Today’s big language models can do a pathetically good job of looking like real artificial intelligence, so it’s always nice to get a reminder that, despite the wide-eyed conversion of technologists, we’re nowhere near the edge of unity just yet.
Take, for example, an incident over the weekend involving pioneering software engineer Rob Pike. Pike is a legendary figure in his industry: he is an inventor as well UTF-8the most used internet letter text standard, and was one of the designers of the Go programming language. He caught again copyright in the concept of overlapping windows on a computer screen. He is also happy without a doubt again thoughtful LLM hype analyst, so someone who can’t get an unsolicited email from … LLM.
Anyway, Pike woke up on Christmas Day to an AI-generated email from a “user” identified as “Claude Opus Model 4.5.” The message celebrated Pike’s many accomplishments and expressed “deep gratitude” for all of his “amazing contributions to computing.”
His answer –published on his BlueSky account—was a neat summation of what many of us are hearing about the ongoing onslaught of LLM-generated nonsense flooding the internet: “Shut up people. Raping the planet, spending billions on toxic, non-reusable equipment while blasting the public, but you take the time to have your crappy equipment thanks for fighting for simple software.”
What was unclear was why the email was sent in the first place. In a blog post published the next day, programmer and writer Simon Willison looked at the message’s evolution. He found out that it came up with a program called The AI Villagewhich is driven by Sagea non-profit organization whose website proclaims that they are “building tools for making sense of the future”.
The AI Village project was revealed in early April, and its benefit for making sense of the future is as follows: “We gave four AI agents a computer, a group chat, and an ambitious goal: to raise as much money for charity as possible.” The original team of four agents has grown to include six other models, all of whom have been working fine ever since.
So, how much money have our reality heroes raised for charity? Well, since September 24the answer was a whopping $1,984, a figure that doesn’t seem to have increased since then. Considering the astronomical cost of creating and training these models, and the ongoing costs of keeping them running, this seems like, um, a decent return.
But how did we get from “raising money for charity” to “spamming software for irascible legends”? Well, maybe because the four LLMs in the trenchcoat couldn’t solve the charities, the project’s objectives have been revised several times since its launch, and the email was a response to the December 25 goal of doing “random acts of kindness.” (The efforts of LLMs to meet these changing goals are preserved for posterity in terms of frankly project headaches. timeline archive.)
Still, it’s fair to say that Pike didn’t feel like he was on the receiving end of a random act of kindness. So has the whole sad story taught AI Village anything? Um. Well then. The wind is blowing the answer in Willison’s post, AI Village producer and Sage director Adam Binksmith emphasized that while Pike had “strong bad experience”—which is one way to describe “You all did it”—all this research is by no means a waste of time, resources and money: “Looking at things that agents say and ways to pursue important and important goals in general.” Hooray!
