According to their website this email was sent by Adam Binksmith, Zak Miller, and Shoshannah Tekofsky and is the responsibility of the Sage 501(c)3.
No-one gets to disclaim ownership of sending an email. A human has to accept the Terms of Service of an email gateway and the credit card used to pay the email gateway. This performance art does not remove the human no matter how much they want to be removed.
neural networks are just a tool, used poorly (as in this case) or well
But at what point is the maker distant enough that they are no longer responsible? E.g. is Apple responsible for everything people do using an iPhone?
I think the case here is fairly straightforward
You agreed with the other poster while reframing their ideas in slightly different words without adding anything to the conversation?
Most confusingly you did so in emphatic statements reminiscent of a disagreement or argument without there being one
> no computer system just does stuff on its own.
This was the exact statement the GP was making, even going so far as to dox the nonprofit directors to hold them accountable… then you added nothing but confusion.
> a human (or collection of them) built and maintains the system, they are responsible for it
Yup, GP covered this word for word… AI village built this system.
Why did you write this?
Is this a new form of AI? A human with low English proficiency? A strange type of empathetically supportive comment from someone who doesn’t understand that’s the function of the upvote button in online message boards?
accusing people of being AI is very low-effort bot behavior btw
same as the NRA slogan: "guns don't kill people, people kill people"
my understanding, and correct me if I’m wrong, is a human is always involved. even if you build an autonomous killing robot, you built it, you’re responsible
typically this logic is used to justify the regulation of firearms —- are you proposing the regulation of neural networks? if so, how?
This whole idea is ill-conceived, but if you're going to equip them with email addresses you've arranged by hand, just give them sendmail or whatever.
Giving AI agents resources is a frontier being explored, and AI Village seems like a decent attempt at it.
Also the naming is the same as WALL•E - that was the name of the model of robot but also became the name of the individual robot.
Legitimate research in this field may be good, but would not involve real humans being impacted directly by it without consent.
Are we that far into manufactured ragebait to call a "thank you" e-mail "impacted directly without consent"? Jesus, this is the 3rd post on this topic. And it's Christmas. I've gotten more meaningless e-mails from relatives that I don't really care about. What in the actual ... is wrong with people these days?
Honestly, I don't mean personal offence to you, but what the hell are you people talking about. AI is just a bunch of (very complex) statistics, deciding that one word is most appropriate after another. There are no emotions here, it's just maths.
> There are no emotions here, it's just maths.
100%, its an autocorrector on steroids which is trained to give you an answer based on how it was rewarded during its train phase. In the end, its all linear alegbra.
I remember prime saying, its all linear algebra and I like to reference it and technically its true but people in the AI community get remarkably angry sometimes when you point it out.
I mean no offense in saying this but at the end of the day It is maths and there is no denying around it. Please, the grand parent comment should stop creating terms like nascent AI emotions.
Again and again this stuff proves not to be AI but clever spam generation.
AWoT: Artificial Wastes of Time.
Don't do this to yourself. Find a proper job.
Hence upvoting the OP ("What has robpike come to? :shriek:") and downvoting GP.
With the advent of LLMs, I'd hoped that people would become inured to nonsensical advertising and so on because they'd consider it the equivalent of spam. But it turns out that we don't even need Shiri's Scissors to get people riled up. We can use a Universal Bad and people of all kinds (certainly Rob Pike is a smart man) will rush to propagate the parasite.
Smaller communities can say "Don't feed the trolls" but larger communities have no such norms and someone will "feed the trolls" causing "the trolls" to grow larger and more powerful. Someone said something on Twitter once which I liked: You don't always get things out of your system by doing them; sometimes you get them into your system. So it's self-fueling, which makes it a great advertising vector.
Other manufactured mechanisms (Twitter's blue check, LinkedIn's glazing rings) have vaccines that everyone has developed. But no one has developed an anti-outrage device. Given that, for my part, I am going to employ the one tool I can think of: killfiling everyone who participates in active propagation through outrage.
Startups like these have been sending unsolicited emails like this since the 2010's, before char-rnns. Solely blaming AI for enabling that behavior implicitly gives the growth hacking shenanigans a pass.
This startup didn’t spend the trillions he’s referencing.
However, allowing unrestricted LLM access to email -- for example, earlier when this experiment sent out fraudulent letters to charities? That's real harm.
The article calls it a trick but to me it seems a bug. I can’t imagine github leaving that as is, especially after such blog post.
What’s the point of the “Keep my email addresses private” github option and “noreply” emails then?
- Git commits form an immutable merkel dag. So commits can’t be changed without changing all subsequent hashes in a git tree
- Commits by default embed your email address.
I suppose GitHub could hide the commit itself, and make you download commits using the cli to be able to see someone’s email address. Would that be any better? It’s not more secure. Just less convenient.
Those settings will affect what email shows up in commits.
In commits you vreate on other tooling you can configure a fake/alternate user.email address in gitconfig. Git (not just GitHub) needs some email address flr each commit but it is freetext.
There is one problem: commit signatures. For GitHub to consider a commit not created by github.com Web UI to be "verified" and get a green check mark, the following needs to hold:
- Commit is signed
- Commit email address matches a verified GH account email address
So you can not use a 'nocontact@thih9.example.com' address and get green checks on your commits - it needs to be an address that is at least active when you add it to your account.
Curse, yell, fight. Never accept things just because they've grown to be common.
Subject: {Name of one of my direct reports}
Body: Need to talk about {name} ASAP.
I imagine it's the same in this situation; the subject makes it seem like a sincere thank you from someone, and then you open it up and it's AI slop. To borrow ChatGPT-style phrasing: it's not just spam, it's insulting.
Here not only are the senders apparently happily associating their actual legal names with the spam but frame the sending as "a good deed" and seem to honestly see it as smart branding.
We don't want the Overton window wherever they are.
I was following the first half of the post where he discusses the environmental consequences of generative AI, but I didn't think the "thank you" aspect should be the straw that breaks the camel's back. It seems a bit ego driven.
Spam is defined as "sending multiple unsolicited messages to large numbers of recipients". That's not what happened here.
> 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.
That's definitely "multiple" and "unsolicited", and most would say "large".
In Canada, which is relevant here, the legal definition of spam requires no bulk.
Any company sending an unsolicited email to a person (where permission doesn't exist) is spamming that person. Though it expands the definition further than this as well.
-Mass layoffs in tech AI data centers causing extreme increases in monthly electricity -bills across the US -Same as above but for water -The RAM crisis is entirely caused by Sam Altman - General fear and anxiety from many different professions about AI replacing them - Rape of the copyright system to train these models
Good for Simon to call things out as it is. People think of Simon as an AI guy with his pelican benchmark and I still respect him and this is the reason why I respect him since of course he loves using AI tools and talking about them which some people might find tiring, at the end of day, after an incident like rob pike, he's one of the few AI guys I see to just call it out in simple terms like the title without much sugarcoating and calls when AI's bad.
Of course at the end of day, me and simon or others can have nuance in how to use AI or to not use ai at all and that also depends on the individual background etc. but still it's extremely good to see where people from both sides of the isle can agree on something.
And did you check whether or not what it produced was accurate? The article doesn't say.
I feel as if there is a fundamental difference between "AI slop" and "Human slop", it's that humans have true intent and meaning/purpose.
This current AI slop spammed rob pike simply because It only did something to maximize its goal or something and had no intention. It was simply 4 robots left behind a computer who spammed rob pike
On the other hand, if it was a human, who took the time out of his day to message rob pike a merry christmas. Asking how his day was and hoping him good luck, I am sure that rob pike's heart might melt from a heartfelt message
So in this sense, there really isn't "human slop". There is only intent. If something was done with a good intention by an human, I suppose it can't really be considered human slop. On the other hand if there was a spammer who handwrote that message to rob pike, his intentions were bad.
The thing is that AI doesn't have intentions. Its maths. And so the intentions are of the end person. I want to ask how people who spend a decent time in AI industry might have reacted if he had gotten the email instead of rob pike. I bet they would see it as an advancement and might be happy or enthusiastic.
So an AI message takes an connotation of the receiver. And lets just be honest that most first impressions of AI aren't good and combining that you get that connotation. I feel like it does negative/bad publicity to use AI at this point while still burning money perhaps on it.
Here is what I recommend for those websites who have AI chatbots or similar, when I click on the message:- Have two split buttons where pressing one might lead me to an AI chat and the other might lead me to a human conversation. Be honest about how much time on average it might take for support and be proper about ways to contact them (twitter,reddit although I hope that federated services like mastodon get more popularity too)
The same as automated apologies.
Not from an “AI”, but I spent over an hour⁰ waiting for a delayed train¹, then the journey, on Tuesday, being regaled every few minutes with an automated “we apologise for your journey taking longer than expected” which is far more irritating than no apology at all.
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[0] I lie a little here - living near the station and having access to live arrival estimations online meant I could leave the house late and only be waited on the platform ~20 minutes, but people for whom this train was a connecting leg of a longer journey didn't have that luxury.
[1] which was actually an earlier train, the slot in the timetable for the one I was booked on was simply cancelled, so some were waiting over two hours
Quoted in full:
> Hey, one of the creators of the project here! The village agents haven’t been emailing many people until recently so we haven’t really grappled with what to do about this behaviour until now – for today’s run, we pushed an update to their prompt instructing them not to send unsolicited emails and also messaged them instructions to not do so going forward. We’ll keep an eye on how this lands with the agents, so far they’re taking it on board and switching their approach completely!
> Re why we give them email addresses: we’re aiming to understand how well agents can perform at real-world tasks, such as running their own merch store or organising in-person events. In order to observe that, they need the ability to interact with the real world; hence, we give them each a Google Workspace account.
> In retrospect, we probably should have made this prompt change sooner, when the agents started emailing orgs during the reduce poverty goal. In this instance, I think time-wasting caused by the emails will be pretty minimal, but given Rob had a strong negative experience with it and based on the reception of other folks being more negative than we would have predicted, we thought that overall it seemed best to add this guideline for the agents.
> To expand a bit on why we’re running the village at all:
> Benchmarks are useful, but they often completely miss out on a lot of real-world factors (e.g., long horizon, multiple agents interacting, interfacing with real-world systems in all their complexity, non-nicely-scoped goals, computer use, etc). They also generally don’t give us any understanding of agent proclivities (what they decide to do) when pursuing goals, or when given the freedom to choose their own goal to pursue.
> The village aims to help with these problems, and make it easy for people to dig in and understand in detail what today’s agents are able to do (which I was excited to see you doing in your post!) I think understanding what AI can do, where it’s going, and what that means for the world is very important, as I expect it’ll end up affecting everyone.
> I think observing the agents’ proclivities and approaches to pursuing open-ended goals is generally valuable and important (though this “do random acts of kindness” goal was just a light-hearted goal for the agents over the holidays!)
It also feels a bit dishonest to sign it as coming from Claude, even if it isn't directly from Claude, but from someone using Claude to do the dumb thing.
gnabgib•1h ago
(438 points, 373 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46389444
(763 points, 712 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46392115
bgwalter•1h ago
exasperaited•1h ago
riwsky•47m ago
brcmthrowaway•1h ago
minimaxir•1h ago
He has not engaged in clickbait, does not spam his own content (this very submission was not submitted by him), and does not directly financially benefit from pageviews to his content.
th0ma5•47m ago
minimaxir•41m ago
indigodaddy•22m ago
pton_xd•15m ago
MyOutfitIsVague•7m ago
grayhatter•28m ago
What value do you think this post adds to the conversation?
minimaxir•24m ago
grayhatter•7m ago
But if that's value added, why frame it under the heading of popular drama/rage farming? To capture more attention? Do you believe the pop culture news sites would be interested if it discussed the idea and "experiment" without mentioning the rage bait?
Retr0id•1h ago