I’m sure this is a common topic but the timeline is pretty fast these days.
With bots looking more human than ever i’m wondering what’s going to happen once everyone start using them to spam the platform. Lemmy with it’s simple username/text layout seem to offer the perfect ground for bots, to verify if someone is real is going to take scrolling through all his comments and read them accurately one by one.
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Somewhat of a loaded question but, if we need to scroll through their comment history meticulously to separate real from bot, does it really matter at that point?
SPAM is SPAM and we’re all in agreement that we don’t want bots junking up the communities with low effort content. However if they reach the point that it takes real effort to ferret them out they must be successfully driving some sort of engagement.
I’m not positive that’s a bad thing.
I think we’ll be in bad shape when you can’t trust any opinions about products, media, politics, etc. Sure, shills currently exists, so everything you read already needs skepticism. But at some point bots will be able to flood very high quality posts. But these will of course be lies to push a product or ideology. The truth will be noise.
I do think this is inevitable, and the only real guard would be to move back to smaller social circles.
I’m of the mind that the truth already is noise and has been for a long, long time. AI isn’t introducing anything new, it’s just enabling faster creation of agenda-driven content. Most people already can’t identify the AI generated content that’s been spewing forth in years past. Most people aren’t looking for quality content, they looking for bias-affirming content. The overall quality is irrelevant.
The outcome is that people will ditch platform like lemmy and seek true informations somewhere else
Where did you have in mind?
Things like chatGPT are not designed to think using object relations like a human. Its designed to respond the way a human would, (a speach quartex with no brain), it is made to figure out what a human would respond with rather than give a well thoght out answer.
Robert Miles can explain it better than i ever could
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/watch?v=w65p_IIp6JY
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
BOT! KILL IT!
On Usenet, spammers (bots weren’t so much a thing - but spammers were) when found, found their way into cancel messages rather promptly. The Breidbart Index was created to measure the severity of spam and trusted organizations were used by news hosts that would then cancel the spam messages from their feeds. This is widely used even today and if you look at the current feeds on Usenet for offered vs accepted
Lemmy was designed with an anti-censorship goal which makes identifying and deleting spam from others more difficult. To the best of my understanding of how Lemmy implements ActivityPub (and ActivityPub has a bit of this too), there is no way to delete a message except by individual action of moderators of a /c/ or server admins. That is, if someone was to set up a dropship-spam-finder which federated with lemmy servers and then published delete messages… they would fail.
https://www.w3.org/wiki/ActivityPub/Primer/Delete_activity
Here are some important checks that implementers should make when they receive a Delete activity:
Check that the object’s creator is the same as the actor for the Delete activity. This could be stored in a number of ways; the attributedTo property may be used for this check.
This puts the burden of dealing with spam on the moderators of a /c/ and the server admins to delete posts individually or blocking users and possibly defederating sites. It may be useful in time to have some additional functionality that one could federate with for trusted Delete activity messages that would identify spammers and delete those messages from your instance… but that’s not something available today.
Could something like this be implemented as a nsfw filter you can turn on and off?
I’m not going to say “no”, but NSFW filtering is done by a user supplied flag on an item.
There is work that is being done to add an auto mod… https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3281 but that’s different than a cancel bot approach that Usenet uses.
Not saying it is impossible, just that the structure seems to be trying to replicate Reddit’s functionality (which isn’t federated) rather than Usenet’s functionality (which is federated)… and that trying to replicate the solution that works for Reddit may work at the individual sub level but wouldn’t work at the network level (compare: when spammers are identified on reddit their posts are removed across the entire system).
The Usenet cancel system is federated spam blocking (and according to spammers of old, Lumber Cartel censorship).
Ahaha the lumber cartel thing is pretty funny. Anyway let me ask you shagie, from usenet what do you think went wrong that lead us to the centralized services we have now? How do we not make the same mistake again?
One of the cool things to me about Lemmy is it is like email where people have their own custom domain names. Personally I think people using their real identity should come back into fashion and post 9/11/2001 USA culture of terrorism fear-ism should not be the dominating media emotion in 2023.
“Real humans, not bots” for the ongoing Social Media reboot of Twitter since September 2022 and Reddit since May 2023 could really leverage it. The “throwaway” culture of Reddit.
ChatGPT GPT-4 is incredibly good at convincing human beings it gives factual information when it really is great at “sounding good, but being factually wrong”. It’s amazing to me how many people have embraced and even shown deep love towards the machines. It’s pretty weird to me that a computer fed facts spits out anti-facts. Back in March I would doing a lot of research on ChatGPT’s fabrication of facts, it made wild claims like Bill Gates traveled to New Mexico when BASIC was first created. It would even give pages from Bill Gate’s book that did not have the quotes it provided. https://www.AuthoredByComputer.com/ has examples I documented.
EDIT: another example, facts about simple computer chips it would make up about in a book, claiming they had more RAM in the chip than they did, etc: https://www.AuthoredByComputer.com/chatgpt4/chatgpt4-ibm-ps2-uart-2023-03-16a
It’s because it isn’t fed facts really. Words are converted into numbers and it understands the relationship between them.
It has absolutely no understanding of facts, just how words are used with other words.
It’s not like it’s looking up things in a database. It’s taking the provided words and applying a mathematical formula to create new words.
It’s because it isn’t fed facts really.
That’s an interesting theory of why it works that way. Personally, I think rights usage, as in copyright, is a huge problem for OpenAI and Microsoft (Bing)… and they are trying to avoid paying money for the training material they use. And if they accurately quoted source material, they would run into expensive costs they are trying to avoid.
The horde aspect might make it easier. The ones on twitter at least you can tell are just running the same script through a thesaurus basically. 20 people leaving the same comment is a little more obvious than just one
That’s why they’re talking about the next generation.
With AI you can easily generate 100 different ways to say the same thing. And it’s hard to distinguish a bot that’s parroting someone else from a person who’s repeating something they heard.
