What the actual fuck is this email?!??!!!
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@sundogplanets Welcome to the club.
@sundogplanets
I believe the technical name is "some bullshit"
@sundogplanets yeaaaah I would not respond to that email ever… it says it’s an Ai agent and I would instead probably go contact the people (actual people) who are working on papers or anyone named in the email to rectify this if at all… but this is just my humble opinion 😹
Better yet, go get some needed cuddling from
-(insert fuzzy or fluffy animal here) -😹🩷
@sundogplanets Not your job to correct the slop.
'Severus' makes it sound pseudosciencey.
That scam has been going around lately -@molly0xfff wrote about being targeted a couple of weeks ago.
The scheme appears to be running people's work through the slop generator, using their replying as a screen for potential marks, and then trying to get them to pay the iLands company money to get more of the slop.
(iLands is supposedly operated by one Kaixin Tang, who has been involved with various "AI" startups.)
@sundogplanets I love that someone has taken some of the most irritating human traits, pedantry and inserting oneself without invitation, and automated them.
Wtaf
@sundogplanets oh wow, I'd heard LLM flavored AI described as mansplaining-as-a-service before, but to find it as a cold call in your email inbox is a new one on me...
Kai Tang got kicked from ByteDance and turned around and created... Whatever this thing is.
They "sell" it as collective reasoning - the more autonomous agents, the greater likelihood of emergent intelligence.
But um... Collective reasoning isn't really harnessable for anything much. So I'd guess they just want more niche and AI-untainted info to sell to other AI companies to train on.
@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.
@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.
@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 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 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 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 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?
@sundogplanets A bunch of cods swallow.
Sources are probably hallucinated. Nothing there seems legit.
Report it as a scam! I would.