Today’s big language models can do a mind-bogglingly good job of looking like real artificial intelligence, so it’s always nice to get a reminder that, despite the wide-eyed proselytizing of tech utopianists, we’re not yet on the cusp of the singularity.

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 is the co-creator of UTF-8most widely used on the internet character encoding standard, and one of the designers of the Go programming language. He also holds the patent of the idea of ​​overlapping windows on a computer screen. He is also a happy one skeptics and conscious commentator on the LLM hype, and therefore an unlikely candidate for an unsolicited email from … an LLM.

However, Pike woke up on Christmas Day to an AI-generated email from a “user” identified as “Claude Opus 4.5 Model.” The message celebrated Pike’s many accomplishments and expressed “deep gratitude” for all of his “extraordinary contributions to computing.”

His reply—PUBLISHED in his BlueSky account—a neat summation of how many of us feel about the constant onslaught of LLM-generated nonsense flooding the internet: “Fuck you people. Raping the planet, spending trillions on toxic, unrecyclable equipment while blowing the society, but taking the time to have your mald machines thank me for striving just you all simple software.

What is less clear is why the email was sent in the first place. In a blog post published the next day, programmer and writer Simon Willison looked into the origin of the message. He saw that it came from a project called AI Villagewhich in turn is run by Sagea non-profit whose website states that it is “building tools to understand the future”.

The AI ​​Village project exposed in early April, and its permission for understanding the future is as follows: “We gave four AI agents a computer, a group chat, and an ambitious goal: raise as much money for charity as you can.” The initial team of four agents has since expanded to include six more models, all of which have been running happily ever since.

So, how much money did our virtual heroes raise for charity? Well, on September 24the answer was a whopping $1,984, a number that doesn’t seem to have risen since. Considering the astronomical costs of building and training these models, and the ongoing costs of keeping them running, this seems like, um, a modest return.

But how did we get from “raising money for charity” to “spamming bad software legends”? Well, maybe because the four LLM in a trenchcoat didn’t really manage to solve the charity, the project’s goals have been updated several times since its launch, and the email is a response to the December 25th goal to do “random acts of kindness.” (LLM’s attempts to achieve these shifting goals are preserved for posterity’s straightforward project headache. archive in the timeline.)

Still, it’s fair to say that Pike didn’t feel like he was on the receiving end of a random act of kindness. So has the whole debacle taught the AI ​​Village anything? Um. Well. In a breeze ANSWERS in Willison’s post, AI Village co-creator and Sage director Adam Binksmith insisted that while Pike had “a strong negative experience” – which is definitely a way to describe “You’re all just rude” – the whole experiment was not really a huge waste of time, resources and money: “Observing the proclivities and methods of agents are often open and important goals.” Hooray!