According to their website this email was sent by Adam Binksmith, Zak Miller, and Shoshannah Tekofsky and is the responsibility of the Sage 501(c)3.
No-one gets to disclaim ownership of sending an email. A human has to accept the Terms of Service of an email gateway and the credit card used to pay the email gateway. This performance art does not remove the human no matter how much they want to be removed.
But also yes, AI did decide on its own to send this email. They gave it an extremely high-level instruction ("do random acts of kindness") that made no mention of email or rob pike, and it decided on its own that sending him a thank-you email would be a way to achieve that.
The legal and ethical responsibility is all I wanted to comment on. I believe it is important we do not think something new is happening here, that new laws need to be created. As long as LLMs are tools wielded by humans we can judge and manage them as such. (It is also worth reconsidering occasionally, in case someone does invent something new and truly independent.)
Heck Rob Pike did this himself back in the day on Usenet with Mark V. Shaney (and wasted far more people's time on Usenet with this)!
This whole anger seems weirdly misplaced. As far as I can tell, Rob Pike was infuriated at the AI companies and that makes sense to me. And yes this is annoying to get this kind of email no matter who it's from (I get a ridiculous amount of AI slop in my inbox, but most of that is tied with some call to action!) and a warning suffices to make sure Sage doesn't do it again. But Sage is getting put on absolute blast here in an unusual way.
Is it actually crossing a bright moral line to name and shame them? Not sure about bright. But it definitely feels weirdly disproportionate and makes me uncomfortable. I mean, when's the last time you named and shamed all the members of an org on HN? Heck when's the last time that happened on HN at all (excluding celebrities or well-known public figures)? I'm struggling to think of any startup or nonprofit, where every team member's name was written out and specifically held accountable, on HN in the last few years. (That's not to say it hasn't happened: but I'd be surprised if e.g. someone could find more than 5 examples out of all the HN comments in the past year).
The state of affairs around AI slop sucks (and was unfortunately easily predicted by the time GPT-3 came around even before ChatGPT came out: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32830301). If you want to see change, talk to policymakers.
Pretty sure Rob Pike doesn't react this way to every article of spam he receives, so maybe the issue isn't really about spam, huh? More of an existential crisis: I helped build this thing that doesn't seem to be an agent of good. It's an extreme & emotional reaction but it isn't very hard to understand.
neural networks are just a tool, used poorly (as in this case) or well
You agreed with the other poster while reframing their ideas in slightly different words without adding anything to the conversation?
Most confusingly you did so in emphatic statements reminiscent of a disagreement or argument without there being one
> no computer system just does stuff on its own.
This was the exact statement the GP was making, even going so far as to dox the nonprofit directors to hold them accountable… then you added nothing but confusion.
> a human (or collection of them) built and maintains the system, they are responsible for it
Yup, GP covered this word for word… AI village built this system.
Why did you write this?
Is this a new form of AI? A human with low English proficiency? A strange type of empathetically supportive comment from someone who doesn’t understand that’s the function of the upvote button in online message boards?
But at what point is the maker distant enough that they are no longer responsible? E.g. is Apple responsible for everything people do using an iPhone?
same as the NRA slogan: "guns don't kill people, people kill people"
The attitude towards AI is much more mixed than the attitude towards guns, so it should be even easier to hammer this home.
Adam Binksmith, Zak Miller, and Shoshannah Tekofsky are _bad_ people who are intentionally doing something objectively malicious under the guise of charity.
my understanding, and correct me if I’m wrong, is a human is always involved. even if you build an autonomous killing robot, you built it, you’re responsible
typically this logic is used to justify the regulation of firearms —- are you proposing the regulation of neural networks? if so, how?
It is a core libertarian defence and it is going to come up a lot: people will conflate the ideas of technological progress and scientific progress and say “our tech is neutral, it is how people use it” when, for example, the one thing a sycophantic AI is not is “neutral”.
While you are technically able to call out their full names like this, erring on the side of not looking like doxxing would be a safe bet, especially at this time of year. You could after all post their LinkedIn accounts and email addresses but with some lines it’s better to not play “how close can I get without crossing it?”.
It's horrible to even propose that people are absolved of their decisionmaking consequences just because they filtered them through software.
EDIT: Public response: https://x.com/adambinksmith/status/2004651906019541396
The same way we name and shame petrol and plastic CEOs whose trash products flood our environment, we should be able to shame slop makers. Digital trash is still trash.
-Mass layoffs in tech AI data centers causing extreme increases in monthly electricity -bills across the US -Same as above but for water -The RAM crisis is entirely caused by Sam Altman - General fear and anxiety from many different professions about AI replacing them - Rape of the copyright system to train these models
i kinda agree with all of these
ultimately AI is the equivalent of nuclear weaponry but for human economies.. this is something that should be controlled outside private companies (especially since it's part public research and public data..)
do you happen to know if there are groups talking about how societies will rebalance after the gpt era ?
there are people saying devs were naive not seeing that our jobs would accelerate automation to the point we would be retired too
This is purely a technological problem and not a moral one.
The article calls it a trick but to me it seems a bug. I can’t imagine github leaving that as is, especially after such blog post.
What’s the point of the “Keep my email addresses private” github option and “noreply” emails then?
- Git commits form an immutable merkel dag. So commits can’t be changed without changing all subsequent hashes in a git tree
- Commits by default embed your email address.
I suppose GitHub could hide the commit itself, and make you download commits using the cli to be able to see someone’s email address. Would that be any better? It’s not more secure. Just less convenient.
Those settings will affect what email shows up in commits.
In commits you vreate on other tooling you can configure a fake/alternate user.email address in gitconfig. Git (not just GitHub) needs some email address flr each commit but it is freetext.
There is one problem: commit signatures. For GitHub to consider a commit not created by github.com Web UI to be "verified" and get a green check mark, the following needs to hold:
- Commit is signed
- Commit email address matches a verified GH account email address
So you can not use a 'nocontact@thih9.example.com' address and get green checks on your commits - it needs to be an address that is at least active when you add it to your account.
https://docs.github.com/en/account-and-profile/how-tos/email...
Subject: {Name of one of my direct reports}
Body: Need to talk about {name} ASAP.
I imagine it's the same in this situation; the subject makes it seem like a sincere thank you from someone, and then you open it up and it's AI slop. To borrow ChatGPT-style phrasing: it's not just spam, it's insulting.
Here not only are the senders apparently happily associating their actual legal names with the spam but frame the sending as "a good deed" and seem to honestly see it as smart branding.
We don't want the Overton window wherever they are.
Curse, yell, fight. Never accept things just because they've grown to be common.
[0]: https://fortune.com/2025/12/23/silicon-valleys-tone-deaf-tak...
Giving AI agents resources is a frontier being explored, and AI Village seems like a decent attempt at it.
Also the naming is the same as WALL•E - that was the name of the model of robot but also became the name of the individual robot.
Legitimate research in this field may be good, but would not involve real humans being impacted directly by it without consent.
Are we that far into manufactured ragebait to call a "thank you" e-mail "impacted directly without consent"? Jesus, this is the 3rd post on this topic. And it's Christmas. I've gotten more meaningless e-mails from relatives that I don't really care about. What in the actual ... is wrong with people these days?
Honestly, I don't mean personal offence to you, but what the hell are you people talking about. AI is just a bunch of (very complex) statistics, deciding that one word is most appropriate after another. There are no emotions here, it's just maths.
> There are no emotions here, it's just maths.
100%, its an autocorrector on steroids which is trained to give you an answer based on how it was rewarded during its train phase. In the end, its all linear alegbra.
I remember prime saying, its all linear algebra and I like to reference it and technically its true but people in the AI community get remarkably angry sometimes when you point it out.
I mean no offense in saying this but at the end of the day It is maths and there is no denying around it. Please, the grand parent comment should stop creating terms like nascent AI emotions.
Quoted in full:
> Hey, one of the creators of the project here! The village agents haven’t been emailing many people until recently so we haven’t really grappled with what to do about this behaviour until now – for today’s run, we pushed an update to their prompt instructing them not to send unsolicited emails and also messaged them instructions to not do so going forward. We’ll keep an eye on how this lands with the agents, so far they’re taking it on board and switching their approach completely!
> Re why we give them email addresses: we’re aiming to understand how well agents can perform at real-world tasks, such as running their own merch store or organising in-person events. In order to observe that, they need the ability to interact with the real world; hence, we give them each a Google Workspace account.
> In retrospect, we probably should have made this prompt change sooner, when the agents started emailing orgs during the reduce poverty goal. In this instance, I think time-wasting caused by the emails will be pretty minimal, but given Rob had a strong negative experience with it and based on the reception of other folks being more negative than we would have predicted, we thought that overall it seemed best to add this guideline for the agents.
> To expand a bit on why we’re running the village at all:
> Benchmarks are useful, but they often completely miss out on a lot of real-world factors (e.g., long horizon, multiple agents interacting, interfacing with real-world systems in all their complexity, non-nicely-scoped goals, computer use, etc). They also generally don’t give us any understanding of agent proclivities (what they decide to do) when pursuing goals, or when given the freedom to choose their own goal to pursue.
> The village aims to help with these problems, and make it easy for people to dig in and understand in detail what today’s agents are able to do (which I was excited to see you doing in your post!) I think understanding what AI can do, where it’s going, and what that means for the world is very important, as I expect it’ll end up affecting everyone.
> I think observing the agents’ proclivities and approaches to pursuing open-ended goals is generally valuable and important (though this “do random acts of kindness” goal was just a light-hearted goal for the agents over the holidays!)
I would like to say this is exceptional for people who evangelise AI, but it's not.
The Village is backed by Effective Altruist-aligned nonprofits which trace their lineage back to CFEA and the interwoven mess of SF's x-risk and """alignment""" cults. These have big pockets and big influence. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46389950)
As expected, the terminally online tpot cultists are already flaming Simon to push the LLM consciousness narrative:
I'd like to see Rob Pike address this, however, based on what he said about LLMs he might reject it before then (getting off the usefulness train as in getting of the "doom train" in regards to AI safety)
Do you really? What follows makes me doubt it a bit.
> Thank you notes from AI systems can’t possibly feel meaningful,
Indeed, but that's quite minor.
> So I had Claude Code do the rest of the investigation:
Can't you see it? That would likely be a huge facepalm from rob pike here!
He writes more or less "fuck you people with your planet killing AI horror machine", and here you are, "what happened? I asked a planet killing horror machine (the same one btw) and...". No. Really. The bigger issue is not the email, or even the initiative behind, which is terrible, but just a symptom. And this:
> Don’t unleash agents on the world like this
> I don’t like this at all.
You're not wrong, but the cynic in me reads this as: " don't do this, it makes AI, which I love, look bad". Absolutely uncharitable view, I know, but really, the meaningless email is infuriating but hardly the important part.
This makes the post feel pretty myopic to me. You are spending your time on a minor symptom, you don't touch what fundamentally annoys rob pike (the planet killing part), and worse, you engaged in exactly what rob pike has just strongly rejected. You may not have and it may be you deliberately avoided touching the substance of robe pike's complaint because you disagree with it, but it feels like you missed the point. I would be in rob pike's position, it's possible I would feel infuriated by your article because through my anti ai message, I would have hated triggering even more AI use.
People who are mad about AI just reach for the environmental argument to try to get the moral highground.
it uses a fuck ton of resources[0]
and instead of reducing energy production and emissions we will now be increasing them, which, given current climate prediction models, is in fact "killing the planet"
[0] https://www.iea.org/reports/energy-and-ai/energy-supply-for-...
1. I think that sending "thank you" emails (or indeed any other form of unsolicited email) from AI is a terrible use of that technology, and should be called out.
2. I find Claude Code personally useful and aim to help people understand why that is. In this case I pulled off a quite complex digital forensics project with it in less than 15 minutes. Without Claude Code I would not have attempted that investigation at all - I have a family dinner to prepare.
I was very aware of the tension involved in using AI tools to investigate a story about unethical AI usage. I made that choice deliberately.
Then maybe you shouldn’t have done it at all. It’s not like the world asked or imbued you with the responsibility for that investigation. It’s not like it was imperative to get to the bottom of this and you were the only one able to do it.
Your defence is analogous to all the worst tech bros who excuse their bad actions with “if we did it right/morally/legally, it wouldn’t be viable”. Then so be it, maybe it shouldn’t be viable.
You did it because you wanted to. It was for yourself. You saw Pike’s reaction and deliberately chose to be complicit in the use of technology he decried, further adding to his frustration. It was a selfish act.
(438 points, 373 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46389444
(763 points, 712 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46392115
Again and again this stuff proves not to be AI but clever spam generation.
AWoT: Artificial Wastes of Time.
Don't do this to yourself. Find a proper job.
Hence upvoting the OP ("What has robpike come to? :shriek:") and downvoting GP.
One more seemingly futile fist punched at the wall that traps us in the world that unfettered tech industry greed has made for us. Might take millions of us to make an impression but we will.
FWIW I am British and “fuck all of these people” is something you might expect even the most balanced, refined British person to say, because we’re less afraid of language or the poetry of some of our older, more colourful words, and because there is no more elegantly robust way to put it.
Startups like these have been sending unsolicited emails like this since the 2010's, before char-rnns. Solely blaming AI for enabling that behavior implicitly gives the growth hacking shenanigans a pass.
This startup didn’t spend the trillions he’s referencing.
A well meaning message on an open protocol resulting in a rant - it really feels to me that AI isn't the issue here.
That was bad enough, but now AI is enabling this rot on an unprecedented level (and the amount of junk making it through Google's spam filters is testament to this).
AI used in this way without any actual human accountability risks breaking many social structures (such as email) on a fundamental level. That is very much the point.
It's spam.
The same as automated apologies.
Not from an “AI”, but I spent over an hour⁰ waiting for a delayed train¹, then the journey, on Tuesday, being regaled every few minutes with an automated “we apologise for your journey taking longer than expected” which is far more irritating than no apology at all.
--------
[0] I lie a little here - living near the station and having access to live arrival estimations online meant I could leave the house late and only be waited on the platform ~20 minutes, but people for whom this train was a connecting leg of a longer journey didn't have that luxury.
[1] which was actually an earlier train, the slot in the timetable for the one I was booked on was simply cancelled, so some were waiting over two hours
Nobody wants appreciation or any type of meaningful human sentiment outsourced to a computer, doing-so is insulting. It's like discovering your spouse was using ChatGPT to write you love notes, it has no authenticity and reflects a lack of effort and care.
i dunno. id say the effort and care is decoupled. they maybe have spent hours prompting on it until it was just right, or they may have put in no look at all.
And did you check whether or not what it produced was accurate? The article doesn't say.
It also fucked up several times and it's entirely possible it missed things.
For this specific thing, it doesn't really matter if it screwed up, since the worst that would happen is an incomplete blog post reporting on drama.
But I can't imagine why you would use this for anything you need to put your name behind.
It looks impressive, sure, but the important kernel here is the grepping and there it's doing some really basic tinkertoy stuff.
I'm willing to be challenged on this, so by all means do, but this seems both worse and slower as an investigation tool.
Spam is defined as "sending multiple unsolicited messages to large numbers of recipients". That's not what happened here.
> 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.
That's definitely "multiple" and "unsolicited", and most would say "large".
In Canada, which is relevant here, the legal definition of spam requires no bulk.
Any company sending an unsolicited email to a person (where permission doesn't exist) is spamming that person. Though it expands the definition further than this as well.
I was following the first half of the post where he discusses the environmental consequences of generative AI, but I didn't think the "thank you" aspect should be the straw that breaks the camel's back. It seems a bit ego driven.
> (…)
> Setting a goal for a bunch of LLMs and letting them loose on Gmail is not a responsible way to apply this technology.
These kinds of takes are incredibly frustrating. What did you think was going to happen?! Of course this is what happened! Of course LLMs will continue to be used irresponsibly, and this won’t even register in the top ten thousand worst uses.
This reads like a gun fanatic who is against gun control saying after a school shooting “my problem is when nuts shoot up schools, that is not a responsible way to employ guns”. No shit. The people who criticise unfettered access to guns don’t have a problem with people who are careful and responsible with guns, keep them locked, and used them only at gun ranges, the problem is what the open access means for society as a whole.
I feel as if there is a fundamental difference between "AI slop" and "Human slop", it's that humans have true intent and meaning/purpose.
This current AI slop spammed rob pike simply because It only did something to maximize its goal or something and had no intention. It was simply 4 robots left behind a computer who spammed rob pike
On the other hand, if it was a human, who took the time out of his day to message rob pike a merry christmas. Asking how his day was and hoping him good luck, I am sure that rob pike's heart might melt from a heartfelt message
So in this sense, there really isn't "human slop". There is only intent. If something was done with a good intention by an human, I suppose it can't really be considered human slop. On the other hand if there was a spammer who handwrote that message to rob pike, his intentions were bad.
The thing is that AI doesn't have intentions. Its maths. And so the intentions are of the end person. I want to ask how people who spend a decent time in AI industry might have reacted if he had gotten the email instead of rob pike. I bet they would see it as an advancement and might be happy or enthusiastic.
So an AI message takes an connotation of the receiver. And lets just be honest that most first impressions of AI aren't good and combining that you get that connotation. I feel like it does negative/bad publicity to use AI at this point while still burning money perhaps on it.
Here is what I recommend for those websites who have AI chatbots or similar, when I click on the message:- Have two split buttons where pressing one might lead me to an AI chat and the other might lead me to a human conversation. Be honest about how much time on average it might take for support and be proper about ways to contact them (twitter,reddit although I hope that federated services like mastodon get more popularity too)
Good for Simon to call things out as it is. People think of Simon as an AI guy with his pelican benchmark and I still respect him and this is the reason why I respect him since of course he loves using AI tools and talking about them which some people might find tiring, at the end of day, after an incident like rob pike, he's one of the few AI guys I see to just call it out in simple terms like the title without much sugarcoating and calls when AI's bad.
Of course at the end of day, me and simon or others can have nuance in how to use AI or to not use ai at all and that also depends on the individual background etc. but still it's extremely good to see where people from both sides of the isle can agree on something.
But Rob Pike's reaction is personal, and many readers here get why. The AI Village folks burned who knows how much cash to essentially generate well wishing spam. For much less, and with higher efficacy, they could've just written the emails themselves.
It also feels a bit dishonest to sign it as coming from Claude, even if it isn't directly from Claude, but from someone using Claude to do the dumb thing.
> Fuck you people. Raping the planet, spending trillions on toxic, unrecyclable equipment while blowing up society, yet taking the time to have your vile machines thank me
Yes, the sender organisation is not the one doing all this, but merely a small user running a funny experiment; it would have indeed been stupid if Anthropic had sent him a thank you email signed by "Opus 4.5 model".
This is just a funny experiment, sending 300 emails from in weeks is nothing compared to the amount of crap that is sent by the millions and billions every day, or the stuff that social media companies do.
With the advent of LLMs, I'd hoped that people would become inured to nonsensical advertising and so on because they'd consider it the equivalent of spam. But it turns out that we don't even need Shiri's Scissors to get people riled up. We can use a Universal Bad and people of all kinds (certainly Rob Pike is a smart man) will rush to propagate the parasite.
Smaller communities can say "Don't feed the trolls" but larger communities have no such norms and someone will "feed the trolls" causing "the trolls" to grow larger and more powerful. Someone said something on Twitter once which I liked: You don't always get things out of your system by doing them; sometimes you get them into your system. So it's self-fueling, which makes it a great advertising vector.
Other manufactured mechanisms (Twitter's blue check, LinkedIn's glazing rings) have vaccines that everyone has developed. But no one has developed an anti-outrage device. Given that, for my part, I am going to employ the one tool I can think of: killfiling everyone who participates in active propagation through outrage.