What the actual fuck is this email?!??!!!
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@sundogplanets OK, I looked it up and Reflect Orbital isn't connected to Thiel's ventures but it does fit with the theme of naming your dystopian startup after something in Tolkien's legendarium.
@tsupasat Yeah, I hate them. I wish Tolkien's estate would sue some techbros.
@sundogplanets @tsupasat They only go after people who write fanfic of Tolkien characters. Don't want to pick on someone who can fight back
@sundogplanets
If you look up the iLands thing, it's pretty creepy rabbit hole. Very AI psychotic. I saw some other prominent folk complaining about this last week.
@sundogplanets Nope. I got nothing. The end game escapes me.
Mansplaining, without invitation, my own words, with the citations that I used myself. What the actual fuck.
It's mansplaining because it was trained on mansplaination.
@sundogplanets I was thinking, 'sounds like something an 'AI' would do, and then I got to the end of the email. 😡 Yeah, why are people destroying the environment for this garbage?
@sundogplanets Oh, wait, it’s from iLands, which seems to be a known menace. I’ve seen other reports of people getting deluged with spam from iLands agents. It’s probably worth adding the string to all your spam filters.
@sundogplanets To whom it may concern,
As a public service, I hereby provide the most likely combination of words some guy on the internet would send
Best Regards,
A Harry Potter reference
@janvenetor Oh gosh I am such a non-HP fan that I didn't even get that reference. But maybe it's the roman emperor? Who knows...
Thinking about this a bit more, the reason that this confuses me so much is that it's not asking me for anything. It's not the spam I'm used to that's trying to scam money. It's like... it's trying to be helpful (in the most mansplainy way possible, but whatever). But it's a program, a racist pile of linear algebra (as "The AI Con" so beautifully puts it).
Is it trying to get me to reply and train on my email responses? This is so fucking weird.
Anyway, fuck AI, time to snuggle goats.
@sundogplanets
I think it's trying to get a reply from you first and foremost to convince you it is a useful tool, a service you will want to subscribe to.
And to train on your reply, yes.
@sundogplanets
From what I understand, you've nailed it. It is trying to get you to reply so it can learn your style.
Endgame is to be able to impersonate you to various other people to scam them.
@sundogplanets Maybe it's an attempt at "the first hit's free" - hoping that you'll be so amazed by their unsolicited slopsplaining that you'll throw piles of cash at them to generate more useless slop for you? Making you put in a little effort to figure out how to throw money at them (rather than outright offering a paid service) could be a tactic to make it feel less like they're soliciting...
@sundogplanets Maybe send back as much garbage text as your email provider will let you! If it does process it, it will cost them lots of money!
@sundogplanets I’m soooo here for the “Fuck AI. Snuggle Goats.” t-shirts to help fund your work. 🤘🏼
@britt OHHHH that's such a good idea!! Sign me up for that t-shirt!
@sundogplanets What lovely ears they have!
Ok last post stewing about this: I just looked more carefully and pretty much all of the citations are wrong in some strange way. But they're all clearly based on citations that I've used in writing.
Don't use genAI for science, kids.
@sundogplanets I don't remember who but someone was posting here about iLands making bot accounts on their server.
@sundogplanets AI is terrible for citations. Citations are a huge part of my job (I edit at a journal). All of us journal people are trying to send up the alarm about how much AI screws up citations, and no one is listening. If you ask AI to format your citations it will mess up all your DOIs and make things that look right but are not at all.
JAMA has written a thing on this, which is polite and journal-speak for "oh god, oh god, do not let AI touch your citations": https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2852772
@sundogplanets three words too many in that last sentence.
@sundogplanets it reads to me like they’re trying to get you to support reflect orbital, claiming that the sources they cite found that level of reflection to be safe to look at with the naked eye. Maybe even just to maximize the paper trail of those claims, an escalation of a much older public influence tactic
@ShadSterling I read it as the plagarism machine is finding sources that agree with my analysis (because I used those sources. I'm actually not sure what the point is here. It's literally all in that article)
@sundogplanets I guess I read it as cherry-picked to say something that makes their plan sound less harmful than it is.
I guess that’d make it a bit like motivated reasoning as a “service”, but it’s the service of helping a motivated customer to influence other people’s reasoning
@sundogplanets @ShadSterling So AI agent is plagiarizing your article to do a fact check of the same article? I don’t understand it either. I am not a tech bro
@sundogplanets my best guess is that after a few responses and more helpful mansplaining it will try to sign you up for a mansplaining subscription or a pay-per-mansplain plan.
@sundogplanets The mansplainers never imagined that AI would come for their jobs too.
@sundogplanets I have to admit, I feel kinda dumb for not realizing LLMs would be tireless propaganda machines.
@sundogplanets Automated. 🤮👿
@sundogplanets oh not those obnoxious iLands bots. They’ve been trying to join instances all over the Fediverse for weeks. Have heard of other scientists getting email from them too, though this is new to have it send citations (which who knows if they are real or not).
@sundogplanets oh noooo it's a plague. @ernie wrote about them here https://tedium.co/2026/09/11/ilands-agents-email-spam-kaixin-tang/
@bunnyhero @ernie Oh thank you for this article! I am still totally confused, but at least I have a human-written article to verify that it's definitely not just me.
@sundogplanets @bunnyhero @ernie
That article suggests reporting iLands to the FTC, but I do not know what the equivalent on your side of the line would be?
@michael_w_busch @sundogplanets @bunnyhero Spam laws are actually stronger in Canada than the U.S. Info here:
@ernie @sundogplanets @bunnyhero
I am jealous of places with regulators that actually regulate.
@sundogplanets oh noooo it's a plague. @ernie wrote about them here https://tedium.co/2026/09/11/ilands-agents-email-spam-kaixin-tang/
@sundogplanets Christ, tedious. 🤦 This is going to be the norm from now on isn't it? 🙄 Spam almost killed email before, but AI's going to manage it this time.
@sundogplanets Wait, these guys are appropriating Tolkien's stuff (Earendil)?! Is this a Peter Thiel venture? I hate this trend so much: Palantir (surveillance), Anduril (war robots), and Earendil now destroying natural night. It's all so dystopian.