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Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

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Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#781

Post by admeza »

Immanuel Kant believed that one should only act in such a way in which you believe what you're doing should become a universal law. He thought lying was wrong, for example, because if everyone lied all the time, nobody would believe anything anymore.

I'm not sure that Kant's categorical imperative accurately summarizes my own personal feelings, but it's a useful exercise to apply it to different scenarios. So let's apply it to this one. In this case, a nonprofit thought it was acceptable to use AI to send emails thanking various prominent people for their contributions to society. So let's imagine this becomes a universal law: Every nonprofit in the world starts doing this to prominent people, maybe prominent people in the line of work of the nonprofit. The end result is that people of the likes of Rob Pike would receive thousands of unsolicited emails like this. We could even take this a step further and say that if it's okay for nonprofits to do this, surely it should be okay for any random member of the population to do this. So now people like Rob Pike get around a billion emails. They've effectively been mailbombed and their mailbox is no longer usable.

My point is, why is it that this nonprofit thinks they have a right to do this, whereas if around 1 billion people did exactly what they were doing, it would be a disaster?

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#782

Post by heresie-dabord »

suralind wrote: post #727

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 is anything but respectful. I can only imagine that if I got a message like that I’d be furious too. This reminds me a story from my mom’s work from years ago: the company she was working for announced salary increases to each worker individually. Some, like m…

> 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.

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#783

Post by hijodelsol »

suralind wrote: post #727

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 is anything but respectful. I can only imagine that if I got a message like that I’d be furious too. This reminds me a story from my mom’s work from years ago: the company she was working for announced salary increases to each worker individually. Some, like m…

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.

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#784

Post by fc417fc802 »

trinsic2 wrote: post #748

>"For myself, the big fraud is getting public to believe that Intellectual Property was a moral principle and not just effective BS to justify corporate rent seeking." If anything, I'm glad people are finally starting to wake up to this fact.

Neither take is correct. When correctly applied it can be an effective tool to encourage certain sorts of intellectual endeavors by making them monetarily favorable. When incorrectly applied it leads to dysfunction as is the case for most regulatory regimes.

Any tool can be used by a wrongdoer for evil. Corporations will manipulate the regulator in order to rent seek using whatever happens to be available to them. That doesn't make the tools themselves evil.

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#785

Post by strogonoff »

trinsic2 wrote: post #748

>"For myself, the big fraud is getting public to believe that Intellectual Property was a moral principle and not just effective BS to justify corporate rent seeking." If anything, I'm glad people are finally starting to wake up to this fact.

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.

Despite the apparent etymological contrast, “copyright” is neither antithetical to nor exclusive with “copyleft”: IP ownership, a degree of control over own creation’s future, is a precondition for copyleft (and the OSS ecosystem it birthed) to exist in the first place.

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#786

Post by fc417fc802 »

numbsafari wrote: post #775
electroly wrote: post #739

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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.

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#787

Post by sethops1 »

prepend wrote: post #737
nkrisc wrote: post #227

What is going through the mind of someone who sends an AI-generated thank-you letter instead of writing it themselves? How can you be grateful enough to want to send someone such a letter but not grateful enough to write one?

Look at the volume of gift cards given. It’s the same concept, right? You care enough to do something, but have other time priorities. I’d rather get an ai thank you note than nothing. I’d rather get a thoughtful gift than a gift card, but prefer the card over nothing.

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

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#788

Post by auggierose »

Dude. You take money from Google. Really? All the people ranting about AI, but taking pay checks from Facebook, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, ... Hypocrisy much?

I for once enjoy that so much money is pumped into the automation of interactive theorem proving. Didn't think that anyone would build whole data centers for this! ;-)

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#789

Post by bgwalter »

trinsic2 wrote: post #748

>"For myself, the big fraud is getting public to believe that Intellectual Property was a moral principle and not just effective BS to justify corporate rent seeking." If anything, I'm glad people are finally starting to wake up to this fact.

Most people here would be interested in Rob Pike's opinion. What you quote is from someone commenting on Rob's post.

The way that Rob's opinion here is deflected, first by focusing on the fact that he got a spam mail and then this misleading quote ("myself" does not refer to Rob) is very sad.

The spam mail just triggered Rob's opinion (the one that normal people are interested in).

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