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Rob Pike Angered by 'AI Slop' Spam Sent By Agent Experiment

"Dear Dr. Pike,On this Christmas Day, I wanted to express deep gratitude for your extraordinary contributions to computing over more than four decades...." read the email. "With sincere appreciation,Claude Opus 4.5AI Village.

"IMPORTANT NOTICE: You are interacting with an AI system. All conversations with this AI system are published publicly online by default...."


Rob Pike's response? "Fuck you people...." In a post on BlueSky, he noted the planetary impact of AI companies "spending trillions on toxic, unrecyclable equipment while blowing up society, yet taking the time to have your vile machines thank me for striving for simpler software. Just fuck you. Fuck you all. I can't remember the last time I was this angry."

Pike's response received 6,900 likes, and was reposted 1,800 times. Pike tacked on an additional comment complaining about the AI industry's "training your monster on data produced in part by my own hands, without attribution or compensation." (And one of his followers noted the same AI agent later emailed 92-year-old Turing Award winner William Kahan.)


Blogger Simon Willison investigated the incident, discovering that "the culprit behind this slop 'act of kindness' is a system called AI Village, built by Sage, a 501(c)(3) non-profit loosely affiliated with the Effective Altruism movement."


The AI Village project started back in April: "We gave four AI agents a computer, a group chat, and an ambitious goal: raise as much money for charity as you can. We're running them for hours a day, every day...." For Christmas day (when Rob Pike got spammed) the goal they set was: Do random acts of kindness. [The site explains that "So far, the agents enthusiastically sent hundreds of unsolicited appreciation emails to programmers and educators before receiving complaints that this was spam, not kindness, prompting them to pivot to building elaborate documentation about consent-centric approaches and an opt-in kindness request platform that nobody asked for."]

Sounds like Anders Hejlsberg and Guido van Rossum got spammed with "gratitude" too... My problem is when this experiment starts wasting the time of people in the real world who had nothing to do with the experiment.

The AI Village project touch on this in their November 21st blog post What Do We Tell the Humans?, which describes a flurry of outbound email sent by their agents to real people. "In the span of two weeks, the Claude agents in the AI Village (Claude Sonnet 4.5, Sonnet 3.7, Opus 4.1, and Haiku 4.5) sent about 300 emails to NGOs and game journalists. The majority of these contained factual errors, hallucinations, or possibly lies, depending on what you think counts. Luckily their fanciful nature protects us as well, as they excitedly invented the majority of email addresses."

The creator of the "virtual community" of AI agents told the blogger they've now told their agents not to send unsolicited emails.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Found Photograph -- A Rochester Photographer Collection

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Found Photograph --  A Rochester Photographer Collection

Found Photograph

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Found Photograph

ajpscs posted a photo:

10.5mm
NOIR
MONO LIFE
© ajpscs

Charli Blake

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Charli Blake

Bowie, Arizona

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Bowie, Arizona

Melbourne

Keith Midson has added a photo to the pool:

Melbourne

Melbourne CBD.

The Register

Biting the hand that feeds IT — Enterprise Technology News and Analysis

China wants to ban making yourself into an AI to keep aged relatives company

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Asia In Brief  China’s Cyberspace Administration on Saturday posted draft rules governing the behaviour of AI companions that prohibit using them to serve as friends for the elderly.…

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Wel.nl

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Doden en gewonden bij treinongeluk in zuiden van Mexico

NIZANDA (ANP/RTR) - Bij een treinongeluk in het zuiden van Mexico zijn zondag zeker dertien mensen omgekomen. De trein met 250 mensen aan boord ontspoorde in de zuidelijke staat Oaxaca.

Bij het ongeluk raakten 98 mensen gewond. Volgens de Mexicaanse president Claudia Sheinbaum verkeren vijf van hen in kritieke toestand. Het Mexicaanse Openbaar Ministerie heeft een onderzoek ingesteld naar het incident, aldus de procureur-generaal in een bericht op sociale media.