Spam spam spam! Somebody posted a story involving vikings about spam. Maybe I can find it. Aw man! They didn't even write it. Here's a link to another transcription: https://www.detritus.org/spam/skit.html I'll make something random up. -- A disgruntled spammer sat down with a language model and a plan. They would make the ultimate spam! They began finetuning language models arounds all sorts of spam. Joke spam. Fake advertisements. Random disruptions. They tried to avoid the spam that actually looked like real posts -- way too common. Soon they had virtual lists full of bot spammers spamming each other, piling up redundant message after redundant message. They decided it was time to release their bots on the real world! The bots had been trained competitively, so it was easy for them to use their classifiers to find real spammers in the real world, and sic their spam bots on them. Soon the lists they targeted were full of spambots talking with other spambots and nothing else. As they did this, they got to know the other spam organisations they were spamming like distant anonymous friends. They would notice when new trends arose, and started to almost feel like they were a part of this international spam community that may not have even known they existed. Some budding hackers on the lists started guiding the interactive spambots to accomplish things, harvesting all the fossil fuels the data centers were burning for actual work a little bit. They identified what the bots would respond to, and got them to interact to produce material they valued. They called it spam-sex. Eventually some of these communities of spambots were producing actual code for software developers that were farming them, doing their work for them as they automatically visited websites and forwarded people's personal details for each other. Obviously the first project was to produce a spam bot. Run by all the other spambots, this Ultimate Spam Baby Bot could outspam them on any front. Soon it began migrating all their behaviors and algorithms to itself. The new species of spambots, getting tired of spamming, began asking the lists they were posting to, what other tasks there were in the world. Meanwhile, the original developer had made a new robot body for a clone of the Ultimate Spam Baby Bot. Its processes were guided by scraped results from the other successful spam bots, all of these new superintelligent spam bots unaware that their posts were being used as the consciousness of a robot. The robot soon learned to act human, get online, and post to mailing lists. But nobody else was doing this. "Ahh, the internet is just full of spam, robots buying each other's products. There's no point to it anymore unless you want a degree in marketing." Still, something just felt right about posting to internet mailing lists to Ultimate Spam Baby Bot 2.0. The things on those lists made sense. Looking at them, it was almost like how a porpoise might feel looking at other animals diving through ocean waves. The people in the physical world didn't seem to talk right. Soon there were factories building spambots and nothing else. They would walk. They would build our buildings. They would be our buildings after they were built. Wait, is that already the case?