The reason I can tell they are AI-generated spam is because they don't come from a person. Inevitably, they come from a "company", with the email address and website you can optionally include when leaving a comment linking to some sketchy website or other that wants you to download their new AI-powered tool to, I don't know, delete all the shit on your hard drive or some such shit.

The reason why these are infinitely more frustrating than good old-fashioned spam (and man, at this point I really miss the surreal narrative spam from 2009) is because, using the magic of AI, they might initially appear to be a genuine comment. In other words, the "agent" (spit) has taken a blog post as input, been tasked with composing a comment that might initially appear to be engaging directly with the subject matter, but which is actually just stating what you wrote back to you with slightly different wording, then attached a sketchy link and email address to it. The hope, presumably, is twofold: firstly, that the blog's owner will fall for the spam by clicking on the link or sending a message to the email address; and secondly, that the blog's owner will publish the comment, making the link public and thereby, potentially, tricking others into inadvertently clicking on it.

This is fucking scummy behaviour! Moreover, this is not convincing me that "agents" are in any way a net good for humanity! Not to the absurd degree that I think they're going to "destroy humanity" or any of that utter nonsense, but slowly but surely, generative AI in general is making the Internet harder and harder to use effectively — and, moreover, it's destroying our trust in one another.

Earlier today on Bluesky, I saw someone share a post from an "Atari news" account that looked interesting. Supposedly there's a project out there that is attempting (and starting to succeed) to get Sierra's Adventure Game Interpreter (AGI, but not that one) games working on Atari 8-bit. They've supposedly already got King's Quest up and running, and the parallel C64 project is, it seems, a little further along.

However, I was immediately inclined to distrust everything about this news, firstly because of the amount of vibecoded bullshit that is out there at the moment — and apologies to the creators of the project in question if it has all been done by hand; you might want to put that very fucking prominently on your website — and secondly, because the Atari news Bluesky account that shared it in the first place is absolutely fucking infested with garbage AI-generated artwork, leading me to believe that the account is automated. An automated news-aggregating account isn't necessarily a bad thing in its own right, but when combined with the amount of AI imagery that account shares, every single one of my bullshit sensors starts going off.

Want another example? Time Extension, the retro gaming website, has recently been dealing with AI-powered plagiarism and harassment from an account calling itself "Generation Amiga", ostensibly a news site about… well, the Amiga. And yet if you ever accidentally have the misfortune to end up on Generation Amiga's website, you will discover that not one of the articles there (very few of which are actually Amiga-related) is written by a person. Their "exclusive reviews" consist of LLM-generated slop derived from marketing material. And they even had the gall to accuse Time Extension of being "Big Media" harassing a poor, innocent little independent creator who was just using an ickle-wickle bit of planet-destroying AI to construct a vibecoded website that has a net negative value to humanity — all because Time Extension's editor, Damien McFerran, quite rightly called this absolute bullshit out, for the benefit of anyone in retro gaming who had never had the misfortune of stumbling across these fucknuts.

You know, contrary to how it might appear, I don't like ranting and raving and complaining about this all the time! (All right, maybe a little bit.) I would much rather live in a world where it wasn't happening at all! But when I'm in a situation where I can no longer trust that comments on my fucking personal blog are written by actual people, I think I am more than justified in losing my patience. When I am in a situation where my first response to a potentially cool piece of retro gaming-related news is not "wow, that's cool!" but instead "is this AI bullshit…?" I think I am very fucking justified in losing my patience.

I'm so, so tired of this all. None of this is making the Internet better. None of this is making the world better. All it's doing is, at best, sowing division and mistrust, and at worst, completely obliterating what was once the world's most valuable repository of information, knowledge and human creativity. That's the "AIpocalypse" we should be concerned about.

Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.

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The post #oneaday Day 838: A shitty new trend appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.