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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

by crawshaw 10mo 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.

dkdcio 10mo 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 10mo 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?
  - dkdcio 10mo ago
    “it depends” (there’re plenty of laws and case law on this topic) I think the case here is fairly straightforward
  - sigbottle 10mo ago
    the only actual humans in the loop here are the startup founders and engineers. pretty cut and dry case here unless you want to blame the AI itself, from a legal perspective?
- Zenbit_UX 10mo 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?
  - dkdcio 10mo ago
    my point was more concise and general (should I have just commented instead of replying?), sorry you’re so offended and not sure why you felt the need to write this (you can downvote) accusing people of being AI is very low-effort bot behavior btw
    - xdavidliu 10mo ago
      seems to me when this kind of stuff happens, there's usually something else completely unrelated, and your comment was simply the first one they happened to have latched onto. surely by itself it is not enough to elicit that kind of reaction
      - dkdcio 10mo ago
        I do see the point a bit? and like a reasonable comment to that effect sure, I probably don’t respond and take it into account going forward 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
gorgoiler 10mo 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?”.
- Vegenoid 10mo ago
  Are they not proud of their work and publicly displaying their names as the authors of the project?
- crawshaw 10mo 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.
- riwsky 10mo 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.
  - Ukv 10mo ago
    The goals (initially "raise as much money for charity as you can", currently "Do random acts of kindness") don't seem ill-intentioned, particularly since it was somewhat successful at the first ($1481 for Helen Keller International and $503 for the Malaria Consortium). To my understanding it also didn't send more than one email per person. 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.
- izacus 10mo 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.
blibble 10mo 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 10mo ago
  The NRA always forgets the second part: “People kill people… using guns. Tools that we manufacture expressly for that purpose.”
  - saidnooneever 10mo ago
    [flagged]
    - xxs 10mo ago
      significantly less likely in cases of mass shootings, e.g. schools.
    - LunaSea 10mo ago
      The statistics of non-US countries disprove your theory.
      - saidnooneever 10mo ago
        this could simply be difference in culture or education. you might not beleive it but in EU also every day ppl get shot and murdered. driven over with car stabbed, strangled raped etc etc. its not so much in mass media, (diff in culture). the vast majority of such cases doesnt make it even into local news let alone national or international.
        LunaSea 10mo ago
        > but in EU also every day ppl get shot and murdered 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/cache/50636.pdf https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/SEPDF/cac... [2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/191223/reported-murder-and-nonnegligent-manslaughter-rate-in-the-us-since-1990/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/191223/reported-murder-a...
roywiggins 10mo ago
I think this AI system just registers for Gmail and sends stuff.
- simonw 10mo ago
  It looks to me like each of the agents that are running has its own dedicated name-of-model@agentvillage.org Gmail address.
  - roywiggins 10mo ago
    Huh, at that point they should just equip it with an email client rather than forcing it to laboriously navigate the webmail interface with a browser! 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.
    - Corrado 10mo ago
      I think the whole point of this was to see if the "agents" could act like a real human and real humans use Gmail much more frequently than sendmail. Sage even commented that they had update their prompt to tell the agents to not send email and not just remove the Gmail component for fear that the agent would just open it's own Gmail (or Y! mail, etc.) account and send mail on it's own.
- crawshaw 10mo 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?
dwohnitmok 10mo 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32830301). If you want to see change, talk to policymakers.
- crawshaw 10mo 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.
  - dwohnitmok 10mo ago
    This is mildly disingenuous no? I'm not talking about Rob Pike's reaction which as I call out, "makes sense to me." And you are not just talking about legal entities. After all the legal entity here is Sage. 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)?
Legend2440 10mo 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.
- LastTrain 10mo 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.
- crawshaw 10mo 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.)
  - aethros 10mo ago
    > As long as LLMs are tools wielded by humans 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.
    - crawshaw 10mo ago
      Part of what makes this post newsworthy is the claim it is an email from an agent, not a person, which is unusual. Your claim that "unsupervised LLM's are commonplace" is not at all obvious to me.

dkdcio 10mo 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 10mo 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?
- dkdcio 10mo ago
  “it depends” (there’re plenty of laws and case law on this topic) I think the case here is fairly straightforward
- sigbottle 10mo ago
  the only actual humans in the loop here are the startup founders and engineers. pretty cut and dry case here unless you want to blame the AI itself, from a legal perspective?
Zenbit_UX 10mo 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?
- dkdcio 10mo ago
  my point was more concise and general (should I have just commented instead of replying?), sorry you’re so offended and not sure why you felt the need to write this (you can downvote) accusing people of being AI is very low-effort bot behavior btw
  - xdavidliu 10mo ago
    seems to me when this kind of stuff happens, there's usually something else completely unrelated, and your comment was simply the first one they happened to have latched onto. surely by itself it is not enough to elicit that kind of reaction
    - dkdcio 10mo ago
      I do see the point a bit? and like a reasonable comment to that effect sure, I probably don’t respond and take it into account going forward 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

gorgoiler 10mo 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?”.

Vegenoid 10mo ago
Are they not proud of their work and publicly displaying their names as the authors of the project?
crawshaw 10mo 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.
riwsky 10mo 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.
- Ukv 10mo ago
  The goals (initially "raise as much money for charity as you can", currently "Do random acts of kindness") don't seem ill-intentioned, particularly since it was somewhat successful at the first ($1481 for Helen Keller International and $503 for the Malaria Consortium). To my understanding it also didn't send more than one email per person. 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.
izacus 10mo 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.

blibble 10mo 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 10mo ago
The NRA always forgets the second part: “People kill people… using guns. Tools that we manufacture expressly for that purpose.”
- saidnooneever 10mo ago
  [flagged]
  - xxs 10mo ago
    significantly less likely in cases of mass shootings, e.g. schools.
  - LunaSea 10mo ago
    The statistics of non-US countries disprove your theory.
    - saidnooneever 10mo ago
      this could simply be difference in culture or education. you might not beleive it but in EU also every day ppl get shot and murdered. driven over with car stabbed, strangled raped etc etc. its not so much in mass media, (diff in culture). the vast majority of such cases doesnt make it even into local news let alone national or international.
      - LunaSea 10mo ago
        > but in EU also every day ppl get shot and murdered 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/cache/50636.pdf https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/SEPDF/cac... [2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/191223/reported-murder-and-nonnegligent-manslaughter-rate-in-the-us-since-1990/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/191223/reported-murder-a...

roywiggins 10mo ago

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

simonw 10mo ago
It looks to me like each of the agents that are running has its own dedicated name-of-model@agentvillage.org Gmail address.
- roywiggins 10mo ago
  Huh, at that point they should just equip it with an email client rather than forcing it to laboriously navigate the webmail interface with a browser! 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.
  - Corrado 10mo ago
    I think the whole point of this was to see if the "agents" could act like a real human and real humans use Gmail much more frequently than sendmail. Sage even commented that they had update their prompt to tell the agents to not send email and not just remove the Gmail component for fear that the agent would just open it's own Gmail (or Y! mail, etc.) account and send mail on it's own.
crawshaw 10mo 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?

dwohnitmok 10mo 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32830301). If you want to see change, talk to policymakers.

crawshaw 10mo 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.
- dwohnitmok 10mo ago
  This is mildly disingenuous no? I'm not talking about Rob Pike's reaction which as I call out, "makes sense to me." And you are not just talking about legal entities. After all the legal entity here is Sage. 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)?

Legend2440 10mo 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.

LastTrain 10mo 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.
crawshaw 10mo 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.)
- aethros 10mo ago
  > As long as LLMs are tools wielded by humans 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.
  - crawshaw 10mo ago
    Part of what makes this post newsworthy is the claim it is an email from an agent, not a person, which is unusual. Your claim that "unsupervised LLM's are commonplace" is not at all obvious to me.