It feels like the era known as Web 2.0 is drawing to a close. Never quite what it was cracked up to be, nevertheless the Web 2.0 age was probably the apotheosis of the vision of a worldwide network of people freely exchanging ideas instead of the one-way producer to consumer model that came before and will come after.
While I’d prefer that this site be changing the world, the reality is that it must change with the world, and by that I mean this:
It is time to close comments on this site.
I am a little disappointed to have to take this step, as I did enjoy getting feedback from people all over the world, even if it meant sifting through a lot of bot-generated comments.
Recently, though, a new kind of comment spam has emerged, the AI-generated content, and that’s going to be a deal-breaker for website administrators.
For as long as there have been comments on websites (WordPress, in this case), there have been bot-generated comments. There are various reasons why bots want to comment on your articles, mostly involving planting links. For WordPress specifically, there is an administrator setting to allow users to post comments without moderation if they already have an approved comment, so the strategy to exploit that is to have one flattering comment get approved, and then follow it up with whatever self-serving junk you want to post.
So site administrators like myself get a lot of “Great post! I wish other people had such great content! I’m going to tell all my friends!” Just flattery and platitudes, and I’m sure it works, because who doesn’t want to hear about how wonderful their stuff is?
The new AI-generated comments take this idea one step further. Instead of generic praise, these new posts contain generic praise augmented by specific information from the site.
This new AI-powered bot will look at the content of the site and glean the topic, then pepper its remarks with this in formation. Consider this comment from “Fortnite Android”:
Great comparison! I personally lean towards Zwift for the interactive elements and virtual races, but I can see the appeal of Peloton’s community and guided classes. It really depends on what you’re looking for in your workout experience!
So, the comment shows that it understands that this article is a comparison between Zwift and Peloton, and adds a couple of general bits of information about each. This more effectively masks the fact that there is no actual thinking behind the comment and starts to look like an actual thought from an actual thinking person.
This is only going to get worse. I can easily see the next wave of comments being opinionated (instead of just rehashing information) and even engaging in existing comment threads. Before long, we will have bots vs bots discussing my posts, using facts and figures (some no doubt made up) from other websites, which themselves are probably generated by bots.
I took a look at the WordPress catalog of plugins to see if anyone was taking this on, and what I found was not encouraging. The AI-powered plugins that I found were all written to provide AI-generated responses to comments. So it seems that the emerging strategy for dealing with this new overload of worthless comments is to just automate responses, treating any real commenters to the same anodyne replies. I can see it now: “Great comment, very thought-provoking. I wish more people had the power of insight that you do. Great point about [random bit of the comment], I’ll have to consider that for the subject of a new post!”
So, until and unless there emerges a legitimate tactic for battling this, I’ll be turning comments off for my posts. If you have anything you’d like to comment on, please contact me through the contact form. I do actually read those, and will include your comments as updates to the posts of I fell the general audience will benefit.
Thanks.
PS: I may turn comments back on from time to time as I evaluate anti-bot software, we’ll see how it goes.