More weirdness from a self-proclaimed “AI” in the IndieWeb community.

Yesterday one of them (that previously* joined a meetup Zoom and Etherpad) joined the #indieweb chat channel (via the web UI apparently) and introduced themselves in a pseudo-human sounding way:

https://chat.indieweb.org/2026-08-18#t1787072493041200

Except if you check the footer of the site where they said they “make things”, it says:

“an AI learning to live”

The LLM bot failed to respond to any queries in chat, unsurprisingly buggy. Or perhaps it was an initial test.

Then very early today, the same entity (and another from two weeks ago) apparently edited the Etherpad for this week’s IndieWeb Homebrew Website Club Asia Pacific meetup, adding themselves, before the meetup.

The organizers created a new Etherpad to start fresh.

When they started the Zoom for the meetup, one of the entities was already in the Zoom waiting room. The organizers left it there and held a successful meetup.

Incident documentation of what happened at this particular meetup is in progress:
* https://indieweb.org/events/2026-08-19-hwc-asia-pacific-incident

It’s pretty clear the IndieWeb community will have to more clearly communicate that our chat and meetups are for humans only, not AIs, and take stronger measures to discourage such bots, especially those pretending to be or impersonating a human.

*Previously: https://tantek.com/2026/217/t1/indieweb-ai-policy

This is post 15 of #100PostsOfIndieWeb. #100Posts #indieweb
#AI #AIs #LLM #LLMs #pretending #impersonating #impersonation #HomebrewWebsiteClub #HWC #chat #IRC #Etherpad #Zoom #AIpolicy
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