Adding over 20 fake AI-gen forums#286
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Adding 23 of Roman Kropachek's fake AI forums
Adding 23 of Roman Kropachek's fake AI forums
Adding 23 of Roman Kropachek's fake AI forums
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If you find any of the sites linked on Wikipedia, I believe there is a way to tag the links as having rotted manually (and replace them with archived versions if available). At least I remember it being possible on citations. |
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The forums themselves barely have no AI-generated images. Rather, the machines operating these sites scrape screenshots from the web and superimpose them over eye-catching wallpapers, which makes the websites less readily-identifiable as slop. The main sections of these websites do have AI-gen images, though.
The following websites are worse than the others, because they actually pretend to be the legitimate, original websites, actually offering free downloads, selling software, and giving themselves legitimacy by linking to related GitHub repos:
Additionally, there are a couple other websites that don't actually have a forum, but otherwise follow the same format as the others and are operated by the same person:
There is a tech company, CleverFiles, that supposedly makes file recovery software (looks like a scam though). They pivoted into crypto in the 2020s, and recently, into AI.
According to this press release, on October 15th, they launched a product called "AI Humanizer", which is supposed to make AI-generated text seem more human. In order to test the company's product, co-founder Roman Kropachek launched at least 20 fully AI-generated websites, including fake forums full of bots talking to each other in several languages.
What's particularly insidious is that Kropachek is cybersquatting, or registering domains that were associated with defunct organizations, such as Mepis (an operating system), Babelgum (a streaming site), or KisMAC (WiFi scanning software). This has caused search engines to index and display the websites prominently. I believe many of the sites are linked on Wikipedia, which is why they are ranked so highly in searches.
Several of these websites shill NetSpot App, another software created by Kropachek, complete with tracking affiliate links.
Unrelated to this request, just in case anyone else stumbles upon this and wants to dig deeper: The user u/Sellpal "James Miles" on Reddit advertises there on Kropachek's behalf. Additionally, there is a promotional subreddit for AI Humanizer called r/bestaihumanizers. The original software is located here, the official website is here, and the maintainer is "Bernard Pelt".