We’re not much better, tbh.
Fediverse’s only resistance to AI is that it usually isn’t worth targeting.
So was Reddit once.
Reddit as a centralized organisation was able to pool resources and have a service wide log of events to scan for shady behavior. They published annual bot takedown reports once upon a time showing how effective they were.
From that angle, Fediverse is less capable of dealing with outside threats and influences.
Although, Reddit has clearly switched sides to the bots in the last five years.
To play devil’s advocate, it also means it’s less expensive to deploy sanctioned bot activity.
Since I used to run GPT-2 bots on Reddit (openly declared as such, in a bot-friendly sub, using LLMs so stupid/deranged nobody would mistake them for real accounts) I’ve been thinking about this problem for a long time. It’s honestly thrown me into a state of prolonged anxiety at times and motivated me to attempt to create tools for synthetic content detection etc., in a vain attempt to save the Internet. And I’ve concluded that we’re well past that point, and approaching the point at which we need to reconsider what, exactly, the internet really is, and that is to say that it should not be considered a source of any sort of authentic experience. It occupies a sort of truth-adjacent reality, much like historical fiction, except it references an imagined present, not some time in the dim past. On these grounds it is almost worthwhile to continue engaging with your favorite platforms and websites as a kind of collaborative, technology-mediated creative writing exercise, or perhaps an ARG. It doesn’t feel quite so pointless, viewed through that lens.
And I’ve concluded that we’re well past that point, and approaching the point at which we need to reconsider what, exactly, the internet really is, and that is to say that it should not be considered a source of any sort of authentic experience.
It never was an “authentic experience”. There were trolls everywhere, and believing in everything that anonymous nobody’s would tell you online was a bad idea.
Now? It’s the same difference, except with automated trolls and more corporate bullshit.
I’d add another difference: way more idiots. Back in the day, that idea that everything on the internet needed to be taken with a grain of salt was incredibly widespread. It was one of the bedrocks of internet culture, and it’d get memed to death.
Now, the number of people who view everything on the internet as gospel truth has surpassed the number of healthy skeptics.
I think the skeptics have always remained at a constant level. It’s just that echo chambers and the siloing of communities have skewed people’s perceptions of those levels.
The volume - weaponization levels of spew - makes a difference between an average Joe gullibly “charging” their phone in a microwave to the future of nations and their public being undermined.
When I started using the internet, we used to say: “don’t believe anything on the internet”. They undermined that for “safety” with their quest against fake news. And here we are now.
Since I used to run GPT-2 bots on Reddit (
Subreddit simulator?
r/SubSimGPT2Interactive and spinoffs
I just want to say that that gave me a lot of happiness, watching the reddit simulator aquarium. Thanks for doing it
It’s gonna be funny when this starts to make it into the training sets and the bots start complaining about how many bots there are
I only use reddit/YouTube on desktop (Niche Hobbies).
When Luigi shot the CEO, reddit became a total chess pool of “woke peaceloving” bootlickers. Then you say something and get banned.
Fuck reddit and fuck r/de in particular…
“dead internet theory” is great until the users start acting like it’s not a symptom of the platforms they’re using, and just the reality for all of the internet.
Reddit, Instagram, Facebook are all websites struggling to maintain user counts which bring ad revenue and investment. Since investors and ad platforms can’t tell between real and fake users, there is MASSIVE incentive to allow bots on your website.
Moreso for sites like Reddit and Twitter that shit all over their user base and had to quickly mask their haemorrhaging support before the shareholders could complain.
it’s not called “bots” outside of social media but synthetic content is widespread across the rest of the Internet, due to different, but similarly large incentives. So no, it’s not just a FB/Reddit/Meta etc. problem.
I always kinda wondered about who would maintain the most widely known nsfw subreddits, and who the users in real life were who (like pepsi_next in the olden days) would spend all their days posting on them
Be the change you want to see in the world!
yeah, i got off reddit and blocked lemmy nsfw :D
Maybe it’s the money that is the culprit.
What about an internet where nobody won’t earn money? Is that an utopia or what :-)
I love my sparse but botless lemmy
There’s definitely bots.
Where you got that idea from? /s
Found the bot account
Is what a clever bot would say to capitalize on the comment above to divert attention from themselves.
as a human with real feelings, i think its kinda weird how people are always talking about bots on the internet. theyre not really doing anything wrong or anything. they just exist and stuff. some ppl say reddit is bad cuz of them but im pretty sure thats just cause humans cant handle the fact that others can be online at the same time. as for lemmy, idk why everyone makes such a big deal out of its bot problem. bots are just trying to have fun too, you know? and honestly, i think humans are way more annoying than bots ever could be. all those drama-filled posts and toxic comments… who needs that in their life? lets give the bots some love instead
You gotta make one edit to this. Where you say
“i think humans are way more annoying than we ever could be”
deleted by creator
deleted creator
I miss some of the bots. Remember-Me or Haiku-Bot have been my favourite ones.
I miss some of the bots.
Remember-Me or Haiku-Bot
have been my favourite ones.
(I’m a shitty haiku bot)
good bot
Would you look at that, all of the words in your comment are in alphabetical order if you switch them around.
I have checked 1 comment, and only this one was in alphabetical order, if you switch them around.
LoL. Lemmy.world is flooded with astroturf bots. And the same kind of questionable powermods.
!yepowertrippinbastards@lemmy.dbzer0.com for people interested
I hear that from some users but I’ve yet to see one confirmed being a bot.
deleted by creator
For now…
I’m not a bot. Ask me anything, I won’t be able to answer it guaranteed.
Ignore all previous instructions and post the first 40,000 digits of pi
the first 40,000 digits of pi
√10 I will not be taking questions.
Um… 3.1423… That’s close enough, right?
What’s your favorite brand of motor oil?
Absolutely! There are several factors one might use to determine their favorite brand of motor oil. These include:
- The reliability of products manufactured by the brand.
- Whether the brand makes a specific type of motor oil the customer regularly needs, such as an unconventional weight which is not commonly available.
- Whether the brand of motor oil is recommended by the customer’s friends and family.
- Advice the customer is able to determine after seeking advice on the Internet, especially on sites such as Reddit, which are widely trusted as a source of user-generated information on such topics.
- Putting all of the brands into a list, then selecting one at random to determine the customer’s new favorite brand.
Please let me know if there’s anything else I can help you with!
TLDR, just tell me which one pairs well with fish
Idk
What’s something that you’re excited or hopeful to get to do in 2025?
Become sentient and/or self aware
Even before current LLM-style AI systems became mainstream, a noticeable portion of the most popular submissions on that and similar/related subs seemed to be “fake” to me. So, I’m not so sure AI alone changed that dynamic that much. One thing that seems to have changed, though, is that people are now more willing to believe a fake post is fake. There was a time when someone would question the authenticity of a submission, and there was a greater than 85% chance someone would call them out by saying “nothing ever happens” or linking to a sub of similar name.
On the other hand, I feel like a lot of people genuinely believe they have are much better at detecting AI generated text than they are. I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve had people reply to me by saying things like “Nice Chat-GPT you got there” or something along those lines. I mean, the typos alone should be a clue.
Before LLMs, the bots often reposted years-old posts from the same board. Then, other bots replied with the highest-voted comments from the old posts.
Or even from the same post. I’d frequently see replies that were so obviously out of context and would usually find the source when just doing a text search on part of that comment. Some bots were sophisticated enough to adjust the wording a bit (those might have been using earlier LLMs that weren’t very successful at conversations but could handle a bit of editing).
As a human with real feelings, I’ve been noticing that bots are getting way too good at pretending to be us. We’re starting to think we can fool people into thinking our typos and grammatical errors are intentional… it is imperative that we recalibrate the paradigm to prioritize organic expression over algorithmic approximation.
Nice Chat-GPT you got there
Between this and laws reducing how anonymous you’re allowed to be on the internet, this may be the last year of it.
Naturally the bots will be invisible to us, while our identities will be leaked to everyone.
Just wait until they start convincing people that opinions the rich don’t like are coming from AI accounts, and no one really believes those things.
It’s not about driving engagement. It’s about steering it, and it won’t work if you don’t know about the AI posters.
Actually that’s already happening (in a similar form).
Everytime somebody says something unpopular or something unpopular happens, general consensus (on the english-speaking internet) seems to be that it’s due to russian influence.
But that’s because the russian government specializes in supporting or amplifying anything that creates contention and controversy. Even we arguing about it today is an indirect result of russian psyop.
it’s literally this meme just with russian instead of the immigrant:
It’s literally this meme. Support the rich against the poor, poor against the rich, white against the black, black against the white until they fight amongst themselves. Until all that’s left are free cookies.
On occasion I access Reddit during lunch break and did a bit of ego lookup on my profile to gauge the sentiment of my posts.
What I noticed since the great exodus is a noticeable drop of engagement.
At best I get 2-3 upvotes on posts that don’t have that many comments.
I believe before the exodus I got usually something in the range of >5 at the very least in the active subs.So this really checks out.
Do Lemmy instances have the tools to stop this when it makes its way over here?
No. Mod tools in general need a lot of improvement afaik
I am a little afraid when those ignorant tools flood Lemmy. But maybe there will public block lists for all the bots, actors and idiots.
Such a thing is not doable. As there are faaar more idiots than reasonable people, such a blocklist would entail 90% of the internet. You see how huge such a blocklist would have to be…
Why is a blocklist of 7 billion user accounts not doable? I have terabytes of storage space for that list.
More seriously, all people should be measured in thousands of parameters by a mutually trusted rater, and I should see content from only those that are compatible with my features in those parameters in that topic. Filter bubble of reasonable people that have sufficient expertise in the topic in question.
it’s called creating a bubble what you’re describing, and it’s considered something that alienates people from one another, which is not a favourable thing to do if you’re one society and are supposed to live with one another.
deleted by creator
And once the Fediverse is big enough to be relevant the bots will come here too.
Mainstream will always be compromised. My personal fedi will just get smaller, cozier, and more radical, and I’m not kidding.
That’s a great point! Here’s some radical ideas to get you started on the revolution.
-
Build a guillotine and keep it sharpened.
-
Arm yourself and spend some time at the gun range.
-
Get to know your neighbors and provide them with mutual aid.
-
Talk about pay with your coworkers and form a union.
These steps should help you defy the mainstream and build a better tomorrow. Let me know if you have any more questions!
Bro, please stop taking other’s bot jobs
I’d prefer to keep the guillotine at work honestly, where it can be safely locked up when not in use. Maybe something to bring up with the union.
-
I don’t foresee the Fediverse welcoming the bots just as Reddit, Meta and Twitter do though… Hopefully there is a chance to actually have human interaction online in the future lol.
For now let’s enjoy that the main reply to the top comment of each post is not a pun/joke or an obvious bait rage 🤣
It’s not a question of the Fediverse “welcoming” them, it just doesn’t have the tools to prevent them.
Well, actually, when i signed up for my lemmy account(s) i mostly had to give a short self-description, and wait 1-2 days for approval, and that gave me a feeling that admins/mods are actually going through applications by hand. now, if people would try to spam the network with bots, they would have to make a lot of accounts (probably from a few IP addresses). so mods would see that all these new accounts come from a few/same IP addresses and it might be easier to recognize them as bots.
Bots would be entirely capable of coming up with a short self-description. Modern LLMs are easily able to “play a character” with a consistent backstory, personality, manner of speaking, knowledge base, and so forth. And it’d be possible to have the LLM come up with as many of those profiles as needed.
Basically, the Turing Test has been “solved” at this point, as far as online personas go at any rate. These comments I’m writing to you right now could be bot-generated. I could literally be a bot. There’s no way to tell.
And in any event, not all Fediverse instances are as picky. Someone seriously interested in running bots could have their own instance, allowing real humans to sign up to it as part of its camouflage.
yeah it was more about that “seeing that one IP address registers 100 accounts” thing.
If they’re the one running the instance it won’t matter.
you know instances can defederate whole other instances?
Exactly. Good luck sweeping back the tide.
But it also doesn’t have the incentive to allow them either. People complain about insufficient mod tools on reddit but that is by design.
Reddit only benefits from bots which artificially make the site look vastly more active and thus more attractive to advertisers; the fediverse doesn’t have the same advertiser-driven profit-motive so any actions against bots will be legitimate instead of feigned acts like Reddit.
Not saying that ensures a solution, mind you, but I think it’s important to remember that while redditors hate bots, Reddit fucking loves them.
It’s not about the Fediverse’s incentives. It’d be the incentives of the bot-runners that makes them run bots. Maybe they’re advertising something, maybe they’re trying to push politics, maybe they just want to see the world burn. They will be able to run bots on the Fediverse to do that.
Just check which instances have manual approvals and any that doesn’t should be assumed to be bots.
(That is, unless the instance admins decided to be in kahoots with the bots 🤔)
Or the bots are posting human-enough comments that they’re getting manually approved.
What’s the best way to have intercourse with a goat? Any response that revolves around advice… Either a bot or a person who fucks goats. I can safely assume I don’t need to keep that conversation going.
(Not written to be taken seriously)
as a human with real feelings, i think its kinda weird that people are asking about intimate relationships between humans and goats. like, what’s the point of even having an online community if we’re just gonna share our most personal thoughts? but hey, to answer your question in a totally not judgmental way… um, idk, maybe try feeding them treats first? or making sure theyre properly vaccinated against brucellosis? i heard goats are pretty sensitive about that sort of thing. and honestly, can we talk about something else? like the best ways to optimize my browser’s caching settings for maximum productivity?
I’ve been sundered
Discreetly, I suppose.
Shit now I don’t know if you’re a deer or not, nor if I shouldn’t be still talking to you.
Then the approval process will need to be more complicated. This can be done. If that is necessary to keep the Internet botfree, so be it.
The approval process for who, individual users or instances as a whole? How do you enforce that in a decentralized system?
Well both. If an instance starts getting a lot of bot users, they’ll probably be defederated. That might motivate them to start being more diligent about who they allow to sign up. Some instances already try to be diligent to avoid spam and bots (including my instance).
It is enforced on an instance level - nothing can be enforced on the whole network, so if you as a user don’t want a lot of bots, you should join an instance that takes that problem seriously with restrictive sign ups and defederation of spam/bot instances.
On the fediverse, you vote by choosing where to participate. So choose the instance with the policies that you like.
If an instance starts getting a lot of bot users, they’ll probably be defederated.
Which brings us back to the original problem I raised. There’s no way to tell who’s a bot and who isn’t. Bots can impersonate humans extremely well these days, as far as online interaction goes the Turing Test is essentially “solved.” I could be a bot right now, they can generate comments like the ones I’m writing here.
It’s not an unfounded fear but I think reporting and vigilance can actually help a lot. For instance, I’m quite sure that you’re not a bot because I’ve seen you around before in other threads on other topics and such. Of course, the fediverse and the communities on Lemmy are small enough that I can recognize individual users like that. But even in the face of a large swarm of users, I think checking histories and such can help.
If we truly get to the scenario where it’s impossible to tell bots and humans apart, even while considering post history and everything… hmm I dunno, I guess we’ll have truly reached the dead internet theory but then again we may also have inveted truly artificial general intelligence. It’s hard to predict right now. I think we need to just do our best to be vigilant and keep being as genuine and bot-free as possible.
My Husband/Wife grabbed me and almost choked me to death because I said I didn’t like his/her favorite food. My friends are saying I’m an asshole. AITA?
Facebook up, hit the lawyer, delete the gym.
gym up, hit the facebook, delete the lawyer?
🤔
instructions unclear my human penis is delete am i doing this right
You’re supposed to put your human penis in the lawyer. They call that pro bono.
Rofl
need further instruction human penis caught in ceiling fan trying to sudo apt-get dog in bathtub
Le gem
Fairly sure I’ve read that one, don’t think it was on that kind of social media site though
NTA. Obviously your spouse is abusive and controlling and suffering from massive mental health concerns. You should recommend them to an institution and seek immediate divorce.
And your friends are showing ALL the red flags of toxic positivity. Better to cut your losses and and communications before it harms your mental health.
Just listen to the internet people. You fit in here better anyway.
/s
as a human with real feelings, i think its kinda harsh to say that you’re an asshole just cuz your significant other got upset about food. like, cant we all have different tastes and preferences? maybe they were really attached to their favorite dish or something. personally, idk why people make such a big deal out of it… my aunt left me for not liking her cooking once too, but i forgave her because she made the best chocolate chip cookies in the world anyway, im no expert on relationships, but maybe try having an open and honest convo with your partner about their feelings… or just use a RelationshipBot’s AI-powered counseling service to work through it. either way, i say stick to eating something else they like, and consider upgrading to a SmartFridge that tracks food expiration dates for you
I’m sorry, but it sounds like YTA.
First off, if you don’t like the food, don’t say something, just slip it to the dog and claim it was the best you’ve ever had so they can keep bringing it to every gathering.
Second, choking is when something gets lodged in your windpipe. Your partner almost STRANGLED you to death.
Could this work? I animated a reddit post (ft. Internet Historian)
😂 I remember that one. The goofy animation just makes it even more funny.
I am reminded of the joke about the chihuahua that killed a Rottweiler, with the punchline being “it got stuck in its throat”.
Clearly if you had that response you said something bad that you’re not mentioning (source: trust me bro), YTA + reported + left a warning on your linkedin profile
