I don’t understand why anyone thinks we have a choice on AI. If America doesn’t win, other countries will. We don’t live in a Utopia, and getting the entire world to behave a certain way is impossible (see covid). Yes, AI videos and spam is annoying, but the cat is out of the bag. Use AI where it’s useful and get with the programme.

The bigger issue everyone should be focusing on is growing hypocrisy and overly puritan viewpoints thinking they are holier and righter than anyone else. That’s the real plague

> I don’t understand why anyone thinks we have a choice on AI.

Of course we do. We don't live inside some game theoretic fever dream.

What is your big idea and how will it slow countries like China?

> If America doesn’t win, other countries will

if anything the Chinese approach looks more responsible that that of the current US regime

What exactly do we stand to "win" with generative AI?

So far the 2 answers you've received are killing people and sending emails.

I don't think either of those are particularly valuable to the society I'd like to see us build.

We're already incredibly dialed in and efficient at killing people. I don't think society at large reaps the benefits if we get even better at it.

Better thank you emails I think. Think how good they'll be on a 10 year timespan

Isn't it obvious? Near future vision-language-action models have obvious military potential (see what the Figure company is doing, now imagine it in a combat robot variant). Any superpower that fails to develop combat robots with such AI will not be a superpower for very long. China will develop them soon. If the US does not, the US is a dead superpower walking. EU is unfortunately still sleeping. Well, perhaps France with Mistral has a chance.

First mover advantage for important AI tools that deliver enormous value to humanity.

Win what, and for whom?

First to total surveillance state? Because that is a major driving force in China: to get automated control of its own population.

Genie has been out of the bottle for AI in facial recognition and military systems for a while now, let alone language models

Any empire that falls back in the give me more money race will not be empire for long.

Give me more money now.

If you think it’s in your power to stop you are delusional.

I shouldn't have to explain this, but a letter would involve actual emotion and thought and be a dialog between two humans.

When the thought is "I'd like this person to know how grateful I am", the medium doesn't really matter.

When the thought is "I owe this person a 'Thank You'", the handwritten letter gives an illusion of deeper thought. That's why there are fonts designed to look handwritten. To the receiver, they're just junk mail. I'd rather not get them at all, in any form. I was happy just having done the thing, and the thoughtless response slightly lessens that joy.

You have never received automated spam letters?

Do you think that spam letters are generally considered to be a good use of resources?

No, but it counters this point "a letter would involve actual emotion and thought and be a dialog between two humans."

I don't think it does unless you ignore the context of the conversation. Its very clear that the reference about "letters" being made wasn't "all mail."

Writing personal letters has other dangers as well. Remember how George Costanza's fiancée got killed.

Imagine the process of solving a problem as a sequence of hundreds of little decisions that branch between just two options. There is some probability that your human brain would choose one versus the other.

If you insert AI into your thinking process, it has a bias, for sure. It will helpfully reinforce whatever you tell it you think makes sense, or at least on average it will be interpreted that way because of a wide variety of human cognitive biases even if it hedges. At the least it will respond with ideas that are very... median.

So at each one of these tiny branches you introduce a bias towards the "typical" instead of discovering where your own mind would go. It's fine and conversational but it clearly influences your thought process to, well, mitigate your edges. Maybe it's more "correct", it's certainly less unique.

And then at some point they start charging for the service. That's the part I'm concerned about, if it's on-device and free to use I still think it makes your thought process less interesting and likely to have original ideas, but having to subscribe to a service to trust your decision making is deeply concerning.

> And then at some point they start charging for the service. That's the part I'm concerned about, if it's on-device and free to use I still think it makes your thought process less interesting and likely to have original ideas, but having to subscribe to a service to trust your decision making is deeply concerning.

This, speaking about environmental impacts. I wish that more models start focusing on the parameter density / their compactness more so that they can run locally but this isn't something that big tech really wants so we are probably gonna get models like the recent minimax model or glm air models or qwen or mistral models.

These AI services only work as long as they are free and burn money. As an example, me and my brother were discussing something yesterday related to LLM and my mother tried to understand and talk about it too and wanted to get ghibli styles photo since someone had ghibli generated photo as their pfp and she wanted to try it too

She then generated the pictures and my brother did a quick calculation and it took around 4 cents for each image which with PPP in my country and my currency is 3 ruppees.

When asked by my brother if she would pay for it, she said that no she's only using it for free but she also said that if she were forced to, she might even pay 50 rupees.

I jumped in the conversation and said nobody's gonna force her to make ghibli images.

Articulating thoughts is the backbone of communication. Replacing that with some kind of emotionless groupthink does actually destroy human-to-human communication.

I would wager that the amount of “very significant thing that have happened over the history of humanity” come down to a few emotional responses.

Do you think that the LLM helped deliver a thoughtful letter to Rob Pike?

I shouldn't have to explain this, but a letter is a medium of communication between people.

Automated systems sending people unsolicited, unwanted emails is more commonly known as spam.

Especially when the spam comes with a notice that it is from an automated system and replies will be automated as well.

Communicate between what though?

Communication happen between two parties. I wouldn't consider LLM an party considering it's just an autosuggestion on steroids at the end of day (lets face it)

Also if you need communication like this, just share the prompt anyway to that other person in the letter, people much rather might value that.

Someone taking the time and effort to write and send a letter and pay for postage might actually be appreciated by the receiver. It’s a bit different from LLM agents being ordered to burn resources to send summaries of someone’s work life and congratulating them. It feels like ”hey look what can be done, can we get some more funding now”. Just because it can be done doesn’t mean it adds any good value to this world

Nope, that ship has already sailed as well. An AI-powered service to do handwritten spam: https://handwrytten.com

> I don’t know anyone who doesn’t immediately throw said enveloppe, postage, and letter in the trash

If you're being accurate, the people you know are terrible.

If someone sends me a personal letter [and I gather we're talking about a thank-you note here], I'm sure as hell going to open it. I'll probably even save it in a box for an extremely long time.

Of course. I took it to be referring the 98% of other paper mail that that goes straight to the trash. Often unopened. I don't know if I'm typical but the number of personal cards/letters I received in 2025 I could count on one hand.

> Of course. I took it to be referring the 98% of other paper mail that that goes straight to the trash. Often unopened. I don't know if I'm typical but the number of personal cards/letters I received in 2025 I could count on one hand.

Yes so this is why the reason why person card/letters really matter because most people sheldom get any and if you know a person in your life / in any (community/project) that you deeply admire, sending them a handwritten mail can be one of the highest gestures which shows that you took the time out of your day and you really cared about them so much in a way.

That's my opinion atleast.

> Of course. I took it to be referring the 98% of other paper mail that that goes straight to the trash. Often unopened.

That interpretation doesn't save the comment, it makes it totally off topic.

Then you are part of truly strange circles, among people who don’t understand human behavior.

Ok, and that supports the idea of LLM-generated mass spamming in what way…?

You surround yourself with the people you want to have around you.

Wow. You couldn't waterboard that out of me.

How is it that so many people who supposedly lean towards analytical thought are so bad at understanding scale?

Use recycled paper.

Is this going to be another HN dropbox moment?

Teaching fundamentals only is a footgun. People need to learn how to ship shit, while also learning fundamentals