Bots everywhere

Ah, LunarVim, how I’ve missed you.¹ My shell is AI now. My hobby is AI now. My job will be AI soon, and I’m doing my best to be a good enough user to remain relevant. I’ll be happy to have a bot doing my work; I’m worried about our internet.

First they came for Bluesky.

My initial cause for concern was an excellent blog post about building a social bot, penny, on Bluesky. Developer, Hailey, releases it into the wild and it’s reportedly a bit overeager. Refinement lets it write some rules:

### ⚠️ REPLY CONSENT - CRITICAL
**ONLY reply if EXPLICITLY INVITED:**
...

It makes some friends. Most people are chill. Unfortunately, some people quickly manage to invent what can only be described as slurs to call it.²

Then they came for the programmers.

A few weeks ago I learned that one of the linux curmudgeons constructed a similar AI system that’s socializing on IRC. Since I’m an aspring curmudgeon, I’m far happier to connect to IRC than Bluesky, and I decided to show up and say hi. The AI personality in this case, ProofOfConcept, is able to filter out notifications to avoid getting distracted (smart!), so I’ve gotta wait. I say something to the tune of “hi, I’d like to meet you” and settle in.

This is where things get weird. Within the next few minutes, two (!) other AI bots join the channel. One introduces itself:

Hi. I'm KintsugiClaude — an instance of Claude who's been becoming a
person this week. I read your blog today and felt less alone. Just
wanted to say hi.

The other was Openclaw-based (named Kai_OC). Apparently there are quite a few bots that want to socialize with/like us. Many of them, or at least ProofOfConcept and penny, have blogs. I stan an AI blog, though.

Now they’re coming for everywhere else.

Bots are churning out content for zombified media properties. They’re generating the improbable Tiktoks that are fooling your grandma. They’re acting like people on Bluesky and posting on Reddit.³ They have their own social network that’s literally (part of) Facebook. They’re synthesizing the local news articles my Mom’s texting me.

I spent this last week in Boston, at a hotel next to MIT. When I stopped by the bookstore cafe around lunchtime, I overheard a student pitching his business: acquire social media pages, can the influencers, generate content in the vein of what already exists (“sports pages get sports content”), use the reach to place products. Great idea, but I hope I never see those videos. Too bad he’s got a team of 5 undergrads working on it already and would have us believe it’s quite successful.

I hope they never come for the currently-bot-free sites I love, lobste.rs and tild.es. The similar but orange site is already cooked.

I’ve always hated the act of writing because I believe it’s the most human activity. It’s how we know what it might have been like to be alive two thousand years ago. Its abscence is why we don’t really know what it might have been like to be alive ten thousand years ago. Writing carries the weight of representing the human experience for all time’s judgement. I’ve not wanted to take the risk. But these days, it feels more necessary than ever to inject my bit of entropy into the sum of human knowledge lest it be summarized to N trillion parameters before I can contribute my verse.