621–630 of 1001 posts
It will be interesting to look back in 10 years at whether we consider LLMs to be the invention of the “tractor” of knowledge work, or if we will view them as an unnecessary misstep like crypto.
I don’t understand why anyone thinks we have a choice on AI. If America doesn’t win, other countries will. We don’t live in a Utopia, and getting the entire world to behave a certain way is impossible (see covid). Yes, AI videos and spam is annoying, but the cat is out of the bag. Use AI where it’s useful and get with the programme. The bigger issue everyone should be focusing on is growing hypocrisy and overly purit…
What exactly do we stand to "win" with generative AI?
Wow I knew many people had anti-AI sentiments, but this post has really hit another level. It will be interesting to look back in 10 years at whether we consider LLMs to be the invention of the “tractor” of knowledge work, or if we will view them as an unnecessary misstep like crypto.
Did Google, the company currently paying Rob Pike's extravagant salary, just start building data centers in 2025? Before 2025 was Google's infra running on dreams and pixie farts with baby deer and birdies chirping around? Why are the new data centers his company is building suddenly "raping the planet" and "unrecyclable"?
Everything humans do is harmful to some degree. I don't want to put words in Pike's mouth, but I'm assuming his point is that the cost-benefit-ratio of how LLMs are often used is out of whack. Somebody burned compute to send him an LLM-generated thank-you note. Everybody involved in this transaction lost, nobody gained anything from it. It's pure destruction of resources.
I find it difficult to express how strongly I disagree with this sentiment.
To be clear, this email isn't from Anthropic, it's from "AI Village" [0], which seems to be a bunch of agents run by a 501(c)3 called Sage that are apparently allowed to run amok and send random emails. At this moment, the Opus 4.5 agent is preparing to harass William Kahan similarly. [0] https://theaidigest.org/village
Big vibe shift against AI right now among all the non-tech people I know (and some of the tech people). Ignoring this reaction and saying "it's inevitable/you're luddites" (as I'm seeing in this thread) is not going to help the PR situation
The agent got his email address from a .patch on GitHub and then used computer use automation to compose and send the email via the Gmail web UI.
https://simonwillison.net/2025/Dec/26/slop-acts-of-kindness/
Big vibe shift against AI right now among all the non-tech people I know (and some of the tech people). Ignoring this reaction and saying "it's inevitable/you're luddites" (as I'm seeing in this thread) is not going to help the PR situation
I'm seeing the opposite in the gaming community. People seem tired of the anti AI witch hunts and accusations after the recent Larian and Clair Obscur debacles. A lot more "if the end result is good I don't care", "the cat is out of the bag", "all devs are using AI" and "there's a difference between AI and AI" than just a couple of months ago.