TL;DR
Veteran computer scientist Rob Pike published a string of angry posts condemning generative AI, saying models were trained in part on his work without attribution or compensation. His messages, shared on a social feed, provoked a wide-ranging reaction from other technologists and creators about data use, environmental cost and the direction of computing.
What happened
On Dec. 26, 2025, Rob Pike posted a pair of forceful messages on a public social feed, expressing intense anger about current generative AI practices. He accused the industry of environmental harm from unrecyclable hardware and wrote that large models had been trained partly on material he produced, without attribution or payment. In a follow-up post he apologized to the wider world for his inadvertent role in enabling those systems. The thread drew a mix of responses: some readers thanked him and echoed his condemnation, others debated whether the harms were foreseen, and several commenters discussed broader issues such as consolidation of compute, reversed 'democratization' of computing and intellectual property. Some participants reported taking creative work offline to avoid it being used as training data, while others criticized automated AI messages that appear to thank contributors.
Why it matters
- Raises ethical questions about using publicly available writing and art to train commercial models without attribution or compensation.
- Highlights environmental concerns tied to large-scale AI training and expensive, hard-to-recycle infrastructure.
- Feeds a broader debate about whether computing power is becoming more centralized and less accessible to individuals.
- Signals reputational risk for researchers whose prior work is used by companies in ways they did not intend.
Key facts
- Rob Pike published angry posts on a public social feed on Dec. 26, 2025, criticizing generative AI.
- He said some models were trained in part on content he had produced and that he received no attribution or compensation.
- Pike described the environmental and societal impact of the industry's hardware and deployment choices.
- He apologized for his inadvertent role in enabling current systems.
- The posts prompted many replies expressing support, anger, regret and discussion of historical trends in computing.
- Commenters debated whether computing "democratization" has been reversed by a concentration of control in datacenters and a few companies.
- Some users reported removing creative works from the internet to prevent them from being used as training data.
What to watch next
- Creators and artists removing content from public sites in response to training-use concerns (confirmed in the source).
- Whether major AI companies change practices on attribution, licensing or compensation for scraped training data — not confirmed in the source.
- Any regulatory, legal or industry moves addressing data use for model training or environmental impact of large-scale compute — not confirmed in the source.
Quick glossary
- Generative AI: Machine-learning systems that produce text, images or other media by learning patterns from large datasets.
- Training data: The collection of text, images, code or other material used to teach a machine-learning model to generate outputs.
- Attribution: Acknowledging the original authorship of material used in a work or process; in AI discourse it often refers to credit or compensation for data sources.
- Datacenter: A facility housing many servers and networking equipment that provide the compute resources for cloud and AI services.
- Democratization of computing: The idea that access to computing resources and tools is broadly available to individuals rather than concentrated in few institutions.
Reader FAQ
Who is Rob Pike?
Not confirmed in the source.
What did he accuse generative AI of doing?
He said large models had been trained in part on material he produced without attribution or compensation, and criticized environmental and societal effects of the technology.
Did he apologize for anything?
Yes; he apologized for his inadvertent role in enabling systems that have been used in ways he now condemns.
Have companies or regulators responded to his posts?
Not confirmed in the source.
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Sources
- Rob Pike goes nuclear over GenAI
- Rob Pike Goes Nuclear over GenAI
- rob pike: "OpenAI: We lose a little on ev…"
- The Art of Unix Programming
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