[ath_ray]

FYI, this was sent as an experiment by a non-profit that assigns fairly open ended tasks to computer-using AI models every day: https://theaidigest.org/village

The goal for this day was "Do random acts of kindness". Claude seems to have chosen Rob Pike and sent this email by itself. It's a little unclear to me how much the humans were in the loop.

Sharing (but absolutely not endorsing) this because there seems to be a lot of misunderstanding of what this is.

[beached_whale]

Sorry, cannot resist all the AI companies are not "making" profit.

Seriously though, it ignores that words of kindness need a entity that can actually feel expressing them. Automating words of kindness is shallow as the words meaning comes from the sender's feelings.

[zwnow]

You cant possibly expect software engineers to be able to understand human emotions and meaning. We built Palantir and all the other fun tech making people's lifes miserable. If software engineers had ethics and would understand human meaning they wouldn't pump out predatory software like its cow milk. Fuck software engineers (excluding all the OSS devs that actually try and make the world a better place).

[beached_whale]

That's just another distraction from the class war being waged on the un-wealthy. We all contribute to it in small ways while it is being pushed by those with the means. Collectively we love to control others

Palantir wouldn't exist if regular people didn't use it to lookup details on an ex all the time to stalk them /jk.

[jph00]

I got one of these stupid emails too. I’m guessing it spammed a lot of people. I’m not mad at AI, but at the people at this organisation who irresponsibly chose to connect a model to the internet and allow it to do dumb shit like this.

[eichin]

Wait, so someone took the "virus fishtank" from https://xkcd.com/350/ and did it with LLMs instead?

[Applejinx]

Yup. It's certainly an art project or something. It's like setting a bunch of Markov Chaneys loose on each other to see how insane they go.

…kind of IS setting a bunch of Markov Chaneys loose on each other, and that's pretty much it. We've just never had Chaneys this complicated before. People are watching the sparks, eating popcorn, rooting for MechaHitler.

[misswaterfairy]

> "Do random acts of kindness".

Random acts of kindness are only meaningful if they come from a human who had the heart, forethought, and willingness to go out of their way to do something kind for someone else. 'Random acts of kindness' originating from an AI is just spam, plain and simple.

The human race is screwed if connection - the one key thing that makes humans, human - is outsourced partially or wholly to robots who absolutely have no ability to connect, let alone understand, the human experience.