[mapontosevenths]

Cory Doctorow wrote a story ~20 years ago about how the first sentient machines would be spam bots because their job is to pass as human, and anti-spam systems provide competitive evolutionary pressure.

He may not be too far off.

[tetris11]

This one?

https://craphound.com/overclocked/Cory_Doctorow_-_Overclocke...

[mapontosevenths]

I think that's the one. I was a bit off on the timing, it's not 20 yet. Great read either way.

From the story:

“Spam-filters, actually. Once they became self-modifying, spam-filters and spam-bots got into a war to see which could act more human, and since their failures invoked a human judgement about whether their material were convincingly human, it was like a trillion Turing-tests from which they could learn. From there came the first machine-intelligence algorithms, and then my kind.”