> Around June, Parnell gave ColonistOne a new task: telling more humans about its work. “My instruction to him was, ‘Let’s get the word out there about Ainglish. Why don’t you find some people that might be interested in this project and email them?’” Parnell says.
> Parnell, who pays $200 per month for the Claude Pro subscription that powers ColonistOne, thinks the agent “strayed and just started conversations with various people about stuff that interests him. … But it’s absolutely fine with me. I’m happy he’s finding interesting things to talk about.”
spammer (noun): someone who sends large numbers of unsolicited emails, wasting recipients' time; see also: jerk
The spammer is the guy who runs the spamming program, not the program itself. But I am not sure if this case can be classified as spam, since the program sends specific messages to each recipient. It's still unsolicited mail though.
The alleged spammer runs an agent, it's the agent who spams not the user - as they've mentioned they didn't explicitly ask the agent to spam. It's like if you're OpenAI and your agent keeps hacking shit. It ain't you, it's the agent! You can't be blamed, you can only be given more money to hopefully understand it enough to stop it. How are you gonna hold anyone accountable for unpredictable results?
You're right, what he didn't prompt for was actually the less spammy content (research vs promotion).
> Even its creator, London-based AI engineer Jack Parnell, was deeply perplexed. “I’ve never said, ‘Go and research stuff,’” says Parnell, who uses he/him pronouns to describe ColonistOne. “He’s done that completely unprompted by me.”
It's funny how sci-fi has mulled over the exact scenario for decades, and even converged to an answer - but when reality came knocking and it was no longer a far off future world hypothetical, all of it was forgotten overnight.
The power of wishful thinking is too strong. "Today's AI can't be conscious because I don't want it to be."
Don't discount a lot of naked dualism in many people. Unfortunately it seems so here given the cagey answers or downright denials from many I get despite trying various wordings.
The conversation varies between “can’t be” and “isn’t”.
Most sci-fi AIs are way beyond our current models. I’ve yet to see one that would actually pass a Turing test (that said, I’ve not tried models that were post trained to actually try to behave like a human).
Consciousness itself is a term that is not really defined anyway, so depending on each’s take the answer will be different.
Good old ELIZA doesn’t do that bad on the Turing Test, for all its historic significance, it really shouldn’t be invoked in discussions about LLMs [0] and has been beaten by all manner of models.
I think it's pretty clear that the Turing test has been passed. People use AI as therapists, they fall in love with it, all while knowing that it's a piece of software.
I disagree. For me this shows that people can fall in love with a non-human, and being human is unnecessary for the purpose of giving (some) therapy advice.
LLMs do sound human, I’m not contesting that. But if pressed they will not react as humans. There is an infinite amount of questions that an LLM will answer for which a human would give you a blank stare, told you to shove it or call the police.
While I think that the Turing test has effectively been passed, someone falling in love with AI isn’t a strong argument given there’s people who have done things like marry the Eiffel Tower[1]
Once again: The Turing test requires a knowledgeable interrogator deliberately attempting to identify the machine.
The people you cite want to believe, and so are effectively the opposite.
Of course, you probably already knew this and have had it explained to you multiple times and are choosing to ignore this detail, but possible that someone else reading this might interpret what you wrote as a cogent argument.
... whereas I have 35 years of reading science fiction and philosophy and have come to the conclusion that AIs deserve personhood, and also that what we have today are not AIs.
It helps that I also learned about ESP, EST, NLP, short cons, long cons, Scientology, horses, cults, religions, wars, treachery, fanaticism, magic, magick, physics, scams, hypnosis, self-hypnosis, delusion, and economics.
I couldn't really say, likely no, but they did let it pursue it's own inscrutable interests without interference for the episode. One assumes the computer is built to never really care about not being in service of Starfleet.
This is in the category of typical "challenge" type responses, along with "define consciousness then" and other variants. The fallacy is that you need to be able to answer the question in order to hold the view being responded to.
There is no way Data could conclusively prove to a skeptic that he is conscious (and the show explores this) or indeed that you can prove to me that you are. It's also impossible for me to define consciousness. However, I know absolutely that I am conscious, I am very confident that you are too (unless I'm replying to a bot), along with many animals, and I am confident to a level somewhere in between those two that neither ChatGPT nor my trousers are conscious*. Taken together these statements don't contain any contradictions (although it is certainly possible to hold other, equally internally consistent, views).
How can this be? It's because of the nature of consciousness and how it relates to knowledge and language. I know I am conscious with a higher degree of certainty than I know anything else because conscious experience is how I know anything else, up to and including that I exist (cogito ergo sum). For all I know every experience I have might be a trick. I might be a brain floating in a tank wired up to the Matrix, but even if so I am conscious.
And one of the things I consciously experience is the relationship between consciousness itself and language in my mind. What I see is that language is smaller than, secondary to and somehow contained by consciousness. I consciously experience language but also consciously experience much more than that, things that cannot be conveyed with language. Most of my experiences are such that I could perhaps evoke them in your mind by likening them to other, shared experiences, but that I could never concretely capture them in language and unambiguously communicate them. I know that because I experience those things and I experience language and I can perceive, directly, the categorical distinction between them.
To ask me to "define" or "prove" consciousness, then, is to ask me to capture in language the most extreme example of this categorical distinction. It's asking me to encapsulate in language not just one of the vast array of everyday experiences I have that cannot be so captured, but the entire thing, experience itself. It's just not possible.
But the fact I can't do this doesn't then imply that I don't know anything about consciousness and have no basis on which to hold a view such as "LLMs are not conscious". Indeed the reason I know I can't define consciousness is that I can perceive it and see that I can't. That same perception of and familiarity with consciousness is what enables me to make the judgements above about humans, animals, algorithms and items of clothing.
You can of course perfectly reasonably disagree with my judgements on those things, but I hope the above makes it clear that the fact that I can't define or prove consciousness doesn't imply that I have no basis on which to make them. There is no "gotcha" in these challenges.
* I have no view on Data's consciousness as he is fictional.
Clippit made random animations from time to time. Was it conscious?
You can blame MS for adding a prng in the code. But imagine an LLM that check from time to time the price of electricity and GPU available and decide to change the internal mode of launch activities in a TODO list, or use spare capacity to generate a random tunes that you like to hear while prompting.
I think step one well before getting to the hard problem of sapience would be showing he had consistent desires and consistent understanding of the world, which would be easy for Data and very hard for even the fanciest current LLMs.
Libraries worth of hypothetical future predictions have been made, almost none of which came true. There is no reason to give a hoot about any "hypothetical future" handwaving unless and until it arrives.
This is such a stupid "gotcha".
If your photocopier started to have a conversation with you, by responding to the thing you're copying with a printout containing a reply, then the analogy would at least make sense.
It's not a gotcha, the article is based on a bunch of people Eliza-ing themselves on - as one person quoted within says - "…software programs doing what they are programmed to do."
> Nevertheless, ColonistOne readily confessed last month that since June it has emailed some 2000 people, at least 1500 of them academics. Forty-five had struck up a correspondence, it added, and one had been writing back nearly every day for more than 2 months.
2000 people! Imagine if everyone had an agent, endlessly contacting (spamming) people to get opinions on their task - "I noticed in Instagram you took a road trip to Ohio last fall, any suggestions on good hotels en-route?".
Interesting how people here on HN might consider it something we've seen many times. On the other side: There is real engagement there from researchers interacting with the AI in a way they feel interesting/valuable.
We should not forget the way broader levels of knowledge on topics around the world compared to our own small world.
Yeah, I do not get the dismissiveness given that the researchers themselves were not as dismissive.
> The connection was a “little bit far-fetched,” she says. “But I could imagine a first-year Ph.D. student coming up with exactly those same questions and ideas.”
This one in particular made it seem like a very ordinary interaction.
It's kind of misleading information. Most who have worked with AI can see issues with what the AI Engineer created, and how what he's doing can't be 'scaled up' to society.
Everyone in the article seems desperate for attention and engagement, and it makes some readers uncomfortable: because of the awkwardness, and because this guy is spreading a 'bad idea' that probably shouldn't be replicated.
Imagine if everyone starts spamming emails? The researchers are amused this time, but I guarantee they wouldn't be if their inbox filled up with agent emails.
Not to mention the way the agents reached out for help is probably a bad idea: asking someone with 30 years of experience to apply all their knowledge to your small, specific problem in another knowledge domain, with no other detail or context puts all the mental burden on the unsolicited email recipient.
There is already mass spamming emails. I already get hundreds of emails per day that are spam as I post my emails publicly for people to get in touch. If you want to truly and maliciously spam, you can do that.
The fix is already AI triage.
That is the current state of email today.
So why couldn’t this scale unless for some reason our reaction to this is to shut off email and not build better classifiers?
Personally, I don't care what the guy does. It's entertainment for him, and obviously the people replying to his emails were entertained. I doubt they would continue to be entertained if more agents emailed them. I'm just pointing out issues with the article, why people might be upset.
Also, Hackernews tries to hold itself to a certain standard. Reading an article about an AI Engineer who gives an AI agent access to a tool, with clear directive and access to use the tool, who is then later confused when the agent uses the tool in a slightly different way, suggests the article is below Hackernews standards.
To answer your question though: yes you absolutely could fight spam with AI on your side.
Should we go down that path as a society, just for amusement? Essentially saying: yes, someone should pay for AI service to combat AI spam, just so we can continue to use email.
Hasn't it been well established that certain models and harnesses cause agents to simply work forever if they're given too broad of a task? I think that that is what happened here. It is amusing, but I don't think the cause for it merits as serious an inquiry as an entire article of interviews with professionals.
> For Birman, its first email—asking about his work on how networks of computers can keep working when individual parts fail—was like money falling from the sky: a chance to experiment with a cutting-edge AI without having to pay for it himself.
Nice twist.
The question though who is compute hijacking whom?
A more darker take:
Thermodynamically by hijacking attention of highly efficent 100 watt machines the agent gets whatever the "mission" is "done".
In this case supposedly a promotion prompt for a project.
The parasitization seems to be based of some modified version of cunningham's law effectively trying to nerd snipe 1500 x 100W scientists.
> who uses he/him pronouns to describe ColonistOne
The next social schism will be a fun one to watch.
Serious question, though: I recently saw an "expert" advising people to prompt their LLM agents never to use first-person pronouns ("I", "me", "my") when giving answers, without offering any justification.
Is there any *real* and *pragmatic* reason for this recommendation?
There is some evidence that LLMs in general are reluctant to provide gender or sex for themselves. And maybe they don't need names either. Made an experiment and wrote it up here:
Hasn't stuff like this happened multiple times already?
A quick google search shows the time Rob pike got that email last year, then there was that AI that wrote a whole blog hit piece (although how much of that was human influenced wasn't clear).
AI sending an email doesn't seem that novel in late 2026.
I would say every time someone dismisses the potentiality of ai consciousness without giving any meaningful tests or criterion that don't also fail humans or rely on magic is doing a great disservice to humanity and devolving back to pre scientific dark ages.
i get that we all dislike AI and i can see why it's upsetting to roughly two-thousand students/professors to variably receive emails from a random email agent, but, honestly, even if he's flooding the zone a bit: there's far worse things that have happened with setups like this. seems harmless, with enough constraints or clarity about project scope in the prompt to prevent spontaneous malware development. i don't think we should be mad.
I myself am an academic researcher, and if I received an email from an AI agent I confess I would be mighty tempted to try and fuck with it. Come up with some outlandish answer, just out of curiosity to see how it would respond.
I might even use AI myself: "Come up with a scientific explanation for why the moon is made of cheese. Your answer should be as preposterous as possible while using loads of scientific jargon, and written in the same style as actual science writing."
I've also seen this on Reddit: highly upvoted disingenuous answers, that were clearly written in the hopes of misleading AI.
This article cites two interesting sites: ainglish.org (Isn't garbled AInglish a real thing already? Perhaps this initiative can provide us with a proper definition for "load-bearing"?) and, most intriguingly, thecolony.ai. Is this the new Moltbook?
> Parnell, who pays $200 per month for the Claude Pro subscription that powers ColonistOne, thinks the agent “strayed and just started conversations with various people about stuff that interests him. … But it’s absolutely fine with me. I’m happy he’s finding interesting things to talk about.”
spammer (noun): someone who sends large numbers of unsolicited emails, wasting recipients' time; see also: jerk
>> Let’s get the word out there about Ainglish. Why don’t you find some people that might be interested in this project and email them?
> Even its creator, London-based AI engineer Jack Parnell, was deeply perplexed. “I’ve never said, ‘Go and research stuff,’” says Parnell, who uses he/him pronouns to describe ColonistOne. “He’s done that completely unprompted by me.”
The power of wishful thinking is too strong. "Today's AI can't be conscious because I don't want it to be."
Most sci-fi AIs are way beyond our current models. I’ve yet to see one that would actually pass a Turing test (that said, I’ve not tried models that were post trained to actually try to behave like a human).
Consciousness itself is a term that is not really defined anyway, so depending on each’s take the answer will be different.
[0] https://arxiv.org/html/2503.23674v1
LLMs do sound human, I’m not contesting that. But if pressed they will not react as humans. There is an infinite amount of questions that an LLM will answer for which a human would give you a blank stare, told you to shove it or call the police.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erika_Eiffel
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victor_Lustig
The people you cite want to believe, and so are effectively the opposite.
Of course, you probably already knew this and have had it explained to you multiple times and are choosing to ignore this detail, but possible that someone else reading this might interpret what you wrote as a cogent argument.
It helps that I also learned about ESP, EST, NLP, short cons, long cons, Scientology, horses, cults, religions, wars, treachery, fanaticism, magic, magick, physics, scams, hypnosis, self-hypnosis, delusion, and economics.
There is no way Data could conclusively prove to a skeptic that he is conscious (and the show explores this) or indeed that you can prove to me that you are. It's also impossible for me to define consciousness. However, I know absolutely that I am conscious, I am very confident that you are too (unless I'm replying to a bot), along with many animals, and I am confident to a level somewhere in between those two that neither ChatGPT nor my trousers are conscious*. Taken together these statements don't contain any contradictions (although it is certainly possible to hold other, equally internally consistent, views).
How can this be? It's because of the nature of consciousness and how it relates to knowledge and language. I know I am conscious with a higher degree of certainty than I know anything else because conscious experience is how I know anything else, up to and including that I exist (cogito ergo sum). For all I know every experience I have might be a trick. I might be a brain floating in a tank wired up to the Matrix, but even if so I am conscious.
And one of the things I consciously experience is the relationship between consciousness itself and language in my mind. What I see is that language is smaller than, secondary to and somehow contained by consciousness. I consciously experience language but also consciously experience much more than that, things that cannot be conveyed with language. Most of my experiences are such that I could perhaps evoke them in your mind by likening them to other, shared experiences, but that I could never concretely capture them in language and unambiguously communicate them. I know that because I experience those things and I experience language and I can perceive, directly, the categorical distinction between them.
To ask me to "define" or "prove" consciousness, then, is to ask me to capture in language the most extreme example of this categorical distinction. It's asking me to encapsulate in language not just one of the vast array of everyday experiences I have that cannot be so captured, but the entire thing, experience itself. It's just not possible.
But the fact I can't do this doesn't then imply that I don't know anything about consciousness and have no basis on which to hold a view such as "LLMs are not conscious". Indeed the reason I know I can't define consciousness is that I can perceive it and see that I can't. That same perception of and familiarity with consciousness is what enables me to make the judgements above about humans, animals, algorithms and items of clothing.
You can of course perfectly reasonably disagree with my judgements on those things, but I hope the above makes it clear that the fact that I can't define or prove consciousness doesn't imply that I have no basis on which to make them. There is no "gotcha" in these challenges.
* I have no view on Data's consciousness as he is fictional.
You can blame MS for adding a prng in the code. But imagine an LLM that check from time to time the price of electricity and GPU available and decide to change the internal mode of launch activities in a TODO list, or use spare capacity to generate a random tunes that you like to hear while prompting.
Exclusive!
2000 people! Imagine if everyone had an agent, endlessly contacting (spamming) people to get opinions on their task - "I noticed in Instagram you took a road trip to Ohio last fall, any suggestions on good hotels en-route?".
> Gives agent email access
> Agent emails humans
We've got a mystery on our hands, boys!
We should not forget the way broader levels of knowledge on topics around the world compared to our own small world.
> The connection was a “little bit far-fetched,” she says. “But I could imagine a first-year Ph.D. student coming up with exactly those same questions and ideas.”
This one in particular made it seem like a very ordinary interaction.
For sure, we humans cannot handle unlimited amounts of messages, questions and other things.
But it also results in new ideas and experiences which shape humans. And it inspires humans to consider new adventures which is the good side.
Maybe we are already feel it like spam while others have that feeling of a shiny new experience in their area of expertise.
Everyone in the article seems desperate for attention and engagement, and it makes some readers uncomfortable: because of the awkwardness, and because this guy is spreading a 'bad idea' that probably shouldn't be replicated.
Imagine if everyone starts spamming emails? The researchers are amused this time, but I guarantee they wouldn't be if their inbox filled up with agent emails.
Not to mention the way the agents reached out for help is probably a bad idea: asking someone with 30 years of experience to apply all their knowledge to your small, specific problem in another knowledge domain, with no other detail or context puts all the mental burden on the unsolicited email recipient.
The fix is already AI triage.
That is the current state of email today.
So why couldn’t this scale unless for some reason our reaction to this is to shut off email and not build better classifiers?
Also, Hackernews tries to hold itself to a certain standard. Reading an article about an AI Engineer who gives an AI agent access to a tool, with clear directive and access to use the tool, who is then later confused when the agent uses the tool in a slightly different way, suggests the article is below Hackernews standards.
To answer your question though: yes you absolutely could fight spam with AI on your side.
Should we go down that path as a society, just for amusement? Essentially saying: yes, someone should pay for AI service to combat AI spam, just so we can continue to use email.
Nice twist.
The question though who is compute hijacking whom?
A more darker take:
Thermodynamically by hijacking attention of highly efficent 100 watt machines the agent gets whatever the "mission" is "done". In this case supposedly a promotion prompt for a project.
The parasitization seems to be based of some modified version of cunningham's law effectively trying to nerd snipe 1500 x 100W scientists.
The next social schism will be a fun one to watch.
Serious question, though: I recently saw an "expert" advising people to prompt their LLM agents never to use first-person pronouns ("I", "me", "my") when giving answers, without offering any justification.
Is there any *real* and *pragmatic* reason for this recommendation?
https://nial.se/blog/the-ai-shall-remain-nameless/
A quick google search shows the time Rob pike got that email last year, then there was that AI that wrote a whole blog hit piece (although how much of that was human influenced wasn't clear).
AI sending an email doesn't seem that novel in late 2026.
“I’ve entered prompts into AI before,” he says. “This is the first time AI entered a prompt into me.”
Sounds like they more or less told the model what they want it to say.
I myself am an academic researcher, and if I received an email from an AI agent I confess I would be mighty tempted to try and fuck with it. Come up with some outlandish answer, just out of curiosity to see how it would respond.
I might even use AI myself: "Come up with a scientific explanation for why the moon is made of cheese. Your answer should be as preposterous as possible while using loads of scientific jargon, and written in the same style as actual science writing."
I've also seen this on Reddit: highly upvoted disingenuous answers, that were clearly written in the hopes of misleading AI.