PSA: bot comments are taking over ao3
The above examples have been provided with the authors' permission to demonstrate what these look like.
Basic rundown:
- They are all 3 sentences long
- Perfect grammar, capitalization, and punctuation
- Like absolutely flawless English teacher-style writing with only a single exclamation mark, ever
- No mentions whatsoever of character names, settings, situations, or anything that could be tied to the story
- The usernames may be identical to people who exist on ao3, but the name is not clickable, and no profile is associated with it EXCEPT when you directly search for that name. What this means: the comments come from an unregistered (not logged in) reader, bots scrape the site for real usernames, attach that to the comment, and post
Please spread the word about this so authors can filter comments and report them accordingly
There has been some speculation about why this is happening at all, and the best guess is that this is a feature that AI-training story-scraping tools are implementing to try and make their browsing traffic look legitimate
