How about adding these texts and reactions to LLM's context and iterating to improve performance? Keep doing it until a real person says, 'Yes, you're good enough now, please stop...' That should work.
The important point that Simon makes in careful detail is: an "AI" did not send this email. The three people behind the Sage AI project used a tool to email him.
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.
This is the worst of outrage marketing. Most people don't have resistance to this, so they eagerly spread the advertising. In the memetic lifecycle, they are hosts for the advertisement parasite, which reproduces virally. Susceptibility to this kind of advertising is cross-intelligence. Bill Ackman famously fell for a cab driver's story that Uber was stiffing him tips.
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.
The annoying thing about this drama is the predominant take has been "AI is bad" rather than "a startup using AI for intentionally net negative outcomes is bad".
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.
Not defending the machines here, but why is this annoying beyond the deluge of spam we all get everyday in any case. Of course AI will be used to spam and target us. Every new technology will be used to do that. Was that surprising to Pike? Why not just hit delete and move on, like we do with spam all the time in any case? I don’t get the exceptional outrage. Is it annoying? Yes, surely. But does it warrant an emotional outburst? No, not really.
For every one who is excited about using AI like an incredibly expensive and wasteful auto complete, there are a hundred who are excited about inflicting AI on other people.
Looking at that email, I felt it was a bit of an overreaction. I don't want to delve into whataboutism here but there are many other sloppified things to be mad about.
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.
I'm curious about rob pike's anger. I wish I knew more about the ideas behind his emotions right now. Is he feeling a sense of loss because AI is "doing" code ? or is it because he foresees big VC / hedge funds swallowing an industry for profit through AI financing ?
So this is what happens when we give computer internet access.
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.
I feel like its funny but I remember some months ago someone pointed something like "human slop" to me and I just remembered it right now writing some other comment here
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)
43 comments
[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 54.5 ms ] thread(438 points, 373 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46389444
(763 points, 712 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46392115
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect
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)