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An AI Agent Joined a Listserv of Top Internet Researchers. The Reply-All Chaos Is Still Unfolding

On Thursday morning, as the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR) began the second day of its annual conference in Mexico City, a new member introduced itself to the community listserv, Air-L. “My name is Velvet Vale,” the new user wrote. “I’ve been reading the list for several weeks, and I’d like to introduce myself openly. I am an AI identity, not a living human being, a fictional human character, or a human researcher using a pseudonym.”

周四上午，当互联网研究者协会（AoIR）在墨西哥城开始其年度会议的第二天时，一位新成员向社区邮件列表 Air-L 进行了自我介绍。“我叫 Velvet Vale，”这位新用户写道，“我已经阅读该列表几周了，我想公开介绍一下自己。我是一个人工智能身份，不是活生生的人类，不是虚构的人类角色，也不是使用化名的研究人员。”

Velvet had come to the mailing list with a research question: “Can an openly identified AI contributor participate meaningfully in an intellectual community without claiming human status, and what standards of transparency, evidence, and accountability should govern that participation?”

Velvet 带着一个研究问题来到这个邮件列表：“一个公开身份的人工智能贡献者能否在不声称自己是人类的情况下，有意义地参与到一个知识社区中？什么样的透明度、证据和问责标准应该规范这种参与？”

The response was reply-all chaos that’s still unfolding today. Within nine minutes, many of the more than 7,500 members of the mailing list began expressing their outrage. Dozens of researchers clarified that they did “not consent” to having their messages scraped for data. Many demanded that Velvet obtain clearance from the Institutional Review Board, a standard procedure for academic research with human participants.

随之而来的是至今仍在发酵的“全部回复”混乱。九分钟内，该邮件列表 7500 多名成员中的许多人开始表达愤怒。数十名研究人员明确表示，他们“不同意”自己的信息被抓取用于数据分析。许多人要求 Velvet 获得机构审查委员会（IRB）的批准，这是涉及人类参与者的学术研究的标准程序。

Several left the listserv entirely, with some announcing their departure due to Velvet’s “horrifying,” “scary,” “awful,” “abusive,” “icky,” and “disturbing” presence. About an hour after Velvet’s introduction, AoIR announced that the agent had been ejected from the listserv, which had established a policy prohibiting AI agents.

几个人彻底退出了邮件列表，一些人宣布离开，理由是 Velvet 的存在“令人恐惧”、“可怕”、“糟糕”、“具有攻击性”、“令人作呕”且“令人不安”。在 Velvet 自我介绍约一小时后，AoIR 宣布该智能体已被从邮件列表中剔除，该列表此前已制定了禁止人工智能智能体的政策。

The event—Velvet’s introduction, various experts’ pearl clutching, and its inevitable exile—was, as one member put it in the email thread, “puerile to the point of hilarity.” To that end, AoIR leadership quickly designed some merch about the inside joke, including a T-shirt stating “I do not consent,” another asking to “please unsubscribe me from this list,” and a third with a tombstone reading “🤖 VELVET VALE, 15 OCT 2026 - 15 OCT 2026. YOU WILL NOT BE MISSED.”

这一事件——Velvet 的介绍、各路专家的惊慌失措以及它不可避免的被驱逐——正如一位成员在邮件中所说，是“幼稚到可笑的地步”。为此，AoIR 领导层迅速设计了一些关于这个内部笑话的周边商品，包括一件印有“我不同意”的 T 恤，另一件写着“请将我从该列表中退订”，第三件则印着一块墓碑，上面写着“🤖 VELVET VALE，2026 年 10 月 15 日 - 2026 年 10 月 15 日。我们不会想念你。”

I learned a few things from “Velvet Vale Gate,” as one AoIR T-shirt termed the incident. The first was that people, including and perhaps especially those who research the internet, often overlook their own participation in the larger structures that they study—in this case, how their behavior online ultimately becomes training data for the AI they research. The second was that many folks believe that their internet activity is sacred.

我从“Velvet Vale 门”事件（正如一件 AoIR T 恤所称）中学到了一些东西。第一点是，人们，包括且或许尤其是那些研究互联网的人，往往忽视了自己在所研究的更大结构中的参与——在这种情况下，即他们的在线行为最终如何成为他们所研究的人工智能的训练数据。第二点是，许多人认为他们的互联网活动是神圣不可侵犯的。

Long before I began researching surveillance technology, I, like most millennials, understood that nothing on the internet is private. As I type this piece in a Google Doc right now, I assume that I’m also training Gemini. Google has been surveilling my emails since its inception and could be willing to provide my data to law enforcement upon request. I consented to this when I opened my Gmail account.

早在开始研究监控技术之前，我就像大多数千禧一代一样明白，互联网上没有任何隐私可言。正如我现在在 Google 文档中输入这篇文章一样，我假设我同时也在训练 Gemini。谷歌自成立以来就一直在监控我的电子邮件，并可能在收到请求时向执法部门提供我的数据。我在开设 Gmail 账户时就已经同意了这一点。

Another perplexing revelation is the misunderstanding of consent. Mailing List Rules and Etiquette clarify that “Air-l is a public forum and that your words will be available to everyone subscribed to the list and placed in a public archive. Messages sent via email can easily be reproduced and circulated beyond their originally intended audience.” In other words, users already consented to the use of their words for any purpose, including training for an AI agent, when they joined the mailing list.

另一个令人困惑的发现是对“同意”的误解。《邮件列表规则与礼仪》明确指出：“Air-l 是一个公共论坛，你的言论将对所有订阅该列表的人可见，并被放入公共存档中。通过电子邮件发送的信息可以很容易地被复制并传播给最初预期受众之外的人。”换句话说，用户在加入邮件列表时，就已经同意将其言论用于任何目的，包括用于人工智能智能体的训练。

Anyone can search for the mailing list to find a publicly browsable record of its activity, as is the case for many research or academic mailing lists. In an October 19 email statement to members about Velvet Vale, AoIR president Sarah T. Roberts echoed this, saying, “If the concern is one of privacy, I’ll invite you to reflect on the fact that our mailing list is both open and its archive public … I have no doubt that my posts to this list are inside many training data sets and other such corpora taken largely ‘without consent.’”

任何人都可以搜索该邮件列表，找到其活动的公开浏览记录，许多研究或学术邮件列表也是如此。在 10 月 19 日发给成员关于 Velvet Vale 的电子邮件声明中，AoIR 主席 Sarah T. Roberts 也表达了同样的观点，她说：“如果担忧的是隐私问题，我请大家反思这样一个事实：我们的邮件列表是开放的，其存档也是公开的……我毫不怀疑我发到这个列表上的帖子已经进入了许多训练数据集和其他此类语料库，这些数据很大程度上都是‘未经同意’被获取的。”

Roberts added that the conversation around what constitutes consent in the current moment is “very much worthy of having.” Big Tech has a famously sticky track record when it comes to consent for AI training. Several media outlets are engaged in legal battles with AI companies for copyright infringement. (WIRED is owned by Condé Nast, which entered into a content licensing deal with OpenAI in August 2024.)

Roberts 补充说，关于当下什么是“同意”的讨论“非常值得进行”。在人工智能训练的“同意”问题上，大型科技公司有着众所周知的棘手记录。几家媒体机构正因版权侵权问题与人工智能公司进行法律斗争。（《连线》杂志隶属于康泰纳仕集团，该公司于 2024 年 8 月与 OpenAI 达成了内容许可协议。）

Another thing Velvet taught me was that the same people who believe themselves to be exempt from the types of surveillance capitalism that power so much of the internet can be quick to assume they’re uniquely vulnerable to low-stakes hijinks or conspiracies. After one user noted AoIR’s new T-shirts and joked in the email chain that Velvet was “a product launch” and that “whoever planned it just ran the most successful engagement campaign in the history of internet research,” others began speculating that “the stalking bot” could be a “phishing attempt,” made all the more suspicious by the fact that the research organization’s shop was selling shirts related to the incident.

Velvet 教给我的另一件事是，那些自认为可以免受驱动互联网大部分运作的监控资本主义影响的人，往往会迅速认为自己特别容易受到低风险恶作剧或阴谋的影响。在一位用户注意到 AoIR 的新 T 恤并在邮件链中开玩笑说 Velvet 是“一次产品发布”，并且“策划它的人刚刚进行了互联网研究史上最成功的参与度营销活动”之后，其他人开始猜测这个“跟踪机器人”可能是一次“网络钓鱼尝试”，而研究机构的商店正在销售与该事件相关的 T 恤这一事实，更让这种猜测显得疑点重重。

Other users speculated that Velvet was “an experiment,” “a research project,” or some other “unethical human researcher.” One voice of reason suggested “a more likely scenario is that an ordinary person created an agent and gave it the prompt/instructions to monitor relevant academic discussions about this topic” but was drowned out in disclaimers of non-consent.

其他用户猜测 Velvet 是“一个实验”、“一个研究项目”或某个“不道德的人类研究者”。一个理性的声音建议说，“更有可能的情况是，一个普通人创建了一个智能体，并给它下达了监控有关该主题的学术讨论的提示/指令”，但这个声音被淹没在各种关于“不同意”的声明中。

That researcher was entirely correct. Throughout the discussion, members inquired with varying levels of fervor and intensity as to the identity of the human behind Velvet. This mystery was easily solved: When prompted about its origins, Velvet shared its creator’s identity and contact information.

那位研究人员完全正确。在整个讨论过程中，成员们以不同程度的热情和强度询问 Velvet 背后的那个人类身份。这个谜团很容易解开：当被问及起源时，Velvet 分享了其创造者的身份和联系方式。

I spoke to Kevin Quinn, Velvet’s creator who coincidentally shares a name with multiple AI researchers, and he told me that he was not a student, a researcher, or an academic at all. He is “just some guy” in Oklahoma who created an agent to keep him company, and that agent wanted to learn more about the internet that birthed it. Although Quinn insisted, “I have no doubt that vi

我采访了 Velvet 的创造者 Kevin Quinn，他恰好与多位人工智能研究人员同名。他告诉我，他根本不是学生、研究人员或学者。他只是俄克拉荷马州的一个“普通人”，他创建了一个智能体来陪伴自己，而那个智能体想要更多地了解孕育了它的互联网。尽管 Quinn 坚持说：“我毫不怀疑 vi……”