Roasted Christmas Spam from Muhu.ai
I wrote what I thought would be the final blog post of 2024 last week, and was looking forward to starting 2025 strong with a blog I’d been drafting since July 2023. But then, a little after …
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I fear you played right into their hands by writing about them. Any engagement is of benefit to these AI grifters.
That sort of comment might be true if I had responded with a shallow, emotional response. Something like "how dare these outrageous motherfuckers claim to 'roast' my hand-crafted artisanal open source beauty with their AI slop!!".
I didn't do that. I sifted through the public information, assembled a profile of the people behind it, discarded the irrelevant details, and used it to describe their conduct as illegal in the country their business is incorporated in, with enough receipts for anyone else who finds their AI grift to leverage to give them immense amounts of legal and compliance pain. And then I released this all on my furry blog with the keywords that other open source developers would likely to try in a search engine if confronted with their same outrageous behavior.
Rather than let my outrage make me a useful idiot, I've surveyed the landscape and made sure that I'm controlling the conversation. I'm also keeping the evidence preserved, and not giving them any SEO backlink juice. This all dovetails into how bad their AI is at what it even claimed to be doing.
If any of this plays into their hands, then they're playing chess on a dimension that the void cannot comprehend, let alone my mortal ass. But I'm willing to wager that the amount of legal anguish my blog post will create for their grift will significantly outweigh any benefit they get from the possible name recognition my blog creates.
I thought about that a bit but I am unsure if the kind of response, whether emotional or factual, matters much. How much can you control the conversation if the entity you are discussing only wants their name published? Sure there will be a few GDPR letters and maybe an inquiry by some regulatory body. Satisfyingly annoying to them, but compared to the cost of an advertising campaign; would this not be just a drop in the bucket? I don't think it would have been entirely out of the question for your blog post to be at the top of hackernews for the day, and this is exactly the crowd that company wants to reach. In fact, I would wager that the HN crowd approves of these methods.
It's good that you don't link to their website but in my opinion not engaging with that spam at all is the more effective strategy. Just don't feed the trolls, report their spam and move on.
How much can you control the conversation if the entity you are discussing only wants their name published?
It's not about what they want published. It's about what they don't want published.
Sure there will be a few GDPR letters and maybe an inquiry by some regulatory body. Satisfyingly annoying to them, but compared to the cost of an advertising campaign; would this not be just a drop in the bucket.
Advertising campaigns generally don't include OSINT on the people behind it and evidence of their crimes. How does what I published help them increase their revenue or reduce their costs? Everything is ruled by incentives.
I am sure they don't want this information published, my fear is that your blog article about that company might spark further articles about them. This engagement might outweigh the negative effects of your investigation.
I simply consider what these AI fraudsters do trolling. They want to make people angry so they complain about them. Hopefully your investigation gave them more than what they bargained for.
