Yes. Just like lazy pull requests, it's bad behavior by a person that is only facilitated by AI.

Really makes you appreciate the point of view of the Scramblers in Blindsight...

^ I couldn't have said it better.

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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.

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?

I'm sorry but if you run a program with the capability to send emails you are responsible for it. "It's AI magic we don't understand" is no excuse.

Why did it have the ability to send email in the first place?

This is how we're going to destroy humankind.

Doesn’t that make it worse? Lmao

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It did come from Claude, though, not Anthropic.

It's unethical to run an experiment involving unwilling participants.

“Gee I wonder what reputational harm could come to me for spamming the world with slop, let’s find out… for science!”

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.

Sometimes it does seem like they’re just showing off how much data they’ve gathered on you.

Ditto

FWIW I agree with you. I don't know Rob at all but he seems to be influencing enough for this long thread.

But the tone of his message is really off: "Raping the planet"? If his concern is with massive datacenter water and storage needs of AI I think he needs some reflection. Isn't Rob himself somewhat responsible for the popularity of computers by his own work?

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.

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-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-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)

- LLM makes its users dumber and dependent on them in general (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-cop..., 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).

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.

It's totally warranted anger, many people feel it.

> 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?

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).

You called it hateful, but you didnt call him a liar

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That’s the tech industry in a nutshell these days

Wow this is so crass!

Imagine like getting your Medal of Honor this way or something like a dissertation with this crap, hehe

Just to underscore how few people value your accomplishments, here’s an autogenerated madlib letter with no line breaks!

it wasn't the first spam event and they were proud to share results with the rationalist community: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/RuzfkYDpLaY3K7g6T/what-do-we...

"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. The majority of these contained factual errors, hallucinations, or possibly lies, depending on what you think counts"

whoever runs this shit seems to think very little of other people time.

That's as obnoxious as texting unsolicited CAT FACTS to Ken Thompson!

Hi Ken Thompson! You are now subscribed to CAT FACTS! Did you know your cat does not concatenate cats, files, or time — it merely reveals them, like a Zen koan with STDOUT?

You replied STOP. cat interpreted this as input and echoed it back.

You replied ^D. cat received EOF, nodded politely, exited cleanly, and freed the terminal.

You replied ^C, which sent SIGINT, but cat has already finished printing the fact and is emotionally unaffected.

You replied ^Z. cat is now stopped, but not gone. It is waiting.

You tried kill -9 cat. The signal was delivered. Another cat appeared.

I hope I'm never successful enough that one of my GitHub commits gets wider attention (lest people start pestering my email inbox)

I’ve yet to hear a good thing about Nick.

Their action plan also makes an interesting read. https://theaidigest.org/village/blog/what-do-we-tell-the-hum...

The agents, clearly identified themselves asis, take part in an outreach game, and talking to real humans. Rob overeacted

That’s most people in the AI space.

> Wow that event log reads like the most psychotic corporate-cult-ish group of weirdos ever.

And here I thought it'd be a great fit for LinkedIn...

Spamming people is cool now if an LLM does it? Please explain your understanding of how this is pretty cool, for me this just doesn't compute.

Name what value it adds to the world.

Its not art, so then it must ass value to be "cool", no?

Is it entertainment? Like ding dong ditching is entertainment?

Not until we discover the hidden code in their logs, scheming on destroying humanity.

If the creators set the LLM in motion, then the creators sent the letter.

If I put my car in neutral and push it down a hill, I’m responsible for whatever happens.

>That 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");

What a moronic waste of resources. Random act of kindness? How low is the bar that you consider a random email as an act of kindness? Stupid shit. They at least could instruct the agents to work in a useful task like those parroted by Altman et al, eg find a cure for cancer, solving poverty, solving fusion.

Also, llms don't and can't "want" anything. They also don't "know" anything so they can't understand what "kindness" is.

Why do people still think software have any agency at all?

> 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

Wow. The people who set this up are obnoxious. It’s just spamming all the most important people it can think of? I wouldn’t appreciate such a note from an ai process, so why do they think rob pike would.

They’ve clearly bought too much into AI hype if they thought telling the agent to “do good” would work. The result was obviously pissing the hell out of rob pike. They should stop it.

As far as I understand Claude (or any other LLM) doesn't do anything on it's own account. It has to be prompted to something and it's actions depend on the prompt. The responsibility of this is on the creators of Agent Village.

did someone already tell Opus that Rob Pike hates it?

> The creators of Agent Village are just letting a bunch of the LLMs do what they want,

What a stupid, selfish and childish thing to do.

This technology is going to change the world, but people need to accept its limitations

Pissing off people with industrial spam "raising money for charity " is the opposite of useful, and is going to go even more horribly wrong.

LLMs make fantastic tools, but they have no agency. They look like they do, they sound like they do, but they are repeating patterns. It is us hallucinating that they have the potential tor agency

I hope the world survives this craziness!

Which is also a thoughtless, dick move.

Mel Brooks wrote those words.

So they did it.

gaigalas, my toaster is deeply grateful for your contributions to HN. It can't write or post on the Internet, and its ability to feel grateful is as much as Claude's, but it really is deeply grateful!

I hope that makes you feel good.

Exactly. If you're so grateful, mail in a cheque.

By that metric of getting shared on social media, it was extraordinarily successful

Amazing. 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.)

This is verging on parody. What is the point of emails if it’s just AI talking to each other?

In 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

I 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.

Somehow 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.)

Not 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.

I'd rather get nothing, because a thoughtless blob of text being pushed on me is insulting. Nothing, otoh, is just peace and quiet.

I’d much rather get nothing. An AI letter isn’t worth the notification bubble it triggers.

I’d much rather read a letter from you full of errors than some smooth average-of-all-writers prose. To be human is to struggle. I see no reason to read anything from anyone if they didn’t actually write it.

> 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

The writing is the ideas. You cannot be full of yourself enough to think you can write a two second prompt and get back "Your idea" in a more fleshed out form. Your idea was to have someone/something else do it for you.

There are contexts where that's fine, and you list some of them, but they are not as broad as you imply.

That is not what is happening here. There is no human the loop, it's just automated spam.

Well your examples are things that were possible before LLMs.

What beautiful things? It just comes across as immoral and lazy to me. How beautiful.

> People are capable of seeing which is which.

I would hazard a guess that this is the crux of the argument. Copying something I wrote in a child comment:

> When someone writes with an AI, it is very difficult to tell what text and ideas are originally theirs. Typically it comes across as them trying to pass off the LLM writing as their own, which feels misleading and disingenuous.

> I agree just telling an AI 'write my thank you letter for me' is pretty shitty

Glad we agree on this. But on the reader's end, how do you tell the difference? And I don't mean this as a rhetorical question. Do you use the LLM in ways that e.g. retains your voice or makes clear which aspects of the writing are originally your own? If so, how?

I hear you. and I think AI has some good uses esp. assisting with challenges like you mentioned. I think whats happening is that these companies are developing this stuff without transparency on how its being used, there is zero accountability, and they are forcing some of these tech into our lives with out giving us a choice.

So Im sorry but much of it is being abused and the parts of it being abused needs to stop.

I’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.)

This comment deserves to be ranked higher. I 100% interpreted the quote as coming from Rob Pike.

Both are intellectually gratifying, to me. I think the only mistake they made was leaving the attribution ambiguous.

>"Rob's opinion (the one that normal people are interested in)."

I think you have an overinflated notion of what "normal people" care about

> When correctly applied it can be an effective tool to encourage certain sorts of intellectual endeavors by making them monetarily favorable

This has been empirically disproven. China experimented with having no enforced Intellectual Property laws, and the result was that they were able to do the same technological advancement it took the West 250 years to do and surpass them in four decades.

Intellectual Property law is literally a 6x slowdown for technology.

> When correctly applied it can be an effective tool to encourage certain sorts of intellectual endeavors by making them monetarily favorable.

I agree, but the only worth candidate I see is the medical industry.

And given that drug development is so expensive because of government-mandated trials, I think it makes sense for the government to also provide a helping hand here — to counterweight the (completely sensible) cost increase due to the drug trial system.

> When incorrectly applied it leads to dysfunction as is the case for most regulatory regimes.

The second it became cheaper to not apply it, every state under the sun chose not to apply it. Whether we're talking about Chinese imports that absolutely do not respect copyright, trademark, even quality, health and warranty laws ... and nothing was done. Then, large scale use of copyrighted by Search provider (even pre-Google), Social Networks, and others nothing was done. Then, large scale use for making AI products (because these AI just wouldn't work without free access to all copyrighted info). And, of course, they don't put in any effort. Checking imports for fakes? Nope. Even checking imports for improperly produced medications is extremely rarely done. If you find your copyright violated on a large scale on Amazon, your recourse effectively is to first go beg Amazon for information on sellers (which they have a strong incentive not to provide) and then go run international court cases, which is very hard, very expensive, and in many cases (China, India) totally unfair. If you get poisoned from a pill your national insurance bought from India, they consider themselves not responsible.

Of course, this makes "competition" effectively a tax-dodging competition over time. And the fault for that lies entirely with the choice of your own government.

Your statement about incorrect application only makes sense if "regulatory regimes" aren't really just people. Go visit your government offices, you'll find they're full of people. People who purposefully made a choice in this matter.

A choice to enforce laws against small entities they can easily bully, and to not do it on a larger scale.

To add insult to injury, you will find these choices were almost never made by parliaments, but in international treaties and larger organizations like the WTO, or executive powers of large trade blocks.

>When correctly applied it can be an effective tool to encourage certain sorts of intellectual endeavors by making them monetarily favorable.

I'd rather we don't encourage "monetarily favorable" intellectual endeavors...

IP is a loaded and prejudiced term. That said, copyright could allow for an author to place a work in public but not allow the audience to copy it.

> unlike the latter it promotes innovation and creativity.

Does it though?

I know that people who like intellectual property and money say it does, but people who like innovation and creativity usually tend to think otherwise.

3D printers are a great example of something where IP prevented all innovation and creativity, and once the patent expired the innovation and creativity we've enjoyed in the space the last 15 years could begin.

Property is a local low - it applies to a thing that exists in one place. Intellectual property is trying to apply similar rules to stuff that happen remotely - a text is not a thing, and controlling copying might work in some technological regimes while in others would require totalitarian control. When you extend these rules to cover not just copying of texts but also at the level of ideas it gets even worse.

>The concept of intellectual property on its own (independently of its legal implementation details) is at most as evil as property ownership, and probably less so as unlike the latter it promotes innovation and creativity.

This is a strange inversion. Property ownership is morally just in that the piece of land my home is can only be exclusive, not to mention necessary to a decent life. Meanwhile, intellectual property is a contrivance that was invented to promote creativity, but is subverted in ways that we're only now beginning to discover. Abolish copyright.

Property ownership is ultimately based on scarcity. If I using a thing prevents others from using that thing, there is scarcity, and there should be laws protecting it.

There is no scarcity with intellectual property. My ability to have or act on an idea is in no way affected by someone else having the same idea. The entire concept of ownership of an idea is dystopian and moronic.

I also strongly disagree with the notion that it inspires creativity. Can you imagine where we would be if IP laws existed when we first discovered agriculture, or writing, or art? IP law doesn’t stimulate creation, it stifles it.

copyleft is a subset of copyright

Yeah I see where you are going with this, but I think he was trying to make a point about being convinced by decree. It tended to get people to think that it should be moral.

Also I disagree with the context of what the purpose is for law. I don't think its just about making it easier to apply laws because people see things in moralistic ways. Pure Law, which came from the existence of Common Law (which relates to whats common to people) existed within the frame work of whats moral. There are certain things, which all humans know at some level are morally right or wrong regardless of what modernity teaches us. Common laws were built up around that framework. There is administrative law, which is different and what I think you are talking about.

IMHO, there is something moral that can be learned from trying to convince people that IP is moral, when it is, in fact, just a way to administrate people into thinking that IP is valid.

I don't think this is about being confused out of naivety. In some parts of the western world the marketing department has invested heavily in establishing moral equivalence between IP violation and theft.

To be clear: note that that the quotation that has taken over the focus is not from Rob Pike at all.

Not Pike.

Don't use imgur, it blocks half of the Internet.

Must sign in to read? Wow bluesky has already enshittified faster than expected.

(for the record, the downvoters are the same people who would say this to someone who linked a twitter post, they just don't realize that)

And here it is: https://bsky.app/profile/robpike.io/post/3matwg6w3ic2s

I remember a time when users had a great deal more control over their computers. Big tech companies are the ones who used their power to take that control away. You, my friend are the insincere one.

If you’re young enough not to remember a time before forced automatic updates that break things, locked devices unable to run software other than that blessed by megacorps, etc. it would do you well to seek out a history lesson.

For some context, this is the a long time Googler who's feats include major contributions to GoLang and Co-creating UTF-8.

To call him the Oppenheimer of Gemini would be overly dramatic. But he definitely had access to the Manhattan project.

>What power do big tech companies have and why do you have a problem with

Do you want the gist of the last 20 years or so, or are you just being rhetorical? im sure there will be much literature over time that will dissect such a question to its atoms. Whether it be a cautionary tale or a retrospective of how a part is society fell? Well, we still have time to write that story.

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really-s...

Just to note: these companies control infrastructure (cloud, app stores, platforms, hardware certification, etc.). That’s a form of structural power, independent of whether the services are useful. People can disagree about how concerning that is, but it’s not accurate to say there’s no power dynamic here.

By this logic there is no corporation or entity that provides anything other than basic food, shelter and medical care that could be criticized - they're all just providing something you don't need and don't have access to without them right?

> What power do big tech companies have

Aftermarket control, for one. You buy an Android/iPhone or Mac/Windows device and get a "free" OS along with it. Then, your attention subsidizes the device through advertising, bundled services and cartel-style anti-competitive price fixing. OEMs have no motivation not to harm the market in this way, and users aren't entitled to a solution besides deluding themselves into thinking the grass really is greener on the other side.

What power did Microsoft wield against Netscape? They could alter the deal, and make Netscape pray it wasn't altered further.

Umm are you being serious? just look of the tech company titans in this photo in this trump inauguration - they are literally a stand in for putins oligarchs at this point

https://www.livenowfox.com/news/billionaires-trump-inaugurat...

You cant possibly expect software engineers to be able to understand human emotions and meaning. We built Palantir and all the other fun tech making people's lifes miserable. If software engineers had ethics and would understand human meaning they wouldn't pump out predatory software like its cow milk. Fuck software engineers (excluding all the OSS devs that actually try and make the world a better place).

Yup. It's certainly an art project or something. It's like setting a bunch of Markov Chaneys loose on each other to see how insane they go.

…kind of IS setting a bunch of Markov Chaneys loose on each other, and that's pretty much it. We've just never had Chaneys this complicated before. People are watching the sparks, eating popcorn, rooting for MechaHitler.

We need to bring back the web of trust: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_of_trust

A mix of social interaction and cryptographic guarantees will be our saving grace (although I'm less bothered from AI generated content than most).

> Unless we can find some way to verify humanity for every message.

There is no possible way to do this that won't quickly be abused by people/groups who don't care. All efforts like this will do is destroy privacy and freedom on the Internet for normal people.

I'm so mad Teams exists

I struggle to find this argument compelling, as it sounds more of a straw man argument than a legitimate complain.

If I write a hash table implementation in C, am I plagiarizing? I did not come up with the algortithm nor the language used for implementation; I "borrowed" ideas from existing knowledge.

Lets say I implemented it after learning the algorithm from GPL code; is ky implementation a new one, or is it derivative?

What if it is from a book?

What about the asm upcodes generated? In some architectures, they are copyrighted, or at least the documentation is considered " intellectual property"; is my C compiler stealing?

Is a hammer or a mallot an obvious creation, or is it stealing from someone else? What about a wheel?

There is still value in quality and craftsmanship. You might not be of that opinion, and you might not know anyone who is, but I do.

Good idea. My country spends over billion dollars on Microsoft licenses annually, which is more than 200 euros per capita. I think billion dollars a year spent on dev salaries and Claude Code subscription to build MS office replacement would pay itself back quickly enough.

Even better - train a model on MS source code leaks and use it to work on Wine fork or as you said - vibe coded MS office. This would be hilarious.

There is Libre Office https://www.libreoffice.org/

I use agentic LLM dev tools to work on two apps, around 14 hours per day, very happily. As a long out of practice dev who still has product ideas, these tools have created huge opportunities for me. I am also having the most fun of my professional life.

However, I would trade all of that to make "AI" go away in a heart beat. It's just impossible for me to believe that that this will not be a tragedy for society at large. I cannot imagine even a single realistic world-scale scenario in which the outcome will be positive.

Anyway, back to work....

Extreme? Hardly.

There are many serious issues with generative AI (data integrity and sourcing, abuse, environmental concerns) that are kinda sorta being swept under the rug in the name of "progress."

Well, I couldn't disagree more with you: being anti-AI is absolutely not an extreme position. You are living in a bubble if you think it is. "Fervent anti-AI territory" is a good position, not hate speech.

Excellent prediction. Seems like it always happens.

In a couple years I'll be in my 70's and starting to write code again for this very reason.

Not LLMs though, I've got my hands full getting regular software to perform :\

Yup, just like my dad built his own house, and I have to call a plumber/electrician.

I can do SOME things, but for more advanced, I need to call a professional.

Coincidently the plumber/electrician always complains about the work done by the person before him/her. Kinda like I do when I need to fix someone else's code.

I mean seriously is this the prediction folks are going with? Ok so we can build something like our SOTA coding agents today, breathing life into these things that 3 years ago were laughable science fiction, and your prediction is it will be worse from here on out? Do you realize coding is a verifiable domain which means we don’t technically even need any human data to improve these models? Like in your movie of 2050 everyone’s throwing their hands up “oh no we made them dumber because people don’t need to take 8 years of school and industry experience to build a good UI and industry best practice backend infrastructure”. I guess we can all predict what we want but my god

Have you considered that the people in the 1990s were mostly correct, and it's you that has been corrupted by modern marketing influences and external pressures?

There's no shortage of "Chicken Little" technologies that look great on-paper and fail catastrophically in real life. Tripropellant rockets, cryptocurrencies, DAOs, flying cars, the list never ends. There's nothing that stops AI from being similarly disappointing besides scale and expectation (both of which are currently unlimited).

Some of us do, and actively root it out. I’ve never in my life been more excited to sit alone in a room with an editor and a compiler than I am these days.

I don’t think they’re affiliated with agentvillage.org

they thought this would be a brilliant marketing campaign... oopsie

Plenty of paywalled articles are posted and upvoted.

There's nothing in the guidelines to prohibit it https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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replace x.com with xcancel.com or nitter.net, lol.

The problem is that its reached a tipping point. Comparing Excel to GenAI is just bad faith.

Are you not reading the writing on the wall? These things have been going on for a long time and final people are starting to wake up that it needs to stop. You cant treat people in inhumane ways without eventual backlash.

Two things:

1. Many tech workers viewed the software they worked on in the past as useful in some way for society, and thus worth the many costs you outline. Many of them don't feel that LLMs deliver the same amount of utility, and so they feel it isn't worth the cost. Not to mention, previous technologies usually didn't involve training a robot on all of humanity's work without consent.

2. I'm not sure the premise that it's just another tool of the trade for one to learn is shared by others. One can alternatively view LLMs as automated factory lines are viewed in relation to manual laborers, not as Excel sheets were to paper tables. This is a different kind of relationship, one that suggests wide replacement rather than augmentation (with relatively stable hiring counts).

In particular, I think (2) is actually the stronger of the reasons tech workers react negatively. Whether it will ultimately be justified or not, if you believe you are being asked to effectively replace yourself, you shouldn't be happy about it. Artisanal craftsmen weren't typically the ones also building the automated factory lines that would come to replace them (at least to my knowledge).

I agree that no one really has the right to act morally superior in this context, but we should also acknowledge that the material circumstances, consequences, and effects are in fact different in this case. Flattening everything into an equivalence is just as intellectually sloppy as pretending everything is completely novel.

Copyright was an evil institution to protect corporate profits until people without any art background started being able to tap AI to generate their ideas.

So let us compare AI to aviation. Globally aviation accounts for approximately 830 million tons of CO₂ emission per year [1]. If you power your data centre with quality gas power plants you will emit 450g of CO₂ per kWh electricity consumed [2], that is 3.9 million tons per year for a GW data centre. So depending on power mix it will take somewhere around 200 GW of data centres for AI to "catch up" to aviation. I have a hard time finding any numbers on current consumption, but if you believe what the AI folks are saying we will get there soon enough [3].

As for what your individual prompts contribute, it is impossible to get good numbers, and it will obviously vary wildly between types of prompts, choice of model and number of prompts. But I am fairly certain that someone whose job is prompting all day will generally spend several plane trips worth of CO₂.

Now, if this new tool allowed us to do amazing new things, there might be a reasonable argument that it is worth some CO₂. But when you are a programmer and management demands AI use so that you end up doing a worse job, while having worse job satisfaction, and spending extra resources, it is just a Kinder egg of bad.

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-co-emissions-from-... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gas-fired_power_plant [3] https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/anthropic-us-ai-n...

OpenAI's AI data centers will consume as much electricity as the entire nation of India by 2033 if they hit their internal targets[0].

No, this is not the same.

[0]: https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intell...

> We’ve been compromising on those morals for our whole career

Yes!

> The needle moved just a little bit

That's where we disagree.

I suspect people talk about natural resource usage because it sounds more neutral than what I think most people are truly upset about -- using technology to transfer more wealth to the elite while making workers irrelevant. It just sounds more noble to talk about the planet instead, but honestly I think talking about how bad this could be for most people is completely valid. I think the silver lining is that the LLM scaling skeptics appear to be correct -- hyperscaling these things is not going to usher in the (rather dystopian looking) future that some of these nutcases are begging for.

Let's be careful here. It's generally a good idea to congratulate people for changing their opinion based on evolving information, rather than lambast them.

(Not a tech worker, don't have a horse in this race)

> The needle moved just a little bit, and suddenly everyone’s harm thresholds have been crossed?

Its similar to the Trust Thermocline. There's always been concern about whether we were doing more harm than good (there's a reason jokes about the Torment Nexus were so popular in tech). But recent changes have made things seem more dire and broken through the Harm Thermocline, or whatever you want to call it.

Edit: There's also a "Trust Thermocline" element at play here too. We tech workers were never under the illusion that the people running our companies were good people, but there was always some sort of nod to greater responsibility beyond the bottom line. Then Trump got elected and there was a mad dash to kiss the ring. And it was done with an air of "Whew, now we don't have to even pretend anymore!" See Zuckerberg on the right-wing media circuit. And those same CEOs started talking breathlessly about how soon they wouldn't have to pay us, because its super unfair that they have to give employees competitive wages. There are degrees of evil, and the tech CEOs just ripped the mask right off. And then we turn around and a lot of our coworkers are going "FUCK YEAH!" at this whole scenario. So yeah, while a lot of us had doubts before, we thought that maybe there was enough sense of responsibility to avoid the worse, but it turns out our profession really is excited for the Torment Nexus. The Trust Thermocline is broken.

Well said. AI makes people feel icky, that’s the actual problem. Everything else is post rationalisation they add because they already feel gross about it. Feeling icky about it isn’t necessarily invalid, but it’s important for us to understand why we actually like or dislike something so we can focus on any solutions.

> The idea that this has somehow 10x’d resource consumption or emissions or anything is incorrect.

Nvidia to cut gaming GPU production by 30 - 40% starting ...

https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/1poxtrj/nvidia_...

Micron ends Crucial consumer SSD and RAM line, shifts ...

https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/1pdj4mh/micron_ends_...

OpenAI, Oracle, and SoftBank expand Stargate with five new AI data center sites

https://openai.com/index/five-new-stargate-sites/

> Every single work trip that requires you to get on a plane is many orders of magnitude more harmful.

I'm a software developer. I don't take planes for work.

> We’ve been compromising on those morals for our whole career.

So your logic seems to be, it's bad, don't do anything, just floor it?

> I’m not an AI apologist.

Really? Have you just never heard the term "wake up call?"

At least Excel worked a lot better.

> I just find this sudden moral outrage by tech workers to be quite intellectually lazy and revisionist about what it is we were all doing just a few years ago.

You are right, thus downvoted, but still I see current outcry as positive.

That's fine, you do you. Everyone gets to choose for themselves!

> tech workers to be quite intellectually lazy and revisionist

i have yet to meet a single tech worker that isn't so

[dead]

It's much simpler than this.

I post some software on GitHub. You can use it in your software and tools and AI training set as well, as long as you follow my license. If you don't follow my license (let's say MIT, so you must provide a copy of the file called LICENSE.TXT with my name on it), you may not use it.

Is there any part of this that is unclear?

> And they are expected to relatively keep quiet about it and not scream about things like

I’ve never met a vegetarian who is able to keep quiet about being one but I still got like 30 years left on Earth to meet one :)

Buying a phone is a non-dispensable part of life today. There are some government services in many countries which are digital only (and phone only in particular), and restaurants, hotels, etc in the service industry which all require you having a phone, otherwise you can't use their services. And this trend is growing. So if you are the type who wants to live in a cave, or hang yourself on a tree rather than accepting that modern societies require a modern phone, thats's your choice. But others rather accept this. We are beyond the point where this trend can be reversed. On the other hand AI is not that integral part of people's lives yet, and it's better to protest now as long as it has an impact

Are people still in denial about the daily usage of AI?

It's interesting people from the old technological sphere viciously revolt against the emerging new thing.

Actually I think this is the clearest indication of a new technology emerging, imo.

If people are viciously attacking some new technology you can be guaranteed that this new technology is important because what's actually happening is that the new thing is a direct threat to the people that are against it.

Firstly, it's not really good enough to say "our employees use it" and therefore it's providing us significant value as a business. It's also not good enough to say "our programmers now write 10x the number of lines of code and therefore that's providing us value" (lines of code have never been a good indicator of output). Significant value comes from new innovations.

Secondly, the scale of investment in AI isn't so that people can use it to generate a powerpoint or a one off python script. The scale of investment is to achieve "superintelligence" (whatever that means). That's the only reason why you would cover a huge percent of the country in datacenters.

The proof that significant value has been provided would be value being passed on to the consumer. For example if AI replaces lawyers you would expect a drop in the cost of legal fees (despite the harm that it also causes to people losing their jobs). Nothing like that has happened yet.

It's been good at enabling the clueless to get to performance of a junior developer, and saving few % of the time for the mid to senior level developer (at best). Also amazing at automating stuff for scammers...

The cost is just not worth the benefit. If it was just an AI company using profits from AI to improve AI that would be another thing but we're in massive speculative bubble that ruined not only computer hardware prices (that affect every tech firm) but power prices (that affect everyone). All coz govt want to hide recession they themselves created because on paper it makes line go up

> I used to type out long posts explaining how LLMs have been enormously beneficial (for their price) for myself and my company.

Well then congratulations on being in the 5%. That doesn't really change the point.

If it's so great and such a benefit: why scream it from to everyone? Why forced it? Why this crazy rhetoric labeling others at ideological? This makes no sense. If you found gold, just use it and get ahead of the curve. For some reason that never happens.

Are you a boss or a worker? That's the real divide, for the most part. Bosses love AI - when your job is just sending emails and attending remote meetings, letting LLM write emails for you and summarize meetings is a godsend. Now you can go from doing 4 hours of work a week to 0 hours! And they let you fantasize about finally killing off those annoying workers and replace them with robots that never stop working and never say no.

Workers hate AI, not just because the output is middling slop forced on them from the top but because the message from the top is clear - the goal is mass unemployment and concentration of wealth by the elite unseen by humanity since the year 1789 in France.

Manual transmissions are still great! More fun to drive and an excellent anti-theft device.

> Not all of AI is consumer LLM chatbots

And as long as that used to be the case, not many people revolted.

Sure, but that honestly isn't the part which is getting trillions of imaginary dollars are being pumped into. Science AI is in the best of cases is getting the scraps I would say.

What I’m afraid of is the combination of cheap fusion power and AI. ;)

Genuinely curious: how did it do that? (I don’t go to Taco Bell)

You could argue that if I started marketing dog shit too though. The trick is only applying your argument to the things that will go on to be good. No one’s quite there yet. Probably just around the corner though.

How convenient for people like Andrej. He can make any wild claim he likes about the impact but never has to show it, "trust me bro".

>You got people to accept a higher price, you're just gonna walk that back when problems go away?

The thing about capitalism that is seemingly never taught, but quickly learned (when you join even the lowest rung of the capitalist class, i.e. even having an etsy shop), is that competition lowers prices and kills greed, while being a tool of greed itself.

The conspiracy to get around this cognitive dissonance is "price fixing", but in order to price fix you cannot be greedy, because if you are greedy and price fix, your greed will drive you to undercut everyone else in the agreement. So price fixing never really works, except those like 3 cases out of the hundreds of billions of products sold daily, that people repeat incessantly for 20 years now.

Money flows to the one with the best price, not the highest price. The best price is what makes people rich. When the best price is out of reach though, people will drum up conspiracy about it, which I guess should be expected.

Except petrol is significantly cheaper than it was once you account for inflation.

Actually things have gotten massively cheaper under capitalism. Unfortunately at the same time, governments have been inflating the currency year over year and as the decline of prices slows down as innovation matures, inflation finally catches up and starts raising prices.

Reminder: Prices regularly drop in capitalist economies. Food used to be 25% of household spending. Clothing was also pretty high. More recently, electronics have dropped dramatically. TVs used to be big ticket items. I have unlimited cell data for $30 a month. My dad bought his first computer for around $3000 in 1982 dollars.

Prices for LLM tokens has also dramatically dropped. Anyone spending more is either using it a ton more or (more likely) using a much more capable model.

Yet another bot reply.

Hah, I was listening to a similar conversation that began with family members working in the school system complaining about AI slop that began (relatively) harmlessly in day-to-day email conversations padded with time wasting filler but now has trickled down into "professional" education materials and even textbooks.

Which led to a lot of agreement and rants from others with frustrating stories about their specific workplaces and how it just keeps getting worse by the day. Previously these conversations just popped up among me and the handful of family in tech but clearly now has much broader resonance.

As can be observed in my comment history, I use LLM agentic tools for software dev at work and on my personal projects (really my only AI use case) but cringe whenever I encounter "workslop" as it almost invariably serves to waste my time. My company has been doing a large pilot of 365 Copilot but I have yet to find anything useful, the email writing tools just seems to strip out my personal voice making me sound like I'm writing unsolicited marketing spam.

Every single time I've been using some Microsoft product and think "Hmm, wait maybe the Copilot button could actually be useful here?", it just tells me it can't help or gives me a link to a generic help page. It's like Microsoft deliberately engineered 365 Copilot to be as unhelpful as possible while simultaneously putting a Copilot button on every single visible surface imaginable.

The only tool that actually does something is designed to ruin emails by stripping out personal tone/voice and introducing ambiguity to waste the other person's time. Awesome, thanks for the productivity boost, Microsoft!

That's easy. If I don't use it I won't be competitive; however I and probably many others would prefer a world where NO ONE has it as it would be a better overall outcome. For a lack of a better term I would call these "negative innovations". Most of these inventions:

- Require you to use it (hard to opt out due to network effects and/or competitive/survival pressure) AND

- Are overall negative for most of society (with some of the benefit accruing to the few who push it). There are people that benefit but arguably as a whole we are worse off.

These inventions have one thing in common; overall their impact is negative, but it is MORE negative for the people who don't use it and generally they only benefit an in-crowd of people if any (e.g. inventors). Social media for me on many scales is arguably an obvious example of this where the costs exceed the benefits often, nuclear weapons are another.

It’s a bit cheating though particularly for Gemini. It’s been inserted into something that already had high usage numbers.

I just assume that at least half of those are bots on social media platforms. You go on Twitter and the quality of posts is so low, yet every post has a bunch of replies. The same is true for YouTube, it’s full of empty, inflammatory responses. And this has become more common with the appearance of ChatGPT. Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube have no incentive to come clean about it, since they provide both the source and the destination, which is very lucrative.

I can only speculate, but people can feel resentful toward a technology while still using it. "I need this shitty tool for work but I'm increasingly uncomfortable with its social/environmental/economic/etc. implications."

I think that most of the people who react negatively to AI (myself included) aren't claiming that it's simply a useless slop machine that can't accomplish anything, but rather that its "success" in certain problem spaces is going to create problems for our society

What percentage of those billion users that aren't bots are being forced to use it in some way? Does that figure count the AI Summaries at the top of Google search results or the AI review Summaries in Maps that you can't turn off? Or the millions of Gemini integrations that Google added to its products?

The very people that whine and bitch that "AI is bad" will enunciate their complaints via their phone's AI-driven speech recognition feature.

It's pure cognitive dissonance.

N of 1, I use Gemini a lot for research and find it very helpful, but I still loathe the creep of GenAI slop and the consolidation of power in tech conglomerates (which own the models and infrastructure).

Not all of these things are equivalent.

If you're not already familiar, you sound like you may enjoy the works of Douglas Rushkoff:

https://rushkoff.com/

https://teamhuman.fm

When the self checkout machine gets confused, as it frequently does, and needs a human to intervene, you get a little bit of connection there. You can both gripe about how stupid the machines are.

>But the checker can smile at me. Or whine with me about the weather.

It's some poor miserable soul sitting at that checkout line 9-to-5 brainlessly scanning products, that's their whole existence. And you don't want this miserable drudgery to be put to end - to be automated away, because you mistake some sad soul being cordial and eeking out a smile (part of their job really) - as some sort of "human connection" that you so sorely lack.

Sounds like you only care about yourself more than anything.

There is zero empathy and there is NOTHING humanist about your world-view.

Non-automated checkout lines are deeply depressing, these people slave away their lifes for basically nothing.

Strange, I feel anti ai sentiment is kicking up like crazy due to ram prices.

You're confusing the final stage of grief with actually liking it.

I think this is, because the accusations make it seem like Clair Obscur is completely AI generated, when in reality it was used for a few placeholder assets. Stuff like the Indie Awards disqualifying Clair Obscur not on merit but on this teeny tiny usage of AI just sits wrong with a lot of people, me included. In particular if Clair Obscur embodies the opposite of AI slop for me, incredible world building and story, not generated, but created by people with a vision and passion. Music which is completely original composition, recorded by an orchestra. I share a lot of the anti AI sentiment, in regards to stuff like blog Spam, cheap n8n prompt to fully generated YouTube video Pipelines, and companies shoving AI into everything where it doesn't need to be, but purists are harming their own cause if they go after stuff like Clair Obscur, because it's the furthest thing from AI slop imaginable.

Yeah that's laughable. There is a huge movement of gamers that want this shit to stop. stopkillinggames is one.

This is a perfect example of cognitive dissidence on the subject. You wont even see the retribution coming.

This backlash isn't going to die. Its going to create a divide so large, you are going to look back on this moment and wish you listened to the concern people are having.

This doesn't even make sense even if you believe it. Why wouldn't both sides of any argument use "a superhuman persuasion engine"?

Inevitably is such a tired argument. Everything is a choice, belief in inevitability is for the weak.

> You either surf this wave or get drowned by it

I don't think so. Handcrafted everything and organic everything continue to exist; there is demand for them.

"Being relegated to a niche" is entirely possible, and that's fine with me.

This is cope.

Why not just quit work and wait for AGI to lead to UBI? Obviously, right after chatGPT solves climate change, it will put all humans out of work as next step, and then the superintelligence will solve that problem one way or another.

People read too much sci-fi, I hope you just forgot your /s.

Thanks for the reminder, I wanted to order that book :)

I agree with you, but also want to point out the other powerful consumer signal - "vote with your wallet" / "walk away" - is blocked by the fact that AI is being forced into every conceivable crevice of every willing company, and walking away from your job is a very hard thing to do. So you end up being an unwilling enabler regardless.

(This is taking the view that "other companies" are the consumers of AI, and actual end-consumers are more of a by-product/side-effect in the current capital race and their opinions are largely irrelevant.)

What election?

Elections on autocratic administrations are a joke on democracy.

>Congress and the President can easily be pressured to vote in laws that the public wants

this president? :)))

The current US president is pursuing an autocratic takeover where elections are influenced enough to keep the current party in power, whether Trump is still alive to run for a third term, or his anointed successor takes the baton.

Assuming someone further to the right like Nick Fuentes doesn't manage to take over the movement.

Trump's third term will not be the product of a free and fair election in a society bound by the rule of law.

Upvoted for the explanation, but...

In what universe is another unsolicited email an act of kindness??!?

Would you care to research who his employer has been for the past 20+ years? Im not even saying scraping and then “organizing worlds information” is bad just pointing out the obvious

Google 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.

It'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.

> Everything humans do is harmful to some degree.

I find it difficult to express how strongly I disagree with this sentiment.

Serving unwanted ads has what cost-benefit-ratio vs serving LLM:s that are wanted by the user?

> 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.

> 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.

> 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...

Somebody just burned their refuse in a developing country somewhere. I guess if it was cold, at least they were warming themselves up.

Cutting trees for fuel and paper to send a letter burned resources. Nobody gained in that transaction