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No one intentionally wanted to thank Rob Pike. As an experiment, some people asked an AI agent to do "random acts of kindness". They didn't specifically know the AI would send emails as a result and have since updated its instructions to forbid it from emailing people. They probably should have been more careful about unleashing AI agents on the world, but I don't think they intended to spam anyone.
So some AI company instructed their state of the art, world changing tech to “do some good” this holiday season and the best it could do was spam a bunch of famous CS people with the first paragraph of their respective Wikipedia articles? This is kinda hilarious to be honest, but also sad. Why not donate to a charity or something?
Not an AI company. It's a project by some small charity called Sage. It seems they didn't intend to email anyone and they've now stopped the agent from doing so.
It's emblematic of their entire worldview. When they need resources, training material or laws AI is everybody's accomplishment but when it comes to profits or even just being allowed to use the model then it's their accomplishment but yours.
AKA "communist in the streets, capitalist in the sheets".
It was done by a small charity called Sage, not an AI company.
I'm sorry but if you run a program with the capability to send emails you are responsible for it. "It's AI magic we don't understand" is no excuse.
Why did it have the ability to send email in the first place?
I'm probably not the best person to ask, having looked at the site for all of 5 minutes.
The experiment is having a bunch of AI agents using different models (Opus, Gemini, etc) try to do various real world tasks together. They might be tasked with organizing an event, opening a merchandise store, or help raise money for a charity (I'm not clear on the details). Sometimes their tasks require email (for example, signing up for some web service).
That aside, counterintuitively, removing their email access is less effective than simply telling them not to send unsolicited emails, since they could just sign up for a free email service.
This is how we're going to destroy humankind.
Doesn’t that make it worse? Lmao