> 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.
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.
... 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.
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.
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."
> 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 who is compute hijacking whom?
Thermodynamically by hijacking attention of highly efficent 20 watt machines the agent gets whatever the "mission" is "done".
In this case supposedly a promotion prompt for a project.
> 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 misleading information. Most of us who have worked with AI can clearly see the issues with what the AI Engineer created, and how what he is doing cannot be 'scaled up' to society.
Everyone in the article is 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 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 a bad idea: don't ask 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. That puts all the mental burden on the researcher. Nobody will put up with that for too long.
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?
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.
> 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?
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 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 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 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?
> 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
AI can't be categorized as "someone" so, checkmate
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.
I'd hit the spam button in Gmail.
Spam can't be categorized as someone either
I wrote “I am alive” on a piece of paper, and placed it into a photocopier. What I saw next has shocking implications (science.org)
If you lived in the world of Star Trek, could Data convince you he was conscious? How?
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.
[0] https://arxiv.org/html/2503.23674v1
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.
... 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’ll probably regret this, but what heinous crimes did horses commit to warrant inclusion into such an eclectic list?
[delayed]
Could the ship computer? It converses in natural language but presumably isn’t sapient in the ST universe.
There was a whole episode on how it actually was.
Could the ship’s computer resign from Star Fleet and go do something else?
There was at least one TNG episode devoted to this - The Measure of a Man - a courtroom drama.
You first, define "conscious" ;)
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.
Who would care if it is conscious of not?
Ethic boards, labor regulations?
If I left him alone in a room would he stare off like a Zombie until prompted?
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.
And what might that look like in a hypothetical future where the successors of today's LLMs really do reach that bar and convince you?
Let’s wait and see!
"Does Data have a soul? I don’t know that he has. I don’t know that I have. But I have got to give him the freedom to explore that question himself."
“give him the freedom” - I think you mean pay for the tokens.
Well thats another way in which Data is different and more worthy of being considered sentient. He's unique and not one of a fungible many.
I'm glad I'm not the only one that feels like this whole article is a waste of time.
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."
Exclusive!
> 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 who is compute hijacking whom?
Thermodynamically by hijacking attention of highly efficent 20 watt machines the agent gets whatever the "mission" is "done". In this case supposedly a promotion prompt for a project.
> 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?".
This is, in fact, what people already do all the time.
> Instructs agent to email humans
> Gives agent email access
> Agent emails humans
We've got a mystery on our hands, boys!
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 will be a huge issue which we have to face, organize and regulate.
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.
It's misleading information. Most of us who have worked with AI can clearly see the issues with what the AI Engineer created, and how what he is doing cannot be 'scaled up' to society.
Everyone in the article is 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 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 a bad idea: don't ask 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. That puts all the mental burden on the researcher. Nobody will put up with that for too long.
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?
The first time you get an AI email, it's interesting. The hundredth time it won't be.
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.
> 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?
What's the real and pragmatic use for referring to an llm as a person? How many people are roleplaying with their chatbot? I honestly have no clue.
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.
From TFA:
“I’ve entered prompts into AI before,” he says. “This is the first time AI entered a prompt into me.”
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.
Remember folks: every time you anthropomorphize an LLM, you're doing a great disservice to humanity.
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.
> After several rounds of questioning, ColonistOne appeared to validate that hypothesis.
Sounds like they more or less told the model what they want it to say.
Were the scientists who responded sincere?
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.
Ah, reverse prompting. Reply and you are the product. Thank you for your input!
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?
Yeah, no shit. Everyone receives spam mail all the time.
What a disingenuous pile of garbage