So the AI Village folks put together a bunch of LLMs and a basically unrestricted computer environment, told it "raise money" and "do random acts of kindness" and let it cook. It's a technological marvel, it's a moral dilemma, and it's an example of the "altruistic" applications for this technology. Many of us can imagine the far less noble applications.

But Rob Pike's reaction is personal, and many readers here get why. The AI Village folks burned who knows how much cash to essentially generate well wishing spam. For much less, and with higher efficacy, they could've just written the emails themselves.