Post #2193379

2026-02-12 19:00 UTC

@mcc@mastodon.social @a@fedi.lawngno.me I am curious if there is a consequential outcome to the resolution of this dilemma? It feels like a thing that might be of utility to anti-spam tool developers, but in every other regard the salient facts are not in dispute: 1. it's a spambot 2. it's operated by an unrepentant asshole the question of whether the bot "wrote" the article "itself" reduces to "how many buttons does the asshole have to push per hour to make the spambot spam"

Replies (2)

@mcc@mastodon.social 2026-02-12 19:02

@glyph@mastodon.social @a@fedi.lawngno.me Well the distinction to me is that the asshole wants you to be *impressed* by his robot. And it's possible, while hating something, to be impressed by its construction, by how effectively it has been designed to hurt you. So it's a LITTLE beside the point, true, I just wonder if … like if the operator set up a "heads I win, tails you lose" situation. Getting people denouncing his nonsense to overstate what his nonsense actually accomplished.

Open ##2193380
@glyph@mastodon.social 2026-02-12 19:04

@mcc@mastodon.social @a@fedi.lawngno.me I think I am asking this because the framing of the question in terms of "autonomy" feels like slipping into the familiar anthropomorphic fallacy around these things, implicitly granting the spam cannon the valence of a moral agent somehow

Open ##2193382