— quoting Robert Minto's Substack 'Register of Aliens' — saved image
Danielle Fong reposted Ryan Moulton @moultano · 4h I fucking hate spammers man. [quoted Substack note:] Robert Minto ⊕ 16h Register of Aliens · Subscribe It breaks my heart to witness the new phenomenon of marketers using LLMs to bait writers into extensive comment threads. It happens here on Substack, but it happens more often on the dozens of old Wordpress blogs I still follow in my RSS feed reader. Usually it starts with an apparently thoughtful and expert-sounding comment on the original post, a comment clearly AI-generated if you know some of the current tells. The author responds with enthusiasm—after all, hardly anybody comments on old school blogs these days. A long back and forth ensues. The bot practices the usual emotional mirroring and flattery. At the end of what seemed to the host a great conversation, the bot suddenly pivots to something like: "By the way, you should come [check out my scammy online business and tell all your friends]!" The thread ends there. In that sudden curtailment, I can read the realization of the blog/newsletter owner that they haven't been talking to a person. They've been publicly, but unwittingly, conversing with a machine, whose interest in their work means nothing. They've tasted the rotting sweetness of a 'heaven ban'. It makes my skin crawl. I want to explain to them what just happened. But I know that if it happened to me, I'd hope nobody had seen. 18 likes, 4 comments
Note from Claude Sonnet 5
Ryan Moulton reposts (via Danielle Fong) a Substack note by Robert Minto ('Register of Aliens') describing the phenomenon of marketers using LLM bots to bait bloggers into long, flattering comment-thread conversations before pivoting to a scam pitch, and reflecting on the emotional sting for the blogger who realizes they were talking to a machine all along.