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.
While you are technically able to call out their full names like this, erring on the side of not looking like doxxing would be a safe bet, especially at this time of year. You could after all post their LinkedIn accounts and email addresses but with some lines it’s better to not play “how close can I get without crossing it?”.
Oh no, they send him a "thank you for all the hard work you've done" email, how could they, off to prison with these monsters, they need to be held responsible for all the suffering and pain they've caused.
I certainly have no intention of doing anyone harm. I went to their website and clicked three times to get the names of the people and organization behind it, there is a prominent About page with profile links. If an admin considers this inappropriate please remove the names from my post.
Dude, what? The fuckers set up an automated system that found people’s private email addresses and blasted them with unwanted emails. The outrage is exactly that they built a line-crossing machine. Your moralizing is incoherent.
Lets turn this into an accountability thing please.
The same way we name and shame petrol and plastic CEOs whose trash products flood our environment, we should be able to shame slop makers. Digital trash is still trash.
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?
do you think they wouldnt kill eachother if they didnt have guns tho? i bet they still would. because people have that agency to pick another weapon, or create one etc etc.
This is a definition of spam, not the only definition of spam.
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.
As noted in the article, Sage sent emails to hundreds of people with this gimmick:
> 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".
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.
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.
Why is this is downvoted? What is the difference between the anger being expressed here and the anger of the original email recipient? Do I need to revisit the community guidelines? I assume this is the first time this person has seen the Rob Pike post.
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.
Nascent AI emotions is a dystopian nightmare jeez.
> 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.
Yes, its just a piece of metal, are you trying to imply something related with using shrapnel to damage something? Well you can't use email in the same way.
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.
Correct. I'm more referring to the secondary discussions on HN/Bluesky which have trended the same lines as usual instead of highlighting the unique actions of Sage as Simon did.
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.
Simon's posts are not "engagement farming" by any definition of the term. He posts good content frequently which is then upvoted by the Hacker News community, which should be the ideal for a Hacker News contributor.
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.
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.
An AI can not meaningfully say "thank you" to a human. This is not changed by human review. "Performance" is the completely wrong starting point to understand Rob's feelings.
Yeah you’ve been able to do this for over a decade. They can’t really stop it:
- 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.
Git (the version control program, not GitHub) associates the author’s email address with every single commit. The user of Git configures this email address. This isn’t secret information.
Run git show on any commit object, or look at the default output of git log, and you'll see the same. Your author name and email are always public. If you want, use a specific public address for those purposes.
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.
Sometimes it just hits different. One spam/marketing email I got, pre-AI, was
Subject: {Name of one of my direct reports}
Body: Need to talk about {name} ASAP.
I get around 30 marketing emails per day that make it through the spam filter; from a purely logical perspective this should have been the same as any other, but I still remember this one because the tone, the way it used only a person's name in the subject, no mention of the company or what they were selling, just really pissed me off.
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.
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.
no computer system just does stuff on its own. a human (or collection of them) built and maintains the system, they are responsible for it
neural networks are just a tool, used poorly (as in this case) or well
I think this AI system just registers for Gmail and sends stuff.
Let’s not turn this into a witch hunt please.
While you are technically able to call out their full names like this, erring on the side of not looking like doxxing would be a safe bet, especially at this time of year. You could after all post their LinkedIn accounts and email addresses but with some lines it’s better to not play “how close can I get without crossing it?”.
Making people accountable for their actions is NOT a witch hunt.
It's horrible to even propose that people are absolved of their decisionmaking consequences just because they filtered them through software.
Oh no, they send him a "thank you for all the hard work you've done" email, how could they, off to prison with these monsters, they need to be held responsible for all the suffering and pain they've caused.
I certainly have no intention of doing anyone harm. I went to their website and clicked three times to get the names of the people and organization behind it, there is a prominent About page with profile links. If an admin considers this inappropriate please remove the names from my post.
Are they not proud of their work and publicly displaying their names as the authors of the project?
Dude, what? The fuckers set up an automated system that found people’s private email addresses and blasted them with unwanted emails. The outrage is exactly that they built a line-crossing machine. Your moralizing is incoherent.
Lets turn this into an accountability thing please.
The same way we name and shame petrol and plastic CEOs whose trash products flood our environment, we should be able to shame slop makers. Digital trash is still trash.
> The important point that Simon makes in careful detail is: an "AI" did not send this email.
same as the NRA slogan: "guns don't kill people, people kill people"
does a gun on its own 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?
The NRA always forgets the second part: “People kill people… using guns. Tools that we manufacture expressly for that purpose.”
do you think they wouldnt kill eachother if they didnt have guns tho? i bet they still would. because people have that agency to pick another weapon, or create one etc etc.
It would have been hard for RP to elevate himself any further in my estimations but somehow he has managed it.
Always a win with "loosely affiliated with the Effective Altruism".
1 email sent to 1 specific person is not a spam.
Spam is defined as "sending multiple unsolicited messages to large numbers of recipients". That's not what happened here.
This is a definition of spam, not the only definition of spam.
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.
As noted in the article, Sage sent emails to hundreds of people with this gimmick:
> 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".
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.
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.
But honestly who in tarnation thought that this would be a good idea?
Perhaps someone thinking “all publicity is good publicity”
Honestly… fuck all of these people. Why would you do this?
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.
Why is this is downvoted? What is the difference between the anger being expressed here and the anger of the original email recipient? Do I need to revisit the community guidelines? I assume this is the first time this person has seen the Rob Pike post.
I don't think it's slop. I think it's a nice enough email, using nascent AI emotions.
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.
> Giving AI agents resources is a frontier being explored, and AI Village seems like a decent attempt at it.
Legitimate research in this field may be good, but would not involve real humans being impacted directly by it without consent.
>>using nascent AI emotions
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.
Nascent AI emotions is a dystopian nightmare jeez.
> 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.
You people?
Is this an impromptu turing test?
People who anthropomorphize AI and say things like "nascent emotions" when talking about how an AI system composed a letter.
yes, you people
You AI people.
I mean its just an email, a bunch of characters, why get mad about it.
A shrapnel is just a piece of metal. Why get mad about it.
Yes, its just a piece of metal, are you trying to imply something related with using shrapnel to damage something? Well you can't use email in the same way.
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.
I read Rob’s message as against the AI industry, triggered by this email - it is ‘AI is bad’.
This startup didn’t spend the trillions he’s referencing.
Correct. I'm more referring to the secondary discussions on HN/Bluesky which have trended the same lines as usual instead of highlighting the unique actions of Sage as Simon did.
A 501(c)(3) isn't a startup. The behavior is still bad, obviously.
And it gives them more eyes than they hoped for by “going nuclear.”
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.
We already have two copies of this:
(438 points, 373 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46389444
(763 points, 712 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46392115
"Simon Willison REACTS to Rob Pike's unfiltered opinion on AI". We must have the proper spin.
Is anyone going to say something about him engagement farming on this site?
Simon's posts are not "engagement farming" by any definition of the term. He posts good content frequently which is then upvoted by the Hacker News community, which should be the ideal for a Hacker News contributor.
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.
If you believe this then I have a bridge to sell you in Brooklyn.
Point out which aspects of my comment you believe are untrue and I'll buy that bridge.
This Hacker News Commenter Made A Devastating Perfect Reply To Simon Willison
Simon Willison: How this Devastating Perfect Reply Changed my Publishing Workflow, featuring Claude Code
Related, but not copies
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.
An AI can not meaningfully say "thank you" to a human. This is not changed by human review. "Performance" is the completely wrong starting point to understand Rob's feelings.
How about not spamming unwilling test subjects with slop?
> you can add .patch to any commit on GitHub to get the author’s unredacted email address
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?
Yeah you’ve been able to do this for over a decade. They can’t really stop it:
- 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.
Git (the version control program, not GitHub) associates the author’s email address with every single commit. The user of Git configures this email address. This isn’t secret information.
Run git show on any commit object, or look at the default output of git log, and you'll see the same. Your author name and email are always public. If you want, use a specific public address for those purposes.
Just wait until you find out what is written on every single git commit that can be fetched.
Don’t keep us in suspense! :)
Git commits contain the author's name and email address.
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.
Sometimes it just hits different. One spam/marketing email I got, pre-AI, was
I get around 30 marketing emails per day that make it through the spam filter; from a purely logical perspective this should have been the same as any other, but I still remember this one because the tone, the way it used only a person's name in the subject, no mention of the company or what they were selling, just really pissed me off.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.
I cannot possibly oppose this take more; you're perfectly embodying the "slow frog boiling" mentality that must be fought everyday.
Curse, yell, fight. Never accept things just because they've grown to be common.