> 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.

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?

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?

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.

There was at least one TNG episode devoted to this - The Measure of a Man - a courtroom drama.

If I left him alone in a room would he stare off like a Zombie until prompted?

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.

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.

And autocomplete in old Nokia was predicting the future

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.

> 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.

The first time you get an AI email, it's interesting. The hundredth time it won't be.

> Instructs agent to email humans

> Gives agent email access

> Agent emails humans

We've got a mystery on our hands, boys!

> 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.

> 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.

From TFA:

“I’ve entered prompts into AI before,” he says. “This is the first time AI entered a prompt into me.”

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.

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.

Ah, reverse prompting. Reply and you are the product. Thank you for your input!

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.

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