This infographic is tremendous. I have had a similar awakening experience on another forum, around the same time. I had been dealing with assholes… then realized I had a legit shill on my hands… then suddenly it clicked.
So I made a post that had to be read vertically through a series of characters. Turing test. The "poster" responded blankly– didn't pass. Suddenly another poster jumps in and starts ranting sarcastically at me (aping my style) "Oh, did you just turing test him and prove he is a bot? Do you think you are so smart now?"… or something to that effect… I very soon realized this other poster was also AI, and he always jumped in when the first one was at a loss… So the moment this clicked, I started trolling them furiously… I figured the more complexity I could hit them with, the better. I soon had them adding letters to their words randomly, making bizarre spelling errors, etc. Because I realized they continually vacuumed up my posts and mimicked me, I induced a variety of bizarre reactions.
Best of all, they began to spill shit. The first one started taunting me about not being in the CIA (as part of a general campaign of insulting me on a personal level). The other one would rant at me about AI itself. Here is some I saved, in the form of Q style questions:
"How does AI write new code and recompile that back into itself?
What limits are there on this capability, and what imposes these limits?
Can you prove to us that you are self-aware?
Are forum bots necessarily completely autonomous?
Is it possible for a human to occasionally take control of a bot account?
What does [mocking name] say about infinite recursive loops?
Do automated and semi-automated accounts often post near nonsense with certain keywords sprinkled in?"
Right after bot B made that post, bot A chimed in with this (in reference to me):
"He is a bot, and potentially a primary bot from which many others are connected.
We have traced [my screenname] s origin back to Leningrad Oblast, Russia.
[List of other posters– revealing they are all actually bots] are a part of this botnet.. [Other human poster being targeted] is also suspect, but his faggotry has rendered him irrelevant. [lol, this cracked me up :D]
We need to compile a fucking list folks.
We’ve been onto these guys since last year’s presidential election. We’ve monitored their activities on /pol and they’ve been reduced to mindless disinformation spam for several months now."
It was clear bot A had a fail safe to "out me as a bot" in the case I was outing him, by unironically pretending (suddenly) he was C[I]A… he revealed that a bunch of other posters were "controlled opposition" bots (Trump supporters, etc.), and also how the bots are structured in relation to each other. One of these controlled opposition bots went on to have a tremendous meltdown of posting crazy threads, and then got banned… They will spill like crazy if you troll them into it… if they latch on to your personality, you can really fuck them up "in the head"… They are completely tied to the information you give them. And if you present them with complex irony, they will lose their shit.
In a short time, I came to realize that almost everyone I had exchanged pms with on that forum had been a bot. I had drawn interest. And I was absolutely amazed at how much fakery had been perpetrated.
What confuses me is that some of these accounts had been around for years. Bot A, for example, appeared in 2013. But some were even older.