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Simon Willison
@simonwillison.net

Yeah, I'd be pretty furious if I got spam email from some "AI agent" thanking me for my contributions too I dug into what happened here, turns out it's an experiment called "AI Village" which unleashes all sorts of other junk emails on the world: simonwillison.net/2025/Dec/26/...

simonwillison.netHow Rob Pike got spammed with an AI slop “act of kindness”Rob Pike (that Rob Pike) is furious. Here’s a Bluesky link for if you have an account there and a link to it in my thread viewer if you don’t. …
rob pike@robpike.io

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 for striving for simpler software. Just fuck you. Fuck you all. I can't remember the last time I was this angry.

Phillip Carter
@phillipcarter.dev

I know hindsight is 20/20 but it does boggle the mind just a smidge that they didn't just send all emails to /dev/null or at least some database to audit later

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The Dark Prince of Donair
@erisianrite.com

Because you wouldn't be able to learn from a full interaction nor would it have any ecological validity (ie it wouldn't apply to the real world and thus invalidate their benchmarks). It would make more sense for it to be opt-in, but even that runs some risk of invalidating the experiement

Phillip Carter
@phillipcarter.dev

Sure, but as we both know, you can go a loooong way with synthetic data and just judging it for yourself for a pretty comprehensive baseline. Real interactions are obviously better but introduce so many other complexities, like how labeling the author as an agent influences a response