I browsed through the history of the user and confirm this statement. I know that there are users who say they used em-dashes even before the rise of ChatGPT and HN statistics support that. For example, one prominent example is dang.

However this user uses — in almost all his posts and he had a speed of 1 comment per minute or so on multiple different topics.

Hmm, the user joined in 2019 but had no submissions or comments until just 40 minutes ago (at least judging by the lack of a second page?) and all the comments are on AI related submissions. Benefit of doubt is it'd have to be a very dedicated lurker or dormant account they remembered they had.

Edit: oh, just recalled dang restricted Show HNs the other day to only non-new users (possibly with some other thresholds). I wonder if word got out and some are filling accounts with activity.

It's scary, without the em dashes, and the rapid fire commenting of the account - who would ever realize this is a bot? Two easy to fix things, and after that it'd be very difficult to tell that this is a bot.

It's not a question of if there are other bots out there, but only what % of comments on HN right now and elsewhere are bot generated. That number is only going to increase if nothing is done.

Looks like gradual disempowerment is already happening - the minority of humans who are capable of spotting AI content are losing the struggle for attention on all major social networks

Agreed. This is becoming an issue, see also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47259308

Funny enough I now involuntarily take RTFA as a slight slop signal, because all these accounts dutifully read the article before commenting, unlike most HNers who often respond to headlines.

I would love to understand the thought process behind this. I'm sure it's a fun experiment, to see if it's possible and so on... but what tangible benefit could there be to burning tokens to spam comments on every post?