iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

After publication, I got detailed responses on this matter from the Château de Versailles. Here are some highlights

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Google said it removed some ads that violated policy. The affected websites claim to be very clear with customers but somehow decided to add a bar at the top of their website flagging that they are not the official website after we reached out.

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For example, the official Louvre site charges an adult €22.00 for a ticket; the ticket trap charges €76.00. Ballparking based on their reach, the sites may have cost customers more than €2,000,000 in excess charges.

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Alexios Mantzarlis @mantzarlis.com · 18/06/2026

Two Spanish operators running 20+ lookalike domains for the official sites have flooded Google with ads for {attraction name} + tickets. They then overcharge for a base ticket by a factor of 2x to 7x.

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I have typically found that Community Notes leaves good fact checks out but doesn't allow bad fact checks in. Yet in this case a "helpful" note actually makes a false statement (the image is AI-generated). Not great. h/t @mxbernhard.bsky.social

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Alexios Mantzarlis @mantzarlis.com · 17/06/2026

Sometimes you have to (metaphorically) kill off an emu to fact-check a shady marketing firm.

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Alexios Mantzarlis @mantzarlis.com · 15/06/2026

Looks fixed on main but behind the “more matches” interstitial on iPhone I still see the problem…

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Alexios Mantzarlis @mantzarlis.com · 15/06/2026

Can someone at Google PLEASE fix these flags already

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Alexios Mantzarlis @mantzarlis.com · 12/06/2026

this seems totally reasonable i'm sure it will pan out exactly as projected

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Pangram's CEO told me that "the tools and algorithms of the future are all probabilistic" but some professors and university administrators think using AI text detection in higer ed is "conceptually unsound,” because it “cannot meet the evidentiary threshold required."

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Following some friendly pushback by @informor.bsky.social, I also tried to see how much I could generalize from the gaps I found. In about 4% of my subsequent tests, I found that slight inversions of text could flip the verdict completely (see example below).

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Rhyming, inverted text, archaic language, and repetition were the strongest predictors that synthetic text would be branded as human-written.

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Alexios Mantzarlis @mantzarlis.com · 08/06/2026

Excuse me but AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!

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Spain 🇪🇸 Cape Verde 🇨🇻 represented as Norway 🇳🇴 Iran 🇮🇷

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Alexios Mantzarlis @mantzarlis.com · 07/06/2026

It’s a vexillological bloodbath in Google’s World Cup schedule preview right now

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Alexios Mantzarlis @mantzarlis.com · 04/06/2026

After Indicator reached out, Apple and Google deleted 43 of the unsafe apps flagged by the audit.

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Alexios Mantzarlis @mantzarlis.com · 04/06/2026

(here's the study's testing approach)

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Alexios Mantzarlis @mantzarlis.com · 31/05/2026

Beautiful day to see Gotham FC — Jordyn Dudley’s going places

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Alexios Mantzarlis @mantzarlis.com · 29/05/2026

hm, are those really the two options for children's titles

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Alexios Mantzarlis @mantzarlis.com · 27/05/2026

I am a bit hesitant to engage with a reply this aggressive — I haven’t “demanded” anything of anyone, shared most findings in this free thread, and my academic position ends in one month — but I will assume good will. We know $12.95/mo is not trivial and offer discounted memberships (1/2)

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My analysis also suggests that AI supercontributors focus less on politicians and hyperpartisan accounts. This may be because they are optimizing for a bridging algorithm that prioritizes broad consensus over factuality.

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AI contributors aren’t just replacing the humans who are supposed to make up the community in Community Notes. They are publishing in languages and on topics that reflect the bias of their algorithmic setup. Japanese notes - a big chunk of human notes - are trivial in the synthetic corpus.

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Community Notes was supposed to bring scale and legitimacy to the fight against misinformation by empowering users to participate in fact-checking. Now that power is increasingly in the hands of a tiny group of hobbyists and researchers.

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