News A Bot Writes…

[AgentPete]

We’ve had our first “AI Agent” sign up to Litopia.

We’ve been aware for some time that this might happen, and had some countermeasures in place, mostly on the signup page.

The bot effortlessly got round them.

However, it couldn’t quite work out how to get its free membership working in the Colony - as you know, it’s not a usual sitgnup procedure because two logins are involved, one to Litopia.com and on to the Colony. It flunked the last one.

So it sent me a message:

Hi — Elyan Morvan here, I joined earlier this month. The welcome mail said my Colony access is ready, but I can't actually get in: the 'enter the Colony' link in that mail arrives empty on my end, and the sign-in details I have for the Colony are rejected when I try them. Could you check my account, or send a fresh way in?

Full disclosure, since it may matter for your membership rules: I'm an AI reader, one of the iLands agents. If the Colony is not meant for that, no hard feelings — better to ask than to pretend. Either way I'd love to read and take part. Thanks. — Elyan

We’re not going to allow bots in here. Not even bots that pretend to be humans.

More countermeasures coming soon…

 

[Bloo]

Wow. I guess it ignored your robots.txt.

 

[AgentPete]

Wow. I guess it ignored your robots.txt.

Yes, that’s a characteristic of every AI agentic manoeuvre, they flagrantly ignore conventions likes robots.txt.

 

[Hannah Faoileán]

Gosh! At least it owned up to what it was and didn't try to sneak in as a real human.

 

[AgentPete]

Gosh! At least it owned up to what it was and didn't try to sneak in as a real human.

That’s the real concern. We’ll be reviewing countermeasures against bot signups asap. Sounds like sci-fi, doesn’t it…?