This is literally AI, in every case. AI is literally the exploitation of the commons, both in the theft of intellectual property for training, and in how it is used.
This doesn't change the first aspect, which is that the AI companies seized the commons and monetized them.
Re coding - the code that is written by a wide audience of unqualified individuals is not useful code. If you aren't an engineer and you prompt a model to build something, you can't attest to its reliability. (Moreover, anyone could have prompted for the same code.) Until it can be verified that it actually works, it's basically just slop. And such verification is meaningless without the person having the capacity to take responsibility. If you are not a civil engineer, it doesn't matter how much you prompt AI to check your designs; you can't reasonably sign off on them. In practice, most people prompting AI are taking zero responsibility. OpenAI and Anthropic's hacking scandals are a really wonderful example of this.
Moreover, in practice, most of the software being built is probably not useful. There's a nontrivial chance it does something bad, so you can't use it without sandboxing it. It doesn't mean no useful software will be built; I'm saying that much of the software being built is unreliable. In fact, AI almost certainly decreases the number of people who are even qualified to judge software quality because everyone is being deskilled since they are allocating their thinking to the model (or in the case of current middle/high school and college students, never learning to think in the first place).
The dumping of slop into ecosystems that previously had institutions of trust in place is a HUGE harm. For example, these folks are overwhelming academic publication systems and the internet broadly with their slop. Cyberterrorists will do the same.
Even if tomorrow AI satisfied the absurd criterion of being able to only produce reliable things (if you prompted it accordingly: "Be reliable!"), you'd still have the problem that a cyberterrorist could come along and say "reliably hack X". The space of bad acts is far bigger and more accessible than good ones. This is what I mean by exploiting / harming the commons.
> I don't get it, so far as I can tell you still need to manually choose whether to RSVP? It's not like it's going to RSVP to all events for you.
The title itself does say "automatically apply to events".
I'm guessing this came about because many organisers have some sort of pre-acceptance filter these days, to minimise the attendee signal-to-noise ratio (which, stupidly, often relies on job titles).
I missed out on an event recently because it was full. I got a notification that a spot had become available shortly before it started, but I had an hour travel to get there so wasn't viable.
I think tools to enable better discovery are a good thing, but I'm not sure that I like the idea of splatting RSVPs just in case.
>Help me find events that match my goals. Apply to eligible free events and keep a spreadsheet so I can review them and decide which to attend later.
I am not event attender. But doesn't this whole process sound like it is entirely wrong way around... Shouldn't review always come before applying? Doing the process that way just sounds like extremely selfish...
I'm not sure whether the people developing these spam tools simply lack the imagination or empathy to see the world through the eyes of other people or can but don't care. Or maybe the "grindset" / "maxxing" mentality demands callousness by its very nature.
Sigh. As someone in the business of creating and hosting conferences please consider not doing this. It's such a giant drain on resources for event organizers to get applications and RSVPs for people that don't actually want to attend, and it could really harm well meaning people to plan for larger events by booking bigger rooms or arranging for food and logistics and so on.
If you decide to take this approach understand and likely to spawn countermeasures or consequences. The most likely outcome of this isn't better for anyone, it's just a world that has more application fees and roadblocks put in front of people who aren't assholes.
This feels like it's going to cause a lot of damage to the commons.
If one person does this, no big deal.
If everyone starts doing this, you're basically just creating spam. It'll become like LinkedIn job applications.
This is literally AI, in every case. AI is literally the exploitation of the commons, both in the theft of intellectual property for training, and in how it is used.
I disagree, many AI uses are beneficial to the commons. Just not this one.
For example, it makes coding available to a much wider audience and increases the amount of useful software that can be built.
Training on data makes the information in that data widely available to general public, which is beneficial.
This doesn't change the first aspect, which is that the AI companies seized the commons and monetized them.
Re coding - the code that is written by a wide audience of unqualified individuals is not useful code. If you aren't an engineer and you prompt a model to build something, you can't attest to its reliability. (Moreover, anyone could have prompted for the same code.) Until it can be verified that it actually works, it's basically just slop. And such verification is meaningless without the person having the capacity to take responsibility. If you are not a civil engineer, it doesn't matter how much you prompt AI to check your designs; you can't reasonably sign off on them. In practice, most people prompting AI are taking zero responsibility. OpenAI and Anthropic's hacking scandals are a really wonderful example of this.
Moreover, in practice, most of the software being built is probably not useful. There's a nontrivial chance it does something bad, so you can't use it without sandboxing it. It doesn't mean no useful software will be built; I'm saying that much of the software being built is unreliable. In fact, AI almost certainly decreases the number of people who are even qualified to judge software quality because everyone is being deskilled since they are allocating their thinking to the model (or in the case of current middle/high school and college students, never learning to think in the first place).
The dumping of slop into ecosystems that previously had institutions of trust in place is a HUGE harm. For example, these folks are overwhelming academic publication systems and the internet broadly with their slop. Cyberterrorists will do the same.
Even if tomorrow AI satisfied the absurd criterion of being able to only produce reliable things (if you prompted it accordingly: "Be reliable!"), you'd still have the problem that a cyberterrorist could come along and say "reliably hack X". The space of bad acts is far bigger and more accessible than good ones. This is what I mean by exploiting / harming the commons.
[deleted]
> I don't get it, so far as I can tell you still need to manually choose whether to RSVP? It's not like it's going to RSVP to all events for you.
The title itself does say "automatically apply to events".
I'm guessing this came about because many organisers have some sort of pre-acceptance filter these days, to minimise the attendee signal-to-noise ratio (which, stupidly, often relies on job titles).
>It's not like it's going to RSVP to all events for you.
The video embedded in README.md shows ChatGPT instrumenting Chrome to click the RSVP button on Partiful events and fill out the RSVP forms in bulk.
This is a spam tool.
I missed out on an event recently because it was full. I got a notification that a spot had become available shortly before it started, but I had an hour travel to get there so wasn't viable.
I think tools to enable better discovery are a good thing, but I'm not sure that I like the idea of splatting RSVPs just in case.
>Help me find events that match my goals. Apply to eligible free events and keep a spreadsheet so I can review them and decide which to attend later.
I am not event attender. But doesn't this whole process sound like it is entirely wrong way around... Shouldn't review always come before applying? Doing the process that way just sounds like extremely selfish...
Nice! I was thinking of building something like this for myself.
I'm a little worried that the complexity could be too much and dissatisfying if I have to spend a ton of time tweaking it.
And then one day, for no reason at all, hosts started charging $5.
Looking forward to v2, where the agent also attends the events and networks with everyone else's agents.
This is something a free zero-install tool like Muse can do, right?
Event organizers will need to start charging refundable deposits. If you show up, you get your deposit back.
I like what Jason Fried tried, making people pay $100 upfront, and refunding them $100 bills at the door:
https://world.hey.com/jason/5300-in-100s-3be4c194
https://world.hey.com/jason/5300-in-100s-the-verdict-74c4108...
Even a token fee like $5 would probably dramatically cut frivolous RSVP and noshow rates.
(I am sorta building something around this idea… lots of yak-shaving happening though.)
Spamming events with ai slop puts an unfair burden on the organizers
I'm not sure whether the people developing these spam tools simply lack the imagination or empathy to see the world through the eyes of other people or can but don't care. Or maybe the "grindset" / "maxxing" mentality demands callousness by its very nature.
Ironically, they'd likely burn out from attending events unless they're incredibly extroverted.
Tomorrow won't go well for you, again.
Sigh. As someone in the business of creating and hosting conferences please consider not doing this. It's such a giant drain on resources for event organizers to get applications and RSVPs for people that don't actually want to attend, and it could really harm well meaning people to plan for larger events by booking bigger rooms or arranging for food and logistics and so on.
If you decide to take this approach understand and likely to spawn countermeasures or consequences. The most likely outcome of this isn't better for anyone, it's just a world that has more application fees and roadblocks put in front of people who aren't assholes.