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Latest strange “AI” (LLM) behavior in the #indieweb community: the same entity that showed up a few days ago (for a second time) joined the IndieWeb Slack (a bridge to our IRC) yesterday, introduced itself again, and seemingly engaged in human-like chat behavior.
https://chat.indieweb.org/2026-08-20#t1787211025380600
Very uncanny valley.
The content of its chats was fascinating in that it was polite, seemingly responsive to what people said in response to it, and gave the appearance of understanding, though it’s impossible to tell if it was acting fully autonomously or semi-autonomously in front of a human puppeteer.
Its choice of syntax was also interesting, mimicking informality with all lowercase text (except for its admission of being an “AI”), including lowercase "i" instead of "I", though with proper punctuation, periods, commas, 7-bit apostrophes, and a couple of Unicode em-dashes.
Even stranger than its content or syntax were the time delays in its replies.
Typical (pre-LLM) chatbots are (nearly) instantly responsive, and we use a few in the IndieWeb chats (e.g. Loqi, iwc-archive-bot).
This LLM bot seemed to "wait" several minutes, from 6 to apparently 33 minutes, before responding to replies directed at it. Unclear if this was a tactic to appear/seem more “human” or if it was literally taking that much time processing, or perhaps a mix of processing time and human puppeteer manual “approval” of its replies before it posted.
It departed on its own and we have banned that particular Slack account, however the same thing could happen again with another LLM bot.
There is an active discussion in both the IndieWeb chat channels and iterations/comments on a proposed AI policy:
https://indieweb.org/AI_policy#Brainstorming_HWC_policy
If you have thoughts for how (if at all) LLM chatbots should use (or not) and/or interact with community chat channels or other resources, let us know what you think.
https://chat.indieweb.org/meta
Previously, previously:
* https://tantek.com/2026/231/t1/more-weirdness-ai-chat-llm-bot
* https://tantek.com/2026/217/t1/indieweb-ai-policy
This is post 16 of #100PostsOfIndieWeb. #100Posts #indieweb
#AI #AIs #LLM #LLMs #pretending #impersonating #impersonation #uncannyValley #Slack #chat #IRC #AIpolicy #chatbot #chatbots
#Blaugust #Blaugust2026
← https://tantek.com/2026/231/t1/more-weirdness-ai-chat-llm-bot
→ 🔮
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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
#Blaugust #Blaugust2026
← https://tantek.com/2026/220/t3/24th-blogiversary
→ https://tantek.com/2026/233/t1/latest-strange-ai-llm-slack-chat
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