I’m a connoisseur of blog spam. I’ve seen a great deal of it in my time, almost always trapped in the spam filter.

I’d divide it into several categories. The first is the simple advertisement, usually for porn websites. It features a bunch of heavy-handed sexual terms, often quite far-out, and is of course designed to get you to click on a link. Sometimes the ad is for something else, something decidedly un-sexy like aluminum siding. Then there are the ads in a different language. I don’t know what they’re for because they appear as a long series of question marks and other punctuation marks, sometimes enormously long.

Perhaps the next-largest number of spam comments are the ones that praise the blogger and take the form of something like, “Oh, you’re so wonderful, so insightful, so fabulous. I’ve bookmarked this site and will be sure to come back again.” Of course, like all spam, they also contain a link to some other site that is what they’re really promoting either by getting you to click on it or by manipulating the algorithm that deals with search engine ranking.

Closely akin to those are the ones that ask a technical question of the blogger, for example, “You’ve got the greatest website design, what platform did you use?” And one of my personal favorites: “How do you deal with your spam problem?”

And then there are those that merely copy another comment – one from a real commenter who has already posted a comment on the thread.

But all of a sudden, a couple of days ago, I saw the appearance of a new and very clever type of spam comment. This type almost fooled me into thinking it was from a living and breathing person. Each of these comments was cleverly tailored to fit the blog post on which it appeared, and sounded for all the world like an actual person making a very real and sometimes insightful and simpatico comment.

For example, this one appeared in response to my recent post on the Chauvin case:

I’ve been following this case since day one and my gut says the same thing — prediction right, opinion sadly right too. The jeopardy argument seems legally solid to me but the politics of touching this conviction are just too radioactive. Curious to see if the courts surprise us.

This is not a duplicate of a previous comment. It doesn’t seem to be a duplicate of anything at all, nor is it a generic comment about the Chauvin trial. This is a comment that takes my post and creates something new that is aligned with it and novel, and is responsive to my post rather than just something general on the topic. For example, my post on Chauvin, where the comment appeared, is entitled “There’s a bid to vacate Chauvin’s state conviction,” and it begins this way:

Prediction: it won’t succeed.

Opinion: it absolutely should succeed.

Note that, in the first sentence of the spam comment, you can find the following: “prediction right, opinion sadly right too.” That sounds like a very real comment to the post, coming from a very real person.

But it is actually written by AI. How do I know that? There were many hints:

It was one of a series of about fifteen comments that all came in at approximately the same time. Every single one was placed on a different post, and every single one was just as clever and just as responsive to the post on which it was placed as this example was. These comments came in clusters in terms of the usernames, with two or three comments sharing each username. All fifteen came from the very same IP number, which was a VPN in Asia. But the key feature was that a few of them – although hardly all – mentioned some AI site or other, one that a person can use to make AI videos, for example. There were other elements of AI promotion, usually much more subtle.

It doesn’t surprise me in the least that AI is starting to take over the generation of comment spam in an especially clever manner. I have little doubt that AI has been involved in generating comment spam for a while, but those older versions are much more obviously spam and nowhere near as inventive.

And I would bet that the genre will only become more and more clever and good at masquerading as human. In fact, just writing about the new version’s current flaws here makes me wonder whether it will see and learn from what I’ve written, and improve itself.

Oh brave new world, that has such AI in it.