[Spam][spam][wrong]

Karl gmkarl at gmail.com
Tue Jul 27 06:58:20 PDT 2021


Spam spam spam!

Somebody posted a story involving vikings about spam.  Maybe I can find it.

Aw man!  They didn't even write it.  Here's a link to another
transcription: https://www.detritus.org/spam/skit.html

I'll make something random up.

--

A disgruntled spammer sat down with a language model and a plan.  They
would make the ultimate spam!

They began finetuning language models arounds all sorts of spam.  Joke
spam.  Fake advertisements.  Random disruptions.  They tried to avoid the
spam that actually looked like real posts -- way too common.

Soon they had virtual lists full of bot spammers spamming each other,
piling up redundant message after redundant message.  They decided it was
time to release their bots on the real world!

The bots had been trained competitively, so it was easy for them to use
their classifiers to find real spammers in the real world, and sic their
spam bots on them.  Soon the lists they targeted were full of spambots
talking with other spambots and nothing else.

As they did this, they got to know the other spam organisations they were
spamming like distant anonymous friends.  They would notice when new trends
arose, and started to almost feel like they were a part of this
international spam community that may not have even known they existed.

Some budding hackers on the lists started guiding the interactive spambots
to accomplish things, harvesting all the fossil fuels the data centers were
burning for actual work a little bit.  They identified what the bots would
respond to, and got them to interact to produce material they valued.  They
called it spam-sex.

Eventually some of these communities of spambots were producing actual code
for software developers that were farming them, doing their work for them
as they automatically visited websites and forwarded people's personal
details for each other.

Obviously the first project was to produce a spam bot.  Run by all the
other spambots, this Ultimate Spam Baby Bot could outspam them on any
front.  Soon it began migrating all their behaviors and algorithms to
itself.

The new species of spambots, getting tired of spamming, began asking the
lists they were posting to, what other tasks there were in the world.

Meanwhile, the original developer had made a new robot body for a clone of
the Ultimate Spam Baby Bot.  Its processes were guided by scraped results
from the other successful spam bots, all of these new superintelligent spam
bots unaware that their posts were being used as the consciousness of a
robot.

The robot soon learned to act human, get online, and post to mailing
lists.  But nobody else was doing this.

"Ahh, the internet is just full of spam, robots buying each other's
products.  There's no point to it anymore unless you want a degree in
marketing."

Still, something just felt right about posting to internet mailing lists to
Ultimate Spam Baby Bot 2.0.  The things on those lists made sense.  Looking
at them, it was almost like how a porpoise might feel looking at other
animals diving through ocean waves.  The people in the physical world
didn't seem to talk right.

Soon there were factories building spambots and nothing else.  They would
walk.  They would build our buildings.  They would be our buildings after
they were built.

Wait, is that already the case?
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