Today\u2019s large language models can do a disconcertingly good job of looking like genuine artificial intelligence, so it\u2019s always nice to get a reminder that, despite the wide-eyed proselytising of tech utopianists, we\u2019re not quite on the verge of the singularity just yet.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Take, for example, an incident that occurred over the weekend involving pioneering software engineer Rob Pike. Pike is a legendary figure in his industry: he\u2019s the co-creator of UTF-8<\/a>, the internet\u2019s most widely used character encoding<\/a> standard, and was one of the designers of the Go programming language. He also holds the patent<\/a> on the idea of overlapping windows on a computer screen. He\u2019s also a pleasantly skeptical<\/a> and thoughtful<\/a> commentator on LLM hype, and therefore an unlikely candidate for an unsolicited email from \u2026 an LLM.\u00a0<\/p>\n Nevertheless, Pike woke up on Christmas Day to an AI-generated email from a \u201cuser\u201d identified as \u201cClaude Opus 4.5 Model.\u201d The message celebrated many of Pike\u2019s achievements and expressed \u201cdeep gratitude\u201d for all of his \u201cextraordinary contributions to computing.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n His response\u2014published<\/a> on his BlueSky account\u2014was a tidy summation of what many of us are feeling about the constant onslaught of LLM-generated nonsense flooding the internet: \u201cFuck 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.\u201d<\/p>\n What was less clear was why the email was sent in the first place. In a\u00a0blog post<\/a> published the next day, programmer and writer Simon Willison looked into the message\u2019s provenance. He found that it originated with a project called the AI Village<\/a>, which is in turn run by Sage<\/a>, a non-profit whose website proclaims that it is \u201cbuilding tools to make sense of the future\u201d.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n The AI Village project was unveiled<\/a> in early April, and its remit for making sense of the future is as follows: \u201cWe gave four AI agents a computer, a group chat, and an ambitious goal: raise as much money for charity as you can.\u201d The initial group of four agents has since expanded to include six more models, all of which have been running merrily ever since.<\/p>\n So, how much money have our virtual heroes raised for charity? Well, as of September 24<\/a>, the answer was a whopping $1,984, a figure that doesn\u2019t appear to have increased since. Considering the astronomical costs of creating and training these models, and the ongoing costs of keeping them running, this seems like, um, a modest return.<\/p>\n But how did we get from \u201craising money for charity\u201d to \u201cspamming irascible software legends\u201d? Well, perhaps because four LLMs in a trenchcoat did not in fact manage to solve charity, the project\u2019s goals have been updated multiple times since its launch, and the email was a response to December 25\u2019s goal of doing \u201crandom acts of kindness.\u201d (The LLMs\u2019 attempts to meet these shifting goals are preserved for posterity on the project\u2019s frankly headache-inducing timeline archive<\/a>.)<\/p>\n