mission unfortunately accomplished
Fuck, I hate the new generation of blog comment spambots.
See – some years ago, there was an XKCD comic about training spambots to make more and more accurate and relevant comments that ended with “What will you do when spammers train their bots to make automated constructive and helpful comments?” and “MISSION. FUCKING. ACCOMPLISHED.”
it was really pretty funny at the time
But now with LLMs it’s real easy to make spambots make reasonable comments that are actually talking about your blog posts. They’re on topic, they’re cogent, they’re positive – of course – and the ad is in the URL attached to the commenter name, thus far universally shilling one or another sort of AI tool.
Turns out, on topic and cogent botposts are still just noise of emptiness, since, after all…
…the ad is the only reason they’re there…
…and you can’t not know that…
…so…
…it’s all clockwork and empty, and…
…sorry, Randall. Turns out it’s not Mission. Fucking. Accomplished. It’s more Mission. Unfortunately. Accomplished, and the punchline this time is that the mission itself kinda sucked.
I do think that as this ramps up – which it absolutely will, I mean, it’s incredibly obvious that it will, I don’t even know how you write spam filters against this – Federated comments from bot-disallowing instances will be the only thing keeping blog comments usable at all. Fortunately for me, that’s where most comments on this blog come from these days, so… maybe ActivityPub will save this, too. You never know.
But holy shit, once those spam-blockers stop mattering, with LLM-generated boring-but-cogent comments start taking over, there’ll be no way to have even remotely reasonable blog comment sections on their own.
Not ones with actual people, anyway.
I was so excited about what’s now called LLMs in undergrad, too. The first time my incredibly primitive toy version talked back to me was like being struck by lightning in the best possible way, walking around in the lab shrieking “IT WORKS! IT’S ALIIIIIIIIIVE!” Then when I did my project demo, the head of the department was so disturbed by it that he literally left the room. Just walked out. I was expecting a bunch of Q&A and chat about the models and all the commentary I’d written about the kind of data you’d actually need vs. the bullshit 450-ish word database with made-up numbers I was using and talking about how to connect actual meaning to all this word probability chewing – you know, the actual hard part that the LLM people just decided to leave out – but insead he just freaked and left.
And now, well, here we are. Instead of incredibly cool game engines and entirely new computer control systems, it’s all just… “what can we fuck up today?”
Y’know, I kinda liked Dr. M – the guy who walked out – even if I did make fun of him at times.
Because, well, honestly…
…maybe he was the smart one about all this after all.
