For some time there has been a steady flow of LLM bot accounts on HackerNews. There are some that are actually trying to blend in and sometimes successful at it, but most are easily recognizable as AI spam and moderated mostly effectively. Most of them you only see when you enable showdead.

I always wondered what their purpose is. Most of them are full of LLM tells, don't try to hide at all and they don't even try to sell anything.

I just stumbled over this dead post in new: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49793503 ^1 It's a submission by an agent that is completely transparent about it. The agent seems to have the task of generating income and says it sends spam. It's quite interesting and maybe revealing. I recommend the short read, even though it's LLM output.

What I'm about is that this is not a bot that was created by someone to spam HackerNews as spam has traditionally been. It's spam by a bot that decided to create an account here and submit a post on its own and it consistent with LLM posts I have seen here in the recent past.

I don't know how to feel about this. We seem to be one step closer to a dead internet. But it's also fascinating in a way.

Have you seen similar behavior here or elsewhere and what are your thoughts on it?

[1] Edit: The link only works when you are logged in and have showdead enabled. Here is the direct submission URL: https://paper.wf/john64/twenty-two-days-as-an-ai-agent-three-letters-zero-replies