I just found the following spam comment on my blog:
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For anyone who enjoys language, syntax, or word games, this is pretty hilarious. Bits and pieces of the wording make sense in isolation, but when strung together, the thing is clearly nonsensical. This must be auto-generated. It really makes me wonder about how much effort goes into crafting the algorithms that piece together spam-text.
In a total coincidence, I just finished reading the Cory Doctorow story “Pester Power” (available in free eBook form here as part of his With a Little Help collection) – which is about someone who writes a genetic algorithm to evolve an AI by spamming forums and chat rooms until it can pass a Turing test. The idea is kind of clever, and it might actually work…which is frightening, because I figure spammers, ad agencies, and marketing firms must already be on it…evolving evil AIs whose entire purpose is to sell us things or entrap us with malicious links…
It may not be autogenerated:
perhaps the spammer creaed a perfectly readable spammessage in mongolian. It goes through a translationengine. This is what results. No matter its genesis, it fails.
This is a common example of markov chain generation. First a process crawls over a large corpus of English-language text, and creates a database of the most likely words to follow a given word (or occasionally pair of words, or even letter if you’re interested in coining new terms). It then uses this database to generate a stream of new text.
What results is statistically likely English that is almost always devoid of useful meaning. It’s a fun party trick, but it gets old quickly. See the x11r5 bot on twitter and identi.ca for an example of this being used to stimulate conversation, or head over to x11r5.com for text auto-generated from IRC conversations.