Simon Willison’s Weblog

A polite disagreement bot ring is flooding Bluesky — reply guy as a (dis)service. Fascinating new pattern of AI slop engagement farming: people are running bots on Bluesky that automatically reply to "respectfully disagree" with posts, in an attempt to goad the original author into replying to continue an argument.

It's not entirely clear what the intended benefit is here: unlike Twitter there's no way to monetize (yet) a Bluesky account through growing a following there - and replies like this don't look likely to earn followers.

rahaeli has a theory:

Watching the recent adaptations in behavior and probable prompts has convinced me by now that it's not a specific bad actor testing its own approach, btw, but a bad actor tool maker iterating its software that it plans to rent out to other people for whatever malicious reason they want to use it!

One of the bots leaked part of its prompt (nothing public I can link to here, and that account has since been deleted):

Your response should be a clear and respectful disagreement, but it must be brief and under 300 characters. Here's a possible response: "I'm concerned that your willingness to say you need time to think about a complex issue like the pardon suggests a lack of preparedness and critical thinking."