The Commentaspamapocalypse Is Nigh!

I run a couple of blogs, and across them, I get about 50 spam comments per day. Here’s a sampling:

Fortunately, WordPress offers something called “Akismet Antispam” which takes care of all this noise. It lets a spam message through about once every two months, and I think I’ve seen one false positive over the past few years. So it’s very reliable, and without it, I would have to close down comments. (Which would be a shame, because sometimes these comments are much more interesting and informative than whatever I’m nattering on about.)

But the reason Akismet can do such a good job is that these comment spam bots post generic messages across millions of WordPress installations. And nothing in these texts refer to the content of the posts they are commenting on, so even if you’re going through these comments manually, you can easily tell that they’re all fake.

So I’ve been waiting for these creeps to start using AI: You ask ChatGPT (or whatever open sores AI engine you have running (it’s cheaper when doing millions of comments)) to give a polite response to the blog article (or a nasty response; that’s probably even more effective). Then you’ll 1) get a text that Akismet hasn’t seen before, so it won’t tag as spam, and 2) even if it gets stuck in a manual approval queue, perhaps the blog author will think it’s genuine.

It’s taken longer time to start than I expected, but! Behold! My first one:

That is an extremely flattering summary of this blog article, and only the lack of typos and the flat affect of the language gives it away. Oh, and that it links to some sort of… scam site, I guess?

(And that nobody would ever leave a comment like this on as vapid a blog post as that one, I guess.)

So there you go. The Commentaspamapocalypse (catchy name, I should trademark it and get fabulously rich) is nigh!

(And, of course, much of the “content” on the web is already AI-generated (to “optimise” the search on Google), so in a couple of years the web will be 97% LLM: AI spam posts with nothing but AI spam comments underneath.)