ChatGPT spam is here

Well, ChatGPT spam has found its way to my blog’s comments. Yay. 😑

A while back I received a flurry of comments that at first blush weren’t obviously spam. Well, all except one which started out as follows:

This passage offers an insightful look into….

Yeah, that’s auto-generated garbage. (I won’t quote the full spam comment, since I don’t want to reward spammers.)

The other spam was better, but they all had some fairly obvious issues when you actually read them. Several pretty old posts received comments, yet the comments were written as if they were discussing something that is happening now, in the present.

A second tell was that the comments tried to incorporate some sort of reference to a question or issue I had mentioned, but then asked questions that made no sense, or had been answered later in the post. Clearly a person didn’t write that, as anyone capable of understanding somewhat technical writing would have sufficient comprehension of the post that they’d never have that sort of question.

Third, a couple comments picked up on some pretty technical phrases, but then used them weirdly, almost like that game where you fill in random nouns, verbs, and adjectives to make up a story. Those comments made just about as much sense as you’d think, when you actually read them.

Finally, the clear give away was links in the poster’s profile to spam sites. So…. nuked from orbit!

I’ve tightened up the comment moderation for now – thanks ChatGPT. (And no, I’m not worried about so-called AI taking over the world yet. It’s nothing more than fancy statistical models. Come back when you have an actual I in AI that works.)