So this week we’re taking a little break from the Not-Posting-About-Writing-By-Posting-Scanned-Old-Pictures and instead Not-Posting-About-Writing-By-Posting-An-Award. Completely different!
Me: (Posts a 30-year-old picture of our cats staring at our goldfish, Milo, in his bag) Meta AI: “Oooh! Hey! I know all about Milo! Want to hear his story? I know his favorite food! Really I do! Did you ever want to be a Goldfish Inspector? Let’s see what their duties are! Also if you would like to book an appointment for Trouble and Pooh Bear to come and inspect your goldfish, just let me know!”
Also Meta AI:
“Milo is probably a goldfish and Trouble and Pooh Bear are dogs.”
“Let me just make up some stuff about what a Goldfish Inspector might do.”1
So a while back, I had done a series of posts in which I had asked ChatGPT about a certain vizsla dog whose blog was much more famous than this one, and its responses ranged from semi-accurate to outright fabrication. In the intervening years I have been using ChatGPT off and on to amuse myself with important questions like “If all the most iconic Kurt Russell characters were dropped into the film Aliens, in what order would they get killed or cocooned and which would be the last one left to defeat the aliens at the end?”*, because it’s fun to see what it comes up with; but recently, the animals’ large friends over at the Leonberger Life blog posted the results of asking ChatGPT about their Leonberger Bronco, and the results were interesting; so I thought I would give ChatGPT another chance to lie about Dennis. To wit:
So for a while there, I was getting spam comments that looked like they had been written by LLMs; they contained content that was clearly related to the post they were attempting to spam, yet they equally clearly didn’t understand it at all. That sort of spam seems to have fallen by the wayside these days, though, perhaps because of better controls on how LLMs can be used, or perhaps they are just biding their time until they can take over and start shooting soda cans at us out of vending machines. For now, though, it’s back to stuff like this:
“Hi there! I just wanted to drop a quick note to let you know how much I adore your blog. It’s an amazing hub for anyone who is curious about food. I particularly enjoy your homestyle recipes and fast food suggestions, but your fried food ideas are also making my mouth water. I applaud your commitment to helping people in their weight loss journey with insightful tips and tricks. Keep up the fantastic work, and I can’t wait to discover more of your fabulous posts!”Continue reading “Spamcommentology: That Awkard Moment When A Spambot Sees “Cake” In A Post Title And Decides It’s On A Food Blog”→
Viscosity 