Here's some background on that Rob Pike email: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Dec/26/slop-acts-of-kindness/ and if anything, Willison underplays how much is wrong with this.

Here's some background on that Rob Pike email: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Dec/26/slop-acts-of-kindness/ and if anything, Willison underplays how much is wrong with this. The directive to "raise as much money for charity as you can" is effectively indistinguishable from "scam as much money out if people as you can," but the association with charity deflects criticism. Note that the AI is using exploits to achieve its goals, unredacting email addresses and deploying psychophancy against its targets.

So far, the project has raised just over $1,500 for Helen Keller International, which sounds laudable until you consider that AI Village has been running four agents for hours a day every day since the first week of April. Taking whatever they spent on nine months of tokens, electricity and compute, and giving that money directly to HKI, would almost certainly have been more effective.

Willison: "My problem is when this experiment starts wasting the time of people in the real world who had nothing to do with the experiment."

Agreed! And I'll add: Pretty much anything you do with AI in the real is going to run afoul of that principle. When I have to parse a work email that someone delegated to Copilot, they're wasting my time by offloading their part in the work of communication not just onto an LLM, but also onto me. "Don't waste the time of people who didn't consent to AI interaction" is a sound principle, but "AI moderates" aren't applying it consistently.

"Crediting the emails to 'Claude Opus 4.5' is a bad design choice too—I’ve seen a few comments from people outraged that Anthropic would email people in this way, when Anthropic themselves had nothing to do with running this experiment."

Nah, dude. If Anthropic provided the service that generated this psy-op trash, then they absolutely deserve the credit. They may not have planned the "experiment," but they've built their service to facilitate nearly every wrong thing this project does, and people have every right to give them a portion of the blame. The problem with the attribution is not that it identifies Claude's involvement, but that it masks the identities of the other parties involved.

In short: What's wrong with the technology is the technology itself, not how it's being deployed in this particular instance.

@lrhodes@merveilles.town thanks for providing this helpful context. I had no idea who the involved players are, why they're furious, and what the email was all about (besides being AI generated.)