Last weekend I was trying to pull together sources for an essay and kept finding “fact check” pages from factually.co. For instance, a Kagi search for “pepper ball Chicago pastor” returned this Factually article as the second result:

Fact check: Did ice agents shoot a pastor with pepperballs in October in Chicago

The claim that “ICE agents shot a pastor with pepperballs in October” is not supported by the available materials supplied for review; none of the provided sources document a pastor being struck by pepperballs in October, and the only closely related reported incident involves a CBS Chicago reporter’s vehicle being hit by a pepper ball in late September [1][2]. Available reports instead describe ICE operations, clergy protests, and an internal denial of excessive force, but they do not corroborate the specific October pastor shooting allegation [3][4].

Here’s another “fact check”:

Fact check: Who was the pastor shot with a pepper ball by ICE

No credible reporting in the provided materials identifies a pastor who was shot with a pepper‑ball by ICE; multiple recent accounts instead document journalists, protesters, and community members being hit by pepper‑ball munitions at ICE facilities and demonstrations. The available sources (dated September–November 2025) describe incidents in Chicago, Los Angeles and Portland, note active investigations and protests, and show no direct evidence that a pastor was targeted or injured by ICE with a pepper ball [1] [2] [3] [4].

These certainly look authoritative. They’re written in complete English sentences, with professional diction and lots of nods to neutrality and skepticism. There are lengthy, point-by-point explanations with extensively cited sources. The second article goes so far as to suggest “who might be promoting a pastor-victim narrative”.

If this were one person, I wouldn’t write this publicly. Since there are apparently multiple people on board, and they claim to be looking for investors, I think the balance falls in favor of disclosure.

Last week Prothean Systems announced they’d surpassed AGI and called for the research community to “verify, critique, extend, and improve upon” their work. Unfortunately, Prothean Systems has not published the repository they say researchers should use to verify their claims. However, based on their posts, web site, and public GitHub repositories, I can offer a few basic critiques.

In my free time, I help run a small Mastodon server for roughly six hundred queer leatherfolk. When a new member signs up, we require them to write a short application—just a sentence or two. There’s a small text box in the signup form which says:

Please tell us a bit about yourself and your connection to queer leather/kink/BDSM. What kind of play or gear gets you going?

This serves a few purposes. First, it maintains community focus. Before this question, we were flooded with signups from straight, vanilla people who wandered in to the bar (so to speak), and that made things a little awkward. Second, the application establishes a baseline for people willing and able to read text. This helps in getting people to follow server policy and talk to moderators when needed. Finally, it is remarkably effective at keeping out spammers. In almost six years of operation, we’ve had only a handful of spam accounts.

I’ve been involved in content moderation since roughly 2004. I’ve built spam prevention for corporate and personal e-mail, moderated open-source mailing lists and IRC channels, worked at a couple social media networks, and help moderate a Mastodon instance for a few hundred people. In the last few years I’ve wasted more time fighting blog comment spam, and I’m pretty sure Large Language Models (LLMs) are to blame.

I think of spam as a space with multiple equilibria. Producing spam takes work. Spammers are willing to invest that work because each message has a small chance to make money, or achieve political or emotional goals. Some spam, like the endless identical Viagra scams in my email spam folder, or the PHPBB comment spam I filter out here on aphyr.com, is cheap to generate and easy to catch. I assume the spammers make it up in volume. Other spam, like spear phishing attacks, is highly time-consuming: the spammer must identify a target, carefully craft a plausible message using, say, the identity of the target’s co-workers, or construct a facade of a bank’s log-in page, and so on. This kind of spam is more likely to make it through filters, but because it takes a lot of human work, is generally only worth it for high-value targets.

LLMs seem to be changing these equilibria. Over the last year I’ve seen a new class of comment spam, using what I’m fairly sure is LLM-generated text. These comments make specific, plausible remarks about the contents of posts and images, and work in a link to some web site or mention a product. Take this one I caught a few months back:

Update, 2025-05-22: TrueNAS was kind enough to reach out and let me know that their support process does not normally incorporate LLMs. They’re talking about what happened internally, and intend to prevent it from happening again through improved documentation and reviewing the support process as a whole. I’m happy to hear it!

TrueNAS makes file servers, also known as Network Attached Storage (NAS). I bought one of their smaller boxes to house backups, and it’s a great little NAS. For many years TrueNAS sold boxes with a BSD-based operating system, but in the last few years they’ve released a new, Linux-backed operating system called TrueNAS SCALE, also called “Community Edition”. I was considering migrating to TrueNAS SCALE, but the docs started off with this warning:

TrueNAS Enterprise customers should consult with TrueNAS Enterprise Support before attempting migrate.

The process requires an extended maintenance window, requires executing steps in the correct order to prevent issues with system configuration and operation, and additional system review post-migration to catch and correct any configuration issues.

Update, 2023-05-23: Added a paragraph about Dr. Howard Whiteman’s non-existent quote.

I subscribe to the Chicago Sun-Times, a non-profit newspaper. This week they sent me a sixty-four page special insert, branded with the Chicago Sun-Times logo, full of LLM nonsense. Yesterday I wrote the following letter to the Chicago Sun-Times. That evening, they published this followup.

Dear Mr. Buscaglia and the Chicago Sun-Times,