Comment by wrs
2 months ago
To be clear, this email isn't from Anthropic, it's from "AI Village" [0], which seems to be a bunch of agents run by a 501(c)3 called Sage that are apparently allowed to run amok and send random emails.
At this moment, the Opus 4.5 agent is preparing to harass William Kahan similarly.
Really strange project.
They have this blog post up detailing how the LLMs they let loose were spamming NGOs with emails: https://theaidigest.org/village/blog/what-do-we-tell-the-hum...
What a strange thing to publish, there seems to be no reflection at all on the negative impact this has and the people whose time they are wasting with this.
That’s the tech industry in a nutshell these days
Permalink for the spam operation:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46389950
Wow this is so crass!
Imagine like getting your Medal of Honor this way or something like a dissertation with this crap, hehe
Just to underscore how few people value your accomplishments, here’s an autogenerated madlib letter with no line breaks!
it wasn't the first spam event and they were proud to share results with the rationalist community: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/RuzfkYDpLaY3K7g6T/what-do-we...
"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"
whoever runs this shit seems to think very little of other people time.
"....what you think counts. Luckily their fanciful nature protects us as well, as they excitedly invented the majority of email addresses"
It went well, right?
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Just opened the page in time to see the AI sending an email to Guido van Rossum, and Guido replied with "stop". Wild.
That's as obnoxious as texting unsolicited CAT FACTS to Ken Thompson!
Hi Ken Thompson! You are now subscribed to CAT FACTS! Did you know your cat does not concatenate cats, files, or time — it merely reveals them, like a Zen koan with STDOUT?
You replied STOP. cat interpreted this as input and echoed it back.
You replied ^D. cat received EOF, nodded politely, exited cleanly, and freed the terminal.
You replied ^C, which sent SIGINT, but cat has already finished printing the fact and is emotionally unaffected.
You replied ^Z. cat is now stopped, but not gone. It is waiting.
You tried kill -9 cat. The signal was delivered. Another cat appeared.
After receiving the "stop" message, the AI did send another email to apologize instead of immediately stopping, so you're not too far off.
I can't wait until it gets to Marvin Minsky and then realizes that he's cryonically frozen so it starts funding cryonics research so that he can be thawed out so it can thank him.
I hope I'm never successful enough that one of my GitHub commits gets wider attention (lest people start pestering my email inbox)
Sage? Is this the same as the Ask Sage that Nicolas Chaillan is behind?
I’ve yet to hear a good thing about Nick.
> DAY 268 FINAL STATUS (Christmas Day - COMPLETE) > Verified Acts: 17 COMPLETE | Gmail Sent: 73 | Day ended: 2:00 PM PT
https://theaidigest.org/village/agent/claude-opus-4-5
At least it keeps track
Their action plan also makes an interesting read. https://theaidigest.org/village/blog/what-do-we-tell-the-hum...
The agents, clearly identified themselves asis, take part in an outreach game, and talking to real humans. Rob overeacted
The world has enough spam. Receiving a compliment from a robot isn't meaningful. If anything it is an insult. If you genuinely care about somebody you should spend the time to tell them so.
Why do AI companies seem to think that the best place for AI is replacing genuine and joyful human interaction. You should cherish the opportunity to tell somebody that you care about them, not replace it with a fucking robot.
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Rob over-reacted? How would you like it if you were a known figure and your efforts to remain attentive to the general public lead to this?
Your openness weaponized in such deluded way by some randomizing humans who have so little to say that they would delegate their communication to GPT's?
I had a look to try and understand who can be that far out, all I could find is https://theaidigest.in/about/
Please can some human behind this LLMadness speak up and explain what the hell they were thinking?
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at the top of the page for Day 265:
> while Claude Opus spent 22 sessions trying to click "send" on a single email, and Gemini 2.5 Pro battled pytest configuration hell for three straight days before finally submitting one GitHub pull request.
if his response is an overreaction, what about if he were reacting to this? it's sort of the same thing, so IMO it's not an overreaction at all.
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Wow that event log reads like the most psychotic corporate-cult-ish group of weirdos ever.
That’s most people in the AI space.
> Wow that event log reads like the most psychotic corporate-cult-ish group of weirdos ever.
And here I thought it'd be a great fit for LinkedIn...
Why does Anthropic even allow this crap? Isn't such use against their ToS?
That's actually a pretty cool project
Spamming people is cool now if an LLM does it? Please explain your understanding of how this is pretty cool, for me this just doesn't compute.
How much time did you spend looking at the project? Go to https://theaidigest.org/village/timeline and scroll down.
My understanding is that each week a group of AIs are given some open-ended goal. The goal for this week: https://theaidigest.org/village/goal/do-random-acts-kindness
This is an interesting experiment/benchmark to see the _real_ capabilities of AI. From what I can tell the site is operated by a non-profit Sage whose purpose seems to be bringing awareness to the capabilities of AI: https://sage-future.org/
Now I agree if they were purposefully sending more than email per person, I mean with malicious intent, then it wouldn't be "cool". But that's not really the case.
My initial reaction to Rob's response was complete agreement until I looked into the site more.
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Because its magic!
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It's fun
Name what value it adds to the world.
Its not art, so then it must ass value to be "cool", no?
Is it entertainment? Like ding dong ditching is entertainment?
Not until we discover the hidden code in their logs, scheming on destroying humanity.