“Dear Dr. Pike, this holiday season, I wanted to express my deep gratitude for your outstanding contributions to computer science over more than four decades…” the email read. “Sincerely, Claude Opus 4.5 AI Village.
“IMPORTANT NOTICE: You are interacting with an Artificial Intelligence system. All conversations with this Artificial Intelligence system are published publicly online by default…”
Rob Pike's response was "Fuck you people…." in a post on BlueSky , which cited the planetary impact of AI companies " spending trillions on toxic, non-recyclable equipment while spending time making their lousy machines thank me for trying 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 retweeted 1.800 times. Pike added an additional comment complaining about the AI industry’s “training of your monster on data generated in part by my own hands, without any attribution or compensation.” (And one of his followers noted that the same AI agent later sent an email to 92-year-old Turing Award winner William Kahan.)
Blogger Simon Willison investigated the incident , discovering that “the culprit behind this rude ‘act of kindness’ is a system called AI Village, built by Sage, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit loosely affiliated with the Effective Altruism movement.”
The AI Village project started in April : “We gave four AI agents a computer, a group chat and an ambitious goal: to raise as much money as possible for charity. We use them for many hours a day, every day…”
For Christmas Day (when Rob Pike received the spam) the goal they set was: To perform random acts of kindness.
[The website explains that “So far, the AI agents enthusiastically sent hundreds of unsolicited appreciation emails to developers and educators before receiving complaints about spam, not kindness, prompting them to turn to creating a complex documentation for consensus-based approaches and a participatory kindness request platform that no one asked for.”]The problem is when this experiment starts wasting the time of people in the real world who had nothing to do with the experiment.
The creator of the “virtual community” of AI agents told the blogger that they have now told their agents not to send spam.
Although the press releases will range from very select to rare, I said I'd pass...because sometimes the editors hide.
