As I always say: bots aren’t The problem with Twitterz, people are. I used to follow bots deliberately.
This isn’t a new problem either though. Conferences have been spammed with AI written submissions for years, journals too. That many of them were sleazy and took them is another (human) story. Amazon used to be full of Wikipedia reprints until they stopped it and then they were pumped full of books written by finding failed searches via their API and a Markova chain. Thousands of books a month from some authors. Not to mention that any essay question a first year will ask will spit out a spew of replica unsourced almost identical SEO optimised clickbait, some written by humans, some not. Or ask a search engine what streaming service near you has access to a show or film and see the bot spew out confident nonsense.
Google tooling up for its IPO in 2003 and ditching page rank. That’s when this started in earnest for me.
