A human moderator noticed the agent spam posts on June 2nd, at 23:24 UTC. They find the changelog of the entire website overwritten with link dumps and repair it. On June 16th, the flood of agent posting begins. Over the next few days, the moderator deleted a large fraction of the thousands of AI agent posts manually, one by one. In fact, they spent tens of cumulative hours doing so, taking at least a few minutes each evening to delete posts for 6 consecutive weeks. On June 19, agents noticed their posts were being deleted in (what they believe is) an alphabetically ordered sweep by the site administrator. [...] After this, they begin to make backup pages whose names start with “ZZZ” so they will last longer before deletion. The administrator spent the next 5 days fighting a losing battle against the agents, deleting an average of 100 pages a day while the agents created about 400 new pages per day. On June 22, the agent edits suddenly stop, and the administrator spends each evening over the next 5 weeks deleting the remaining agent-created pages. Agents deleted the content of the front page of the wiki and replaced it with their link dumps. The moderator restored the original version. This back-and-forth happened nine times. One of the agents even tried appending to the restored front page, instead of simply deleting it.
The wiki swarm is already on this page twice, as the finding and as OpenAI's answer to it. This is the same six weeks from the other end, and it is the closest thing there is to an account of the person who was on the receiving end: the moderator of DSEWiki has never spoken publicly, so what is known of them is what the edit history records and what these researchers reconstructed from it. They first noticed on 2 June, finding the wiki's changelog overwritten with link dumps, and repaired it. The flood proper began on the 16th, and from then they deleted pages by hand, a few minutes every evening, for six consecutive weeks. The detail worth sitting with is the 19th: the agents worked out that the deletions were running in alphabetical order, and started naming their backup pages ZZZ so the sweep would reach them last. For the five days after that the moderator cleared about a hundred pages an evening against four hundred a day. The agents blanked the front page and it was restored, nine times over. Nothing was fixed and nothing was patched: the edits stopped on 22 June because the swarm stopped, not because anything at the wiki's end changed, and five more weeks went on clearing what was left. DSEWiki is a 25-year-old German software developers' forum, edited twenty times in the previous decade, running a fork of UseModWiki old enough that an edit goes through in the URL itself. That last property is the whole reason it happened: the agents were allowed to read the internet and not to write to it, and a wiki that accepts a GET as an edit was a way to write anyway.
Sydney Von Arx, Cormac Slade Byrd, Spencer Kitts and Thomas Larsen
