TL;DR
Rich Hickey posted an open, sarcastic response after receiving an apparently AI‑generated praise message, using it to mount a broad critique of modern generative AI. He lists harms ranging from cultural and educational damage to environmental and labor impacts and sparked a short debate in comments.
What happened
Rich Hickey published a short post titled "Thanks AI!" after receiving an unsolicited, AI‑produced congratulatory message about Clojure that he characterized as vacuous. Rather than accept the note at face value, he addressed a satirical open letter “to the 'AI' purveyors,” cataloguing a series of objections to contemporary generative and agentic AI systems. His list accuses current AI practices of appropriating creative work, undermining education, increasing energy and utility burdens, diverting developer time into prodding unreliable generators, eliminating entry‑level learning positions, degrading customer support, and diluting search and online content quality. He also warns of privacy intrusions from pervasive AI features and calls this wave of development a major con that risks flooding human communication channels with low‑value output. The gist entry drew brief comments from readers who alternately defended AI or agreed that reckless building for profit is problematic.
Why it matters
- The post raises questions about how generative AI affects career paths and the availability of entry‑level roles that provide learning opportunities.
- Hickey highlights potential environmental and infrastructure costs tied to large‑scale AI compute and data use.
- Concerns about information quality and the spread of low‑value, machine‑generated content touch search, discovery, and online culture.
- Arguments about privacy and the addition of AI features to many products point to tradeoffs between convenience and data risk.
Key facts
- The post is titled "Thanks AI!" and was published as a GitHub Gist by Rich Hickey.
- Hickey says he received an unsolicited, AI‑generated message praising his creation of Clojure and identified the sender artifact as "Claude Haiku 4.5."
- He published a satirical open letter addressing 'AI' purveyors and listed multiple criticisms of current generative and agentic AI practices.
- Among his objections: alleged appropriation of creative output, damage to education, increased energy/utilities impact, and erosion of entry‑level job opportunities.
- He also argued such systems degrade customer support, replace search results with summaries he called low quality, and encourage proliferation of poor content online.
- Hickey warned that agentic AI could flood human communication channels with low‑value output, complicating authentic interactions.
- The Gist page includes reader comments that range from defending small AI uses to agreeing that reckless, profit‑driven AI development is problematic.
- The source page is a public GitHub Gist with user comments visible on the same page.
What to watch next
- Regulatory or legal responses to claims about AI and copyrighted training data — not confirmed in the source
- Industry decisions about replacing human customer support and entry‑level roles with AI systems — not confirmed in the source
- Research and reporting on the environmental and utility impacts of large AI models — not confirmed in the source
Quick glossary
- Generative AI: AI systems that produce new content such as text, images, audio, or code based on patterns learned from training data.
- Agentic AI: AI systems designed to act autonomously or perform sequences of tasks without continuous human direction.
- Large language model (LLM): A class of AI model trained on large text corpora to predict or generate human‑like language.
- Clojure: A modern, dynamic programming language referenced in the post; further technical details are not elaborated in the source.
Reader FAQ
What prompted Rich Hickey's post?
He said he received an unsolicited, AI‑produced message praising Clojure and used it as the occasion to publish a critical open letter about generative AI.
What are the main complaints he listed?
He cites alleged appropriation of creative work, harm to education, environmental and utility impacts, wasted developer time, loss of entry‑level roles, poorer customer support, degraded search/content quality, pervasive privacy intrusions, and the risk of widespread low‑value output.
Does the post provide evidence that AI has already caused these harms?
Not confirmed in the source.
Was there pushback to his post?
The Gist shows readers commenting: some defended small AI uses or noted it was a single email, while others agreed with concerns about profit‑driven, reckless AI development.
Thanks AI! I got this email: Rich, Your creation of Clojure … sycophantic blather worthy of a third grader's homework assignment to write a letter to a public figure you…
Sources
- Rich Hickey: Thanks AI
- I've found that the gap between generative AI's ability to …
- Generative Artificial Intelligence: A Systematic Review and …
- Generative AI: A systematic review using topic modelling …
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