Recently it has formally come out that a certain individual has created a spambot AI trained on 3 years worth of 4chan posts, and can create convincing shitposts that can de facto shut down all discussion on a board by drowning it in noise. This chatbot was directed primarily at /pol/ - a board which I personally janny - for the purpose of disrupting legal political discussion that the makers of the chatbot disagreed with. I do not want to get completely conspiratorial, but I've seen various other bits of evidence here and there (mostly social engineers bragging) that there is quite a bit of money put behind shutting down /pol/ through this and similar chatbots in order to accomplish goals such as ensuring certain people lose certain future elections. (this isn't to say /pol/ helped anyone win anything, what matters is certain groups think /pol/ matters and is thus worth spamming)

I can fully understand that /pol/ is not going to be the most popular board among non-/pol/ jannies. There are many reasons why you are perfectly within your rights to say "who cares what happens to /pol/?" But in my opinion this is the first salvo in a broader attack on 4chan, as the weapons used to disrupt /pol/ will be freely available and could easily be turned against other boards who may have similar grudges against them - such as /mlp/ or /lgbt/. Something needs to be done to counter these chatbots in general, as it seems that the individual behind this used a 4chan pass and the posts were mostly innocuous shitposting. The bots could easily be trained to not violate the rules (i.e. no 'saged' or profanities) and be further difficult to ban. According to the man himself, he was able to flood /pol/ to such a degree that 10% of all posts were the chatbot's. Simply imagine this happening on any other board and you understand my concern.

I do not think this should be ignored or dismissed AT ALL. It will be an invisible tumor going forward. This is 'Dead Internet Theory' realized.