The Commentapocalypse Is Nigher

Allowing comments on a WordPress blog is only viable if you have a spam checker. Fortunately Automattic (the people behind WordPress) also provide (free) access to Akismet antispam. Because if you run a WordPress blog, you will be getting hundreds of spam comments per day:

Nobody can wade through all of that, but Akismet correctly identifies all of this junk, so you never actually see it. Thanks, Automattic!

But ever since LLMs became a thing, I’ve assumed that comment spammers would be using them to post reasonable-sounding comments that would bypass Akismet… and there have been instances of this, but the deluge took longer to arrive than expected. But it seems to have started for real now:

This first wave of AI spam is easy enough to identify — they all vaguely agree with something you said in the blog post, and then link to some shady, scammy AI video thing. And Akismet doesn’t identify these for some reason or other. I mean, even though you can’t determine that it’s spam based on the comment itself, the URLs should be a good enough indicator, right?

C’mon, Akismet — you can do it! I have faith in you!

Heh, while writing this blog post, I got the following comment (correctly identified as spam by Akismet). Amusing, but not LLM spam.

I’m dreading the next wave of LLM spam, though — this initial wave is pretty stupid, but the next wave will have better text and no links (to make you approve the comment), and then the next comment will be automatically approved (as per standard WordPress settings), and that is the one that will have the links to the spam site.

So I guess you should flip your comments setting to “Comment must be manually approved”:

This future is so annoying, man. No flying cars except fake flying cars, and all of this junk we have to deal with.