(Bots! Bots everywhere!)

Hey everyone!

I know it's been a hot second since my last post. I want to extend a belated thank you to everyone who came out to see me at Hauntfest in Athens. I had a blast hanging out and meeting y'all! If you weren't able to make it, I'll be posting a schedule of future appearances as soon as they're finalized. And I fully intend to make Hauntfest a yearly occurrence!

There are a couple of reasons I've been radio silent since the festival. First, I've been pretty sick. Feeling a lot better now, but it's been a journey getting here. Second, I've been waiting until I had some news to report. There have been, and still are, a lot of projects underway. Most of them are still at various stages of completion, and I've learned my lesson about announcing stuff without a definitive release date.

Unfortunately, most of my projects still don't have a hard timeline for release. So why am I making an update post at all? Well, in the last two days, my server has been flooded with bot posts and bot activity. I'm talking hundreds in the span of a few hours...

Either that, or a bunch of my Pakistani readers suddenly got really into fast fashion.

I mean, don't get me wrong, bots have always been an issue with blogs like mine. But the shear volume of bot posts in the last 24-48 hours has been ludicrous. I don't know if it's because the algorithms noticed I hadn't made a post in a while, so like termites to an empty house they descended upon the abandoned website. Or if maybe this is a portent of the coming AI-pocolypse.

Actually, if this is the start of coordinated AI spamming, then the internet as a whole might be in trouble. Can you imagine? A program that can generate hundreds of billions of comments and posts per second flooding message boards faster than any human could moderate? Especially with the sophistication of new AI language based on the models of countless unwitting human participants. That would mark the end of Reddit, for one (I'm not saying that's already happening. But I'm also not saying it isn't already happening. And if it were, would we even know?)

And just think about comments sections on videos. Or reviews for products. Or any of the other things we just assume are generated by humans. What will Wikipedia look like when AI starts amending entries and making their own posts? In a way, the mimics invasion is actually happening. We don't know who's real. We don't know who we can trust. They look and sound just like humans, but they're not. What do they want? What are they capable of?

Apparently, for now at least, what they want is to sell us clothes.

But how long before the dead-internet theory becomes a reality?

I don't know. I'm just a dumb weirdo catastrophizing about the future and yelling at clouds.

What do you think, fellow humans? Leave an answer in the comments before I eventually have to shut down that feature and completely retool this website. (I promise I'll try to answer.)

Love you all,

-Jack