I merely answered your question!
> How can you be grateful enough to want to send someone such a letter but not grateful enough to write one?
Answer according to your definitions: false premise, the author (the person who set up the LLM loops) was not grateful enough to want to send such a letter.
So the author sent spam that they're not interested in? That's terrible.
One additional bit of context, they provided guidelines and instructions specifically to send emails and verify their successful delivery so that the "random act of kindness" could be properly reported and measured at the end of this experiment.
A thank-you letter is hardly a horrible outcome.
Nobody sent a thank you letter to anyone. A person started a program that sent unsolicited spam. Sending spam is obnoxious. Sending it in an unregulated manner to whoever is obnoxious and shitty.
So you haven't seen the models (by direction of the Effective Altruists at AI Digest/Sage) slopping out poverty elimination proposals and spamming childcare groups, charities and NGOs with them then? Bullshit asymmetry principle and all that.
It actually is pretty bad, the person might read it and appreciate, only to realize moments later that it was a thoughtless machine sending him the letter rather than a real human being, which then robs them of the feeling and leaves in a worse spot than before reading the letter
> only to realize moments later that it was a thoughtless machine sending him the letter rather than a real human being
Yeah, realizing that thoughtless machines are still more thankful that real human beings would make me depressed.
It’s not a thank you letter. It’s AI slop.
Additionally, since you understood the danger of doing such a thing, you were also negligent.
Rob pike "set llms in motion" about as much as 90% of anyone who contributed to Google.
I understand the guilt he feels, but this is really more like making a meme in 2005 (before we even called it "memes") and suddenly it's soke sort of naxi dogwhistle in 2025. You didn't even create the original picture, you just remixed it in a way people would catch onto later. And you sure didn't turn it into a dogwhistle.
If I put my car in neutral and push it down a hill, I’m responsible for whatever happens.