9 ms·

I don’t really understand the hate he gets over this. If you want to thank someone for their contribution, do that yourself? Sending thank you from an ML model

• electroly 10mo ago
  I'm not sure any humans were behind the email at all (i.e. "do that yourself"). This seems to be some bizarre experiment where someone has strapped an LLM to an email client and let it go nuts. Even being optimistic, it's tough to see what good this was supposed to do for the world.
  • numbsafari 10mo ago
    It’s a marketing gimmick. Whoever did it wanted to trade on the social currency of the tech-famous people they sent public shout-outs to, hoping it would drive clicks, engagement, and relevancy for the source account from which it originated, either as an elaborate form of karma farming, or just a way to drive followers and visibility.
    • fc417fc802 10mo ago
      It's also possible that the entire goal was nothing more complicated than stirring up shit for fun. By either metric it must have been a massive success judging by all the attention this is getting.
      • nathansherburn 10mo ago
        I've actually been following this project for a long time and it's none of the above. They're simply testing what a set of frontier models can do when given a goal and left to their own devices. I agree this outcome is very painful to see and I really feel for Rob. It's clear people (myself included) are completely at breaking point with AI slop. In this specific case though it's worth spending 30sec to read the website of AI model village to understand the experiment before claiming this was sent by Anthropic or assigning malicious intent.
        • robwwilliams 10mo ago
          Thanks for this context. Here is one specific link to the project by Adam Binksmith from April 2025. https://theaidigest.org/village/blog/introducing-the-agent-village https://theaidigest.org/village/blog/introducing-the-agent-v... Would have been a safer experiment in a sandbox full of volunteers participant. This got messy and causes confusion.
        • deleted 9mo ago
          [deleted]
        • jacquesm 9mo ago
          This is the equivalent of releasing a poorly tested and validated self driving vehicle into general traffic. Of course nobody would ever do such a thing...
• user34283 10mo ago
  He received what is arguably some AI-generated spam. Apparently this has enraged him and motivated an unhinged rant where he talks about raping the planet and vile machines. It's a hateful post and it seems disrespectful to anyone working in the industry, so some backlash has to be expected.
  • cindyllm 10mo ago
    [dead]
  • swee54 10mo ago
    You called it hateful, but you didnt call him a liar
  • sloum 10mo ago
    Yeah, but the industry is a big part of the problem and most people working in it are complicit at this point (whether or not they are reluctantly complicit).
  • bartread 10mo ago
    > unhinged rant Seems pretty hinged to me. Grounded firmly in reality even. The data centres used to run AI consume huge amounts of power and water to run, not to mention massive quantities of toxic raw materials in their manufacture and construction. The hardware itself has a shelf life measured in single digit years and many of its constituent components can’t be recycled. Tell me what I’m missing. What exactly is unhinged? Are you offended that he used the word “fuck” or something?
    • user34283 9mo ago
      Many in the comment section are acting obtuse. It's obviously the "vile machines raping the world and blowing up society" part that is particularly unhinged and possibly offensive.
      • bartread 9mo ago
        Be serious, will you? He is, very directly and in shorthand form I’ll grant you, expressing concerns that many people share about both AI and the oligarchs in control of it. But if you find the language offensive consider the very real possibility that, if we don’t get ourselves onto a better, more sustainable, and more equitable path, people will eventually start expressing themselves with bullets as well as with words. Many of us would like to avoid that, especially if we have families, so the harsh language is the least of our concerns.
• heresie-dabord 10mo ago
  > I don’t really understand the hate he gets over this. Some commenters suggest that Pike is being hypocritical, having long worked for GOOG, one of the main US corporations that is enshittifying the Internet and profligately burning energy to foist rubbish on Internet users. One could rightly suggest that a vapid e-mail message crafted by a machine or by an insincere source is similar to the greeting-card industry of yore, and we don't need more fake blather and partisan absurdity supplanting public discourse in democratic society. The people who worry about climate-change and the environment may have been out-maneuvered by transnational petroleum lobbies, but the concern about burning coal, petroleum, and nuclear fuel to keep pumping the commercial-surveillance advertising industry and the economic bubble of AI is nonetheless a valid concern. Pike has been an influential thinker and significant contributor to the software industry. All the above can be true simultaneously.
• hijodelsol 10mo ago
  Sending an automated thank you note also shows disdain for the recipient's time due to the asymmetry of the interaction. The sender clearly sees the thank you note sending as a task not worthy of their time and thus hands it off to a machine, but expects the recipient to read it themselves. This inherently ranks the importance of their respective time and effort.
  • deleted 10mo ago
    [deleted]
  • echelon 10mo ago
    [flagged]
    • tokioyoyo 10mo ago
      Everything mentioned in the first paragraph as arguments still takes some personal time and effort. The amount of time that’s involved to receive and acknowledge the gift is smaller than the amount of time to prepare the gift. So it feels “right”. Not sure if I’m making sense, but that’s how I’d feel about it.
      • Yoric 10mo ago
        Except for the white elephants, which were designed specifically as anti-gifts.
        • woooooo 9mo ago
          Even a deliberately bad gift as a gag shows some effort and socialization.
        • godelski 9mo ago
          Depends how you do white elephant... But still, a good gag gift takes effort. It's not like you walk into a random store and pick the first thing you see. The whole aspect of stealing gifts demonstrates this. It'd be pointless if the gifts were all low grade garbage. They'd be effectively fungible. Yet the theft part it is critical to making white elephant fun. Regardless if you're doing gag gifts or good gifts.
• habryka 10mo ago
  To be clear, this email really had basically zero human involvement in it. It's the result of an experiment of letting language models run wild and exploring the associated social dynamics. It feels very different from ML-generated marketing slop. Like, this isn't anyone using language models for their personal gain, it feels much more like a bunch of weird alien children setting up their own (kind of insane) society, and this being a side-effect of it.
  • iwontberude 10mo ago
    “Gee I wonder what reputational harm could come to me for spamming the world with slop, let’s find out… for science!”
  • account42 9mo ago
    It's unethical to run an experiment involving unwilling participants.
• nunez 10mo ago
  It's just so effin' weird! And to set Claude as the From header despite it not coming from Anthropic. Very odd.
  • aoeusnth1 9mo ago
    It did come from Claude, though, not Anthropic.
    • xp84 9mo ago
      If I were Anthropic I would have some kind of TOS restriction saying that you can't use their trademark to represent what you use their API to enable. It's just inappropriate. Even if you are a full anti-AI activist, it seems clear that the blame for specific things 'Claude' does in response to a deliberate prompt should fall on the person(s) operating it, and as such they shouldn't be allowed to make it appear that this is what Anthropic designed Claude to do.
      • aoeusnth1 9mo ago
        Anthropic sees Claude as having its own identity, and wants to foster that independence. This behavior is already aligned with Claude's station.
• nearbuy 10mo ago
  No one intentionally wanted to thank Rob Pike. As an experiment, some people asked an AI agent to do "random acts of kindness". They didn't specifically know the AI would send emails as a result and have since updated its instructions to forbid it from emailing people. They probably should have been more careful about unleashing AI agents on the world, but I don't think they intended to spam anyone.
  • deleted 10mo ago
    [deleted]
  • WD-42 10mo ago
    So some AI company instructed their state of the art, world changing tech to “do some good” this holiday season and the best it could do was spam a bunch of famous CS people with the first paragraph of their respective Wikipedia articles? This is kinda hilarious to be honest, but also sad. Why not donate to a charity or something?
    • snickerbockers 10mo ago
      It's emblematic of their entire worldview. When they need resources, training material or laws AI is everybody's accomplishment but when it comes to profits or even just being allowed to use the model then it's their accomplishment but yours. AKA "communist in the streets, capitalist in the sheets".
      • nearbuy 10mo ago
        It was done by a small charity called Sage, not an AI company.
    • nearbuy 10mo ago
      Not an AI company. It's a project by some small charity called Sage. It seems they didn't intend to email anyone and they've now stopped the agent from doing so.
  • iwontberude 10mo ago
• socalgal2 10mo ago
  I guess we're in the minority. I absolutely hate iPhotos, Google Photos, Facebook suggesting "memories". Apple, Google, Meta are not my friend or family and I don't want them behaving like they are. Even if they didn't fuck up and sent me memory of people or situation I don't want to remember.
  • Xorakios 10mo ago
    Ditto
  • xgkickt 10mo ago
    Sometimes it does seem like they’re just showing off how much data they’ve gathered on you.
    • DANmode 10mo ago
      “disclosing”
  • Firehawke 10mo ago
    Ditto. Every time I get a "Hey, you should send your father a happy birthday message!" it's a stab to the heart over someone dead over 12 years now.
    • sejje 9mo ago
      I don't get those, so there's definitely a setting you can change fwiw
      • jacquesm 9mo ago
        Victim blaming detected.
        • sejje 9mo ago
          Only if you give my comment the worst possible reading, which goes against the guidelines as you well know.
• mgraczyk 10mo ago
  Causes zero harm to anyone, less bad than normal spam. Silly thing to get angry about
  • ath3nd 9mo ago
    LLMs cause a lot of harm to everyone: - The investments in data centers to support the hungry slop producers drive habitat extinction and resource depletion that could be used for better things than a programmer too inept to write a for loop (https://news.mit.edu/2025/explained-generative-ai-environmental-impact-0117 https://news.mit.edu/2025/explained-generative-ai-environmen...) - The electricity demand from LLMs drives local electricity prices up so we as a society (https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/14/business/energy-environment/ai-data-centers-electricity-costs.html https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/14/business/energy-environme...). Not only that, but criminals like Belon Pusk provide electricity for their N*zi bots by totally ignoring environmental rules and regulations and just giving a huge methane middle finger to all (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3VJT2JeDCyw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3VJT2JeDCyw) - LLM makes its users dumber and dependent on them in general (https://www.media.mit.edu/projects/your-brain-on-chatgpt/overview/ https://www.media.mit.edu/projects/your-brain-on-chatgpt/ove...) - LLMs are created and trained by stealing labor (https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/apr/04/us-authors-copyright-lawsuits-against-openai-and-microsoft-combined-in-new-york-with-newspaper-actions https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/apr/04/us-authors-cop..., https://www.wired.com/story/new-documents-unredacted-meta-copyright-ai-lawsuit/ https://www.wired.com/story/new-documents-unredacted-meta-co...) Spam itself is useless and bad, electricity, water and other resources, bits and bytes of attention taken from this world so somebody can try to convince you the next thing you need in your life is a plastic piece of trash or another version of a phone with marginal upgrades. What Rob received is worse than spam, it's Spam 2.0. It's even less environmentally friendly, serves no purpose, and it makes its users dumber and dumber (and the inevitable bubble pop will take the whole economy with it because people were delusional enough to invest in a behemoth money guzzler with no path ever to profitability). Yeah, he works for EvilCorp, but it's never too late to grow a conscience. If you yourself are not angry and you consider it a "silly thing", you are part of the problem (see part about LLMs making populations dumber en masse).
    • 9mo ago
• Refreeze5224 10mo ago
  He's not upset that someone sent him an AI-generated thank you. He's upset about AI itself. And he's completely right.
  • magnitudes 10mo ago
    [flagged]
• deaux 10mo ago
  > I don’t really understand the hate he gets over this. For me, the dislike comes from the first part of the message. All of a sudden people who never gave a single shit about the environment, and still make zero lifestyle changes (besides "not using AI") for it, claim to massively care. It's all hypocritical bullshit by people who are scared of losing their jobs or of the societal damage. Which there is a risk of, definitely! So go talk about that. Not about the water usage while munching on your beef burger which took 2100 litres of water to produce. It's laughable. Now I don't know Rob Pike. Maybe he's vegetarian, barely flies, and buys his devices second-hand. Maybe. He'd be the very first person clamouring about the environmental effects of AI I've seen who does so. The people I know who actually do care about the environment and so have made such lifestyle changes, don't focus much about AI's effects in particular. > Fuck you people. Raping the planet, spending trillions on toxic, unrecyclable equipment while blowing up society So yeah, if you haven't already been doing the above things for a long time, fuck you Rob Pike, for this performative bullshit. If you have, then sorry Rob, you're a guy of your word. Interesting to see that people are a huge fan of Rob saying those things, but not of me saying this, looking at the downvotes.
  • razodactyl 10mo ago
    I appreciate the critical aspect of this comment. We definitely need more of it in society especially when we're inundated with low-quality data. Unfortunately, the negative commentary self-perpetuates a toxic community culture that won't help us in the long run. I upvoted for the critical stance. Constructive commentary in future will go much further to helping us all learn from each other. Personal attacks are a waste of everyone's time.
    • swat535 9mo ago
      > the negative commentary self-perpetuates a toxic community I read it differently, parent's comment is not toxic or negative, it's _realistic_. If you have never cared about the environment, and in fact actively worked to harm it, you have very little social credit left to make such a statement. With all due respect to Rob, I'm also going to toss out all the arguments from authority. While UTF-8 is great and Go is kind of interesting, let's not pretend he did charitable work at the homeless shelter. He actively contributed to the Adware growth in tech and got rich and famous doing it. The fact that his projects were used in greater computing, doesn't absolve the ethical concerns. I think that we should judge the argument based on its merit. We can do this by stripping away all the emotions and virtue signaling and ask: "Is AI, providing enough value to be a net positive?"
• koakuma-chan 10mo ago
  The fact you can unironically get "furious" in general is probably not a good thing, and going on that glorified Twitter platform, and making that kind of post, doesn't make it look better.
  • trinsic2 10mo ago
    It's totally warranted anger, many people feel it.
    • mlrtime 9mo ago
      "Raping the planet" warranted? Hyperbole?
      • ath3nd 9mo ago
        > "Raping the planet" warranted? Hyperbole? No, simply a good choice of words. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3VJT2JeDCyw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3VJT2JeDCyw
      • trinsic2 9mo ago
        Absolutely, and no not hyperbole, have you been living under a rock?.
      • jacquesm 9mo ago
        Actually no. And I think Rob Pike must have listened to George Carlin at some point. "Mother nature? Yeahhhh, she was asking for it."
• anacrolix 9mo ago
  I got a cheque for some fuck up for $8. In this day and age, sending a cheque for a small amount like that is a dick move. You know heaps of people will not even bother. Many people have never seen a cheque these days.
  • bigfatkitten 9mo ago
    My uncle received a cheque for $0.12 from the Australian Taxation Office in the 1980s. He framed it, and it’s still on his wall today.
    • jackvalentine 9mo ago
      I have a cheque from NAB for 1 cent because I somehow screwed up closing my Citibank account and had fractional interest that had to be paid to me.
• RickyLahey 9mo ago
  [flagged]
• egorfine 9mo ago
  2 PLN is plenty enough to move you up the next tax bracket in ZUS, so... :-)
• eric_cc 9mo ago
  > I’d be furious To me it just comes across as low emotional intelligence. There are very few things worthy of being furious, in my opinion. Being furious is high cost.
• jacquesm 9mo ago
  Any annual salary increase that is below inflation is a salary decrease.