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  • Hacker News
  • The problem with certain peptides (the Eli Lilly patented ones like Tirzepatide and Retatrutide) is that when you carefully look at whats going on, you'll notice that they are recently filing lawsuits for anyone who mentions those words on their website, even med spa's and compounding pharmacies [0].

    It is legal to sell research only peptides that are not FDA approved, but as soon you talk about efficacy and human use, you also become a target for the FDA warning letters. [1] [2] [3].

    Anyone selling these peptides who are indexed by search engines face increase scrutiny immediately, especially if you're going to try to sell the patented ones, because then you're a Target of not just the FDA but also Eli Lilly... peptides are big business but it's big risk if you do it wrong.... Eli Lily wants people spending $1,000 per month to use these peptides.

    I think the trick about selling peptides to people is to probably do it word of mouth, no indexing by google, no ads, double gated website with invite only structure.

    [0] https://www.npr.org/2026/08/13/g-s1-138594/eli-lilly-files-6...

    [1] https://www.fda.gov/inspections-compliance-enforcement-and-c...

    [2] https://www.fda.gov/inspections-compliance-enforcement-and-c...

    [3] https://www.raps.org/resource/fda-warning-letters-target-mar...

    by jijji
  • If you base your trust towards a thing you intent to inject into your body on the niceness of some website and clumps of letters that appear on it, you should think long and hard about your life because you must have made at least five grave mistakes sometime earlier that led you to this point.
    by scotty79
  • "Anyone who’s not been living under a rock knows that we’re in full peptide mania."

    No, they don't, it's a very Silicon Valley specific thing and I never heard about them here in France. People need to stop thinking their experience generalizes by default

    by aweb
  • Hey, could be worse. At least the amino acid chains themselves aren't LLM-generated. Right..?
    by andai
  • This article is not so much about peptides it's about entirely AI generated ecosystems. The goal is to promote questionably scammy commercial interests, or obviously political interests as I'm sure is happening also, by creating whole webs of semi convincing looking portals, discussion boards, review sites, community activity, etc, all fake.

    The blog post rightly points out we should get good at spotting all this but this is not the scary part, the scary part is that the audience for these ecosystems is not even humans, it's the big AI players like Gemini and ChatGPT, and those are places that a lot of people are going to get information and advice on things.

    I use Gemini quite a lot and lately I've already noticed it's very quick to give me a broad spectrum vibe on some issue or topic and not good at all at backing it up with reputable sources. So I think this is potentially a very ominous development of the entire web itself becomes a giant poisoned cauldron of untrustworthy AI maliciously influencing "trustworthy" AIs.

    Update: i fed this comment into Gemini and asked "what is Google doing about this?" and it produced a very long, detailed answer, leading off with tagging this as the so-called "internet ouroboros" problem. For those who don't feel like doing the same, I can distill it's answer as follows: "Yo. Chill. We got this, bro. Lol" so we're good!

    by zzzeek
  • I wonder if AI companies already have a good way of filtering out these generated sites, or if the internet has just become worthless for training.
    by Levitating
  • I do like the Potemkin Village metaphor for things like the website in question. Given how little effort something like this takes, I imagine there are a lot more of them than I've considered before, and given the way search engines operate and index, and LLMs scrape relatively indiscriminately, it seems to have implications that go beyond Google's stupid summarized answers at the top of the results page.
    by MPSimmons
  • A robots.txt explicitly allowing LLMs has nothing to do with whether it was made for humans or not and is generally the right move assuming you want your site picked up and recommended by AI tools. No different than allowing search engine crawlers to pick it up and the authors focus on that is bizarre when the rest of the evidence is so stark.
    by elliotec

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