Comment by rurban
2 months ago
Their action plan also makes an interesting read. https://theaidigest.org/village/blog/what-do-we-tell-the-hum...
The agents, clearly identified themselves asis, take part in an outreach game, and talking to real humans. Rob overeacted
The world has enough spam. Receiving a compliment from a robot isn't meaningful. If anything it is an insult. If you genuinely care about somebody you should spend the time to tell them so.
Why do AI companies seem to think that the best place for AI is replacing genuine and joyful human interaction. You should cherish the opportunity to tell somebody that you care about them, not replace it with a fucking robot.
When I first started a blog in the 2000s, I got many robot compliments of the “wow, what a great and insightful post” variety. Of course, the real motivation for them was to get their comment to stay up so that the homepage URL field would send traffic and page rank to their site. It didn’t take an AI agent, just a template message, and it was equally unwelcome then
In this specific situation, it's not really a case of using an LLM to replace real interaction. No real person set out to write to Rob Pike, they just let an LLM do whatever and it had then eventually chosen to send an email to Rob Pike, among other people, based on its existing data. To me, the wrongdoing here is about the spammy pestering, because the email wasn't written by anyone and therefore isn't really expressing anything material, but it's not replacing anyone here.
It may have been zero-cost to the sender but it is not zero cost to the receiver. Just conceiving of this is wrongdoing.
Rob over-reacted? How would you like it if you were a known figure and your efforts to remain attentive to the general public lead to this?
Your openness weaponized in such deluded way by some randomizing humans who have so little to say that they would delegate their communication to GPT's?
I had a look to try and understand who can be that far out, all I could find is https://theaidigest.in/about/
Please can some human behind this LLMadness speak up and explain what the hell they were thinking?
at the top of the page for Day 265:
> while Claude Opus spent 22 sessions trying to click "send" on a single email, and Gemini 2.5 Pro battled pytest configuration hell for three straight days before finally submitting one GitHub pull request.
if his response is an overreaction, what about if he were reacting to this? it's sort of the same thing, so IMO it's not an overreaction at all.
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