9 ms·
Everything humans do is harmful to some degree. I don't want to put words in Pike's mouth, but I'm assuming his point is that the cost-benefit-ratio of how LLMs
by InsideOutSanta 10mo ago
Everything humans do is harmful to some degree. I don't want to put words in Pike's mouth, but I'm assuming his point is that the cost-benefit-ratio of how LLMs are often used is out of whack.
Somebody burned compute to send him an LLM-generated thank-you note. Everybody involved in this transaction lost, nobody gained anything from it. It's pure destruction of resources.
- xorgun 10mo agoCutting trees for fuel and paper to send a letter burned resources. Nobody gained in that transaction
- Blackthorn 10mo agoI shouldn't have to explain this, but a letter would involve actual emotion and thought and be a dialog between two humans.
- gcau 10mo agoI shouldn't have to explain this, but a letter is a medium of communication, that could just as easily be written by a LLM (and transcribed by a human onto paper).
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- ImPostingOnHN 10mo agoI shouldn't have to explain this, but a letter is a medium of communication between people. Automated systems sending people unsolicited, unwanted emails is more commonly known as spam. Especially when the spam comes with a notice that it is from an automated system and replies will be automated as well.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- Imustaskforhelp 10mo agoCommunicate between what though? Communication happen between two parties. I wouldn't consider LLM an party considering it's just an autosuggestion on steroids at the end of day (lets face it) Also if you need communication like this, just share the prompt anyway to that other person in the letter, people much rather might value that.
- xorgun 10mo agoWe’re well past that. Social media killed that first. Some people have a hard time articulating their thoughts. If AI is a tool to help, why is that bad?
- ai_is_the_best 10mo ago[flagged]
- irishcoffee 10mo agoArticulating thoughts is the backbone of communication. Replacing that with some kind of emotionless groupthink does actually destroy human-to-human communication. I would wager that the amount of “very significant thing that have happened over the history of humanity” come down to a few emotional responses.
- fwip 10mo agoDo you think that the LLM helped deliver a thoughtful letter to Rob Pike?
- neltnerb 10mo agoImagine the process of solving a problem as a sequence of hundreds of little decisions that branch between just two options. There is some probability that your human brain would choose one versus the other. If you insert AI into your thinking process, it has a bias, for sure. It will helpfully reinforce whatever you tell it you think makes sense, or at least on average it will be interpreted that way because of a wide variety of human cognitive biases even if it hedges. At the least it will respond with ideas that are very... median. So at each one of these tiny branches you introduce a bias towards the "typical" instead of discovering where your own mind would go. It's fine and conversational but it clearly influences your thought process to, well, mitigate your edges. Maybe it's more "correct", it's certainly less unique. And then at some point they start charging for the service. That's the part I'm concerned about, if it's on-device and free to use I still think it makes your thought process less interesting and likely to have original ideas, but having to subscribe to a service to trust your decision making is deeply concerning.
- lukan 10mo agoYou have never received automated spam letters?
- kentm 10mo agoDo you think that spam letters are generally considered to be a good use of resources?
- lukan 10mo agoNo, but it counters this point "a letter would involve actual emotion and thought and be a dialog between two humans."
- kentm 10mo agoI don't think it does unless you ignore the context of the conversation. Its very clear that the reference about "letters" being made wasn't "all mail."
- DonHopkins 10mo agoWriting personal letters has other dangers as well. Remember how George Costanza's fiancée got killed.
- kgwxd 10mo agoWhen the thought is "I'd like this person to know how grateful I am", the medium doesn't really matter. When the thought is "I owe this person a 'Thank You'", the handwritten letter gives an illusion of deeper thought. That's why there are fonts designed to look handwritten. To the receiver, they're just junk mail. I'd rather not get them at all, in any form. I was happy just having done the thing, and the thoughtless response slightly lessens that joy.
- throw20251220 10mo agoUse recycled paper.
- yes_man 10mo agoSomeone taking the time and effort to write and send a letter and pay for postage might actually be appreciated by the receiver. It’s a bit different from LLM agents being ordered to burn resources to send summaries of someone’s work life and congratulating them. It feels like ”hey look what can be done, can we get some more funding now”. Just because it can be done doesn’t mean it adds any good value to this world
- xorgun 10mo agoI don’t know anyone who doesn’t immediately throw said enveloppe, postage, and letter in the trash
- yes_man 10mo agoOk, and that supports the idea of LLM-generated mass spamming in what way…?
- vodou 10mo agoThen you are part of truly strange circles, among people who don’t understand human behavior.
- Blackthorn 10mo agoWow. You couldn't waterboard that out of me.
- throw20251220 10mo agoYou surround yourself with the people you want to have around you.
- palmotea 10mo ago> I don’t know anyone who doesn’t immediately throw said enveloppe, postage, and letter in the trash If you're being accurate, the people you know are terrible. If someone sends me a personal letter [and I gather we're talking about a thank-you note here], I'm sure as hell going to open it. I'll probably even save it in a box for an extremely long time.
- devnonymous 10mo agoHow is it that so many people who supposedly lean towards analytical thought are so bad at understanding scale?
- DiscourseFan 10mo agoSomebody just burned their refuse in a developing country somewhere. I guess if it was cold, at least they were warming themselves up.
- acheron 10mo agoGoogle has been burning compute for the past 25 years to shove ads at people. We all lost there, too, but he apparently didn’t mind that.
- cmrdporcupine 10mo agoThat's frankly just pure whataboutism. The scale of the situation with the explosion of "AI" data centres is far far higher. And the immediate spike of it, too.
- enraged_camel 10mo agoIt’s not really whataboutism. Would you take an environmentalist seriously if you found out that they drive a Hummer? When people have choices and they choose the more harmful action, it hurts their credibility. If Rob cares so much about society and the environment, why did he work at a company that has horrendous track record on both? Someone of his level of talent certainly had choices, and he chose to contribute to the company that abandoned “don’t be evil” a long time ago.
- cmrdporcupine 10mo agoHonestly, it seems like Rob Pike may have left Google around the same I did. (2021, 2022). Which was about when it became clear it was 100% down in the gutter without coming back.
- pstuart 10mo agoMy take was that he had done enough work and had handed the reins of Go to a capable leader (rsc), and that it was time to step away. Ian Lance Taylor on the other hand appeared to have quit specifically because of the "AI everything" mandate. Just an armchair observation here.
- christophilus 10mo agoIt was still a wildly wasteful company doing morally ambiguous things prior to that timeframe. I mean, its entire business model is tracking and ads— and it runs massive, high energy datacenters to make that happen.
- victorbjorklund 10mo agoServing unwanted ads has what cost-benefit-ratio vs serving LLM:s that are wanted by the user?
- PunchyHamster 10mo agoEvery content generated by LLM was served to me against my will and without accounting for preferences.
- doug_durham 10mo agoWhat an odd way of framing this. Every bit of human generated content was served to you "against your will". You are making no sense.
- joquarky 10mo agoSounds like a gold star ego purity thing to me. I.e., they are proud to have never intentionally used AI and now they feel like they have to maintain that reputation in order to remain respected among their close peers.
- victorbjorklund 10mo agoThe generation of the content was done intentionally though. If they saved the output and you visited their site it wasn’t really generated for you (rather just static content served to you).
- lokar 10mo agoAds are extremely computationally cheap
- cvwright 10mo agoBut mining all the tracking data in order to show profitable targeted ads is extremely intensive. That’s what kicked off the era of “big data” 15-20 years ago.
- jezzamon 10mo agoIt's dumb, but energy wise, isn't this similar to leaving the TV on for a few minutes even though nobody is watching it? Like, the ratio is not too crazy, it's rather the large resource usages that comes from the aggregate of millions of people choosing to use it. If you assume all of those queries provide no value then obviously that's bad. But presumably there's some net positive value that people get out of that such that they're choosing to use it. And yes, many times the value of those queries to society as a whole is negative... I would hope that it's positive enough though.
- Imustaskforhelp 10mo ago> Somebody burned compute to send him an LLM-generated thank-you note. Everybody involved in this transaction lost, nobody gained anything from it. It's pure destruction of resources. Well the people who burnt compute got it from money so they did burn money. But they don't care about burning money if they can get more money via investors/other inputs faster than they can burn (fun fact: sometimes they even outspend that input) So in a way the investors are burning their money, now they burn the money because the market is becoming irrational. Remember Devin? Yes cognition labs is still there etc. but I remember people investing into these because of their hype when it did turn out to be moot comparative to their hype. But people/market was so irrational that most of these private equities were unable to invest in something like openai that they are investing in anything AI related. And when you think more deeper about all the bubble activities. It becomes apparent that in the end bailouts feel more possible than not which would be an tax on average taxpayers and they are already paying an AI tax in multiple forms whether it be in the inflation of ram prices due to AI or increase in electricity or water rates. So repeat it with me: whose gonna pay for all this, we all would but the biggest disservice which is the core of the argument is that if we are paying for these things, then why don't we have a say in it. Why are we not having a say in AI related companies and the issues relating to that when people know it might take their jobs etc. so the average public in fact hates AI (shocking I know /satire) but the fact that its still being pushed shows how little influence sometimes public can have. Basically public can have any opinions but we won't stop is the thing happening in AI space imo completely disregarding any thoughts about the general public while the CFO of openAI proposing an idea that public can bailout chatgpt or something tangential. Shaking my head...
- antonvs 10mo ago> Somebody burned compute to send him an LLM-generated thank-you note. Everybody involved in this transaction lost, nobody gained anything from it. It's pure destruction of resources. Just like the invention of Go.
- randallsquared 10mo ago> Everything humans do is harmful to some degree. I find it difficult to express how strongly I disagree with this sentiment.
- furyofantares 10mo agoIt's extremely anti-human.
- InsideOutSanta 10mo agoYou can make an argument supporting your disagreement.
- randallsquared 10mo agoThere are two possible forks. The physical fork involves factual disagreement on how much humanity has built vs destroyed, the relative ease of destruction over construction, and an argument that given entropy and other effects, even a slight bias toward production would produce little positive, leading to the conclusion that humans mostly produce vastly more than they consume, even though production is, as mentioned, more difficult. The value or "moral" fork would be trying to convince you that building, producing, and growing was actually helpful rather than harmful. I don't imagine we actually disagree on the physical fork, making that argument pretty pointless: clearly humans and human civilization are learning, growing, and still have a strong potential to thrive as long as ASI, apathy, or a big rock don't take us out first. Instead, I took your statement as an indication that you don't actually positively value humans, more humans, humans growing, and humans building things. That's a preferences and values disagreement, and there's no way to rationally or logically argue someone into changing their core values. No ought from is, and all that. I'm not suggesting, by the way, that people's values don't change, or can't be changed by discussion, only that there is no way to do so with logical argument; reason can get you to your goal, but it can't tell you what ultimate goal to want. Anyway, I was expressing that I like humans and want humans (or people who themselves used to be humans, in the limit) to continue and do more, rather than arguing that you ought to feel the same.
- paulvnickerson 10mo ago> Everything humans do is harmful to some degree That's just not true... When a mother nurses her child and then looks into their eyes and smiles, it takes the utmost in cynical nihilism to claim that is harmful.
- eks391 10mo agoI could be misinterpreting parent myself, but I didn't bat an eye on the comment because I interpreted it similarly to "everything humans (or anything really) do increases net entropy, which is harmful to some degree for earth". I wasn't considering the moral good vs harm that you bring up, so I had been reading the the discussion from the priorities of minimizing unnecessary computing scope creep, where LLMs are being pointed to as a major aggressor. While I don't disagree with you and those who feel that statement is anti-human (another responder said this), this is what I think parent was conveying, not that all human action is immoral to some degree.
- InsideOutSanta 10mo agoYes, this is what I meant. I used the word "harmful" in the context of the argument that LLMs are harmful because they consume resources (i. e. increase entropy). But everything humans do does that. Everything increases entropy. Sometimes we find that acceptable. So when people respond to Pike by pointing out that he, too, is part of society and thus cannot have the opinion that LLMs are bad, I do not find that argument compelling, because everybody draws that line somewhere.