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Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

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Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#831

Post by nunez »

user34283 wrote: post #767
llmslave2 wrote: post #105

It's nice to see a name like Rob Pike, a personal hero and legend, put words to what we are all feeling. Gen AI has valid use cases and can be a useful tool, but the way it has been portrayed and used in the last few years is appalling and anti-human. Not to mention the social and environmental costs which are staggering. I try to keep a balanced perspective but I find myself pushed more and more into the fervent ant…

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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."

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#832

Post by echelon »

hijodelsol wrote: post #783
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.

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Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#834

Post by tokioyoyo »

echelon wrote: post #832
hijodelsol wrote: post #783

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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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.

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#835

Post by nunez »

dcre wrote: post #644
olivierestsage wrote: post #296

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

How do you reconcile the sense that there's a vibe shift with the usage numbers: about a billion weekly users of ChatGPT and Gemini and continuing to grow.

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?

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#837

Post by WD-42 »

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

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#838

Post by Applejinx »

eichin wrote: post #616
ath_ray wrote: post #560

FYI, this was sent as an experiment by a non-profit that assigns fairly open ended tasks to computer-using AI models every day: https://theaidigest.org/village The goal for this day was "Do random acts of kindness". Claude seems to have chosen Rob Pike and sent this email by itself. It's a little unclear to me how much the humans were in the loop. Sharing (but absolutely not endorsing) this because there seems to be…

Wait, so someone took the "virus fishtank" from https://xkcd.com/350/ and did it with LLMs instead?

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.

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#839

Post by __jonas »

wrs wrote: post #19

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

Really strange project.

They have this blog post up detailing how the LLMs they let loose were spamming NGOs with emails: https://theaidigest.org/village/blog/what-do-we-tell-the-hum...

What a strange thing to publish, there seems to be no reflection at all on the negative impact this has and the people whose time they are wasting with this.

Re: Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI

#840

Post by _yb2s »

vegabook wrote: post #354

Shouldn't have licenced Golang BSD if that's the attitude. Everybody for years including here on HN denigrated GPLv3 and other "viral" licences, because they were a hindrance to monetisation. Well, you got what you wished for. Someone else is monetising the be*jesus out of you so complaining now is just silly. All of a sudden copyleft may be the only licences actually able to force models to account, hopefully with h…

If I invent a hammer and make its design free, that doesn’t mean I don’t have a right to be critical or angry when people use it for murder.
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