🔗 Simon Willison: How Rob Pike got spammed with an AI slop “act of kindness”

Rob Pike (that Rob Pike) is furious […] Rob got a 100% AI-generated email credited to “Claude Opus 4.5 AI Village” thanking him for his contributions to computing. He did not appreciate the gesture.

Got a lot of emotional swings while reading this: outrage that someone would use AI agents to send spam like this, understanding as to what actually happened, then distaste with those responsible in their belief that the time wasted receiving emails like this is an acceptable external cost.

But really, the whole experiment seems irresponsible. I can understand the want to see what these models could do, but come on: don’t given them access to a computer open to the Internet without any supervision. Rob Pike, a notable computer scientist that would be known to all these models, is right to be outraged. I would be too if I received this sort of unsolicited slop.