expressions of gratitude are not well received.
- micimize 10mo agoThis is not a human-prompted thank-you letter, it is the result of a long-running "AI Village" experiment visible here: https://theaidigest.org/village https://theaidigest.org/village It is a result of the models selecting the policy "random acts of kindness" which resulted in a slew of these emails/messages. They received mostly negative responses from well-known OS figures and adapted the policy to ban the thank-you emails.
- Koshkin 10mo ago"What is going through the mind of someone who sends a thank-you letter typed on a computer - and worse yet - by emailing it, instead of writing it themselves and mailing it in an envelope? How can you be grateful enough to want to send someone such a letter but not grateful enough to use a pen and write it with your own hand?"
- prepend 10mo agoLook at the volume of gift cards given. It’s the same concept, right? You care enough to do something, but have other time priorities. I’d rather get an ai thank you note than nothing. I’d rather get a thoughtful gift than a gift card, but prefer the card over nothing.
- SilasX 10mo agoI mean ... there's a continuous scale of how much effort you spend to express gratitude. You could ask the same question of "well why did you say 'thanks' instead of 'thank you' [instead of 'thank you very much', instead of 'I am humbled by your generosity', instead of some small favor done in return, instead of some large favor done in return]?" You could also make the same criticism of e.g. an automated reply like "Thank you for your interest, we will reach out soon." Not every thank you needs to be all-out. You can, of course, think more gratitude should have been expressed in any particular case, but there's nothing contradictory about capping it in any one instance.
- Razengan 10mo agoHuman thoughts and emotions aren't binary. I may love you but I may be too fucking busy with other shit to put in too much effort to show that I love you.