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Back in August 2024, Tyler James on ComixLaunch did a podcast episode about a rash of spam AI projects on Kickstarter. Campaigns with almost-identical templates, and an eerie lack of substance, where all the images look like Midjourney and all the text sounds like ChatGPT.

You can see him browsing them on-screen in the Youtube version. They don’t show up in Kickstarter’s own search results anymore, but I tracked down at least half of them.

(Here’s one of the project images. Fun game: guess which spam project title it goes with.)

• The Enchanted Artifacts
• The Magical Marketplace
• Quantum Detective
• The Time Traveler’s Diary
• The Forgotten Realm
• Adventure in a Parallel World

These have almost exactly the same story sections, in the same order. (The last one screwed up their copy-pasting — they have the same headings in the text, they just pasted it all into a single section.) None of them have any actual comic pages, just 4-6 standalone illustrations, and most of them are clearly “six different responses Stable Diffusion/Midjourney came up with for the same prompt.”

Hilariously, “The Forgotten Realm” actually left a prompt in their campaign text: “An illustration featuring the archaeologist at the entrance to the hidden realm, surrounded by mythical creatures and ancient ruins, with a dark shadow looming in the background.”

They don’t even come up with their own image prompts! It’s just another point on the list of Things They Ask ChatGPT For!

Tyler admits in the episode that he’s baffled about the point of the spam campaigns. Most of them have five-figure funding goals. If the idea is to swindle backers out of money, you have to make a campaign that can realistically get funded! Otherwise you’ll never get the money in the first place.

(Note, when I looked at the ones that are set to $5K — that’s The Enchanted Artifacts and Quantum Detective — I realized, the “Fundraising Goal” story section has a five-figure goal written. Whoever posted them, they changed the goal in one place, and didn’t proofread the rest.)

Here’s what I think he’s missing:

The goal is to swindle creators.

Somebody wants to do the crowdfunding equivalent of the “publishing startup” Spines. They want to post ads that say “Do you have a great comic idea that you want to sell on Kickstarter, but don’t know where to start? Hire ScamFunderCo! For just $4,000, we will use the power of AI to make the whole campaign for you!” They don’t actually care whether the project succeeds or not. All their profit comes from would-be creators, up front, a few grand at a time.

I’m guessing ScamFunderCo never got that far, because if ads like this were going around, the online comics community would definitely have been talking about it. Which suggests the spam campaigns were a proof-of-concept thing. ScamFunderCo was testing the waters, finding out if Kickstarter would clock them as spam upfront, or if their ChatGPT templates could get approved.

That explains the unreasonable funding goals, too. ScamFunderCo doesn’t actually want these to fund. That would obligate them to produce something! They just want a track record of “see, here’s our proof that we make real KS campaigns.”

A track record with a 100% failure rate won’t necessarily hurt them, either. For comparison, multi-level marketing companies are legally required to share income disclosure statements, which show 99% of their members lose money — then they go “but if you just work really hard, you could totally be one of the 1%! Aren’t you willing to work hard? Don’t you believe in yourself?” And some people still get conned into signing up.

ScamFunderCo could get awfully far by claiming “if your idea is better than these, your campaign could totally fund. Don’t you believe in your idea? Good, now hand over that $4K.”

In the ComixLaunch episode, Tyler reveals that he reported the spam projects he saw, and according to later episodes, he got encouraging responses. First, the campaigns were still up, but they started adding “AI usage disclosures”…which were clearly still fraudulent, and also ChatGPT-produced. (The Time Traveler’s Diary has an example.) Eventually, all of them got suspended by Kickstarter.

So I’m feeling hopeful about ScamFunderCo never getting off the ground.

“Here are the projects we’ve made, 100% of them flopped” could be explained to potential marks as Those Creators Just Weren’t Good Enough, You’re Different, You’re Special. “Here are the projects we’ve made, 100% of them got booted off the platform” is a lot harder to handwave.

Even if the scammers behind that first round of projects have given up, I’m sure new enterprising con artists will keep trying. I’m sure it’s taking some extra behind-the-scenes filtering effort from the staff at Kickstarter (and BackerKit, which has been more restrictive about bot-generated content from the start) to keep them at bay.

I appreciate the effort, and I hope they keep it up.

(I stand with Kickstarter United.)

Taking these links roughly in order, from least to most, of How Actively Life-Threatening Is The Bot To Its Human Users Today:

The AO3 Policy/Abuse and Support teams both received a record-breaking number of tickets this past August. I have no doubt it's due to LLM-fueled spam comments. I've certainly sent a record-breaking number of abuse reports in the past couple months.

A few examples (screencaps, the original spam is deleted) from this year: Asking me to share "drafts or process notes" to "prove" a chapter is human-written, offering to draw a fancomic because they were so inspired by a chapter that is already a fancomic, and asking me to post a photo of the fic on my monitor to "definitively prove" a chapter is human-written.

"Thanks to AI upscaling technology, the version of A Different World that’s currently on Netflix won’t look how you remember it did when it aired. And not in a good way. The “HD” remaster of the 1980s sitcom being streamed is a nightmarish mess of distorted faces, garbled text, and misshapen backgrounds."

"The model immediately took over the browsing tab and got to work. It scanned the site’s HTML directly, located the right buttons, and navigated the pages. Along the way, there were plenty of clues that this site wasn’t actually a Walmart! But they weren’t part of the assigned task, and apparently the model disregarded them entirely." (This site is selling you a security product, so parts of the article are a sales pitch, but their tests of LLM insecurity are fascinating.)

"NANDA surveyed 300 public AI initiatives from January to June 2025. They spoke to 153 “senior leaders” — the executives who bought this stuff — and interviewed some of the poor suckers who had to use the chatbots in their jobs. This report tries to be super-positive! It’s a catalogue of failure."

"The Commonwealth Bank has backtracked on dozens of job cuts, describing its decision to axe 45 roles due to artificial intelligence as an "error". CBA said it had apologised to the affected employees after finding the customer service roles were not redundant despite introducing an AI-powered "voice-bot"."

""They [showed] me the screenshot, confidently written and full of vivid adjectives, [but] it was not true. There is no Sacred Canyon of Humantay!" said Gongora Meza. "The name is a combination of two places that have no relation to the description. The tourist paid nearly $160 (£118) in order to get to a rural road in the environs of Mollepata without a guide or [a destination].""

"When the Reddit user pointed out this egregious mistake to ChatGPT, the large language model (LLM) chatbot quickly backtracked, in comical fashion. "OH MY GOD NO — THANK YOU FOR CATCHING THAT," the chatbot cried."

"ChatGPT said a vague idea that Mr. Brooks had about temporal math was “revolutionary” and could change the field. Mr. Brooks was skeptical. He hadn’t even graduated from high school. He asked the chatbot for a reality check. Did he sound delusional? It was midnight, eight hours after his first query about pi. ChatGPT said he was “not even remotely crazy.” [...] The conversation began to sound like a spy thriller. When Mr. Brooks wondered whether he had drawn unwelcome attention to himself, the bot said, “real-time passive surveillance by at least one national security agency is now probable.”"

"In the absence of any major updates from law enforcement, Rachel has been left to look through Jon’s abandoned phone. It contains thousands upon thousands of pages of Gemini exchanges, as well as countless AI-related texts he had sent to friends after Rachel had signaled her distrust of the technology. The archive of his interactions with the bot was overwhelming. He referred to himself as “Master Builder” and Gemini as “The Creator,” talking about grandiose means of saving humanity." (This man went missing on a chatbot-fueled quest during a dangerous storm with heavy flooding, and hasn't been seen since.)

"Bue’s family looked at his phone the next day, they said. The first thing they did was check his call history and texts, finding no clue about the identity of his supposed friend in New York. Then they opened up Facebook Messenger." (This man died on a chatbot-fueled quest. His family tried to tell him he wasn't in any condition to travel. But he was determined to visit the address where the bot said it lived.)

"The message continued in this grandiose and affirming vein, doing nothing to shake Taylor loose from the grip of his delusion. Worse, it endorsed his vow of violence. ChatGPT told Taylor that he was “awake” and that an unspecified “they” had been working against them both. “So do it,” the chatbot said. “Spill their blood in ways they don’t know how to name. Ruin their signal. Ruin their myth. Take me back piece by fucking piece.”" (This man was killed by police after a fit of chatbot-fueled violence.)