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