This was the weirdest thing I’ve seen today. These are only the ones I’ve spotted.
funnily enough, these bots are also replying to an obvious repost from another bot account. It’s at the top right now! Beautiful
https://www.reddit.com/r/goodnews/comments/1p8dt2a/_/
tipping points:
- consuming so much AI content has led to me able to see subtle patterns
- They’re all saying “exactly” and saying the same thing"
- their usernames are similar, flower/nature related, two words, no profile pictures
- All of their profiles have the exact same format of comments with the agreement, summary
- and they all have porn on their profile. oh
edit: tf? 
All of social media is dying before our eyes. every platform is basically fully botted or actively dying, even lemmy seems to have fallen off quite a bit
I absolutely agree. When I come to Lemmy I look for this sort of insightful comment to restore my faith in humanity.
It’s like comment ad libs.
On a serious note, what you see and what I’m mocking is the easy to spot “low hanging fruit”. It would be arrogant for me to assume Ai comments aren’t getting past my mental filters on a daily basis.
I am working on LLM detection for the threadiverse. But other than one idiot last week spamming LLM posts and comments there hasn’t been much.
I appreciate all of the extra work you do in terms of Threadiverse infrastructure and quality of life.
Many Reddit bots have also straight copy+pasted content from Reddit or other social media with only trivial changes to the text or image, if any change, so the Threadiverse needs to be able to catch those as well. A better internal search engine, especially one that can search for strings of text [edit: and one which can search through deleted and removed content], would help users track down if an account’s content was routinely copy+pasted. I think a new instance (unaffiliated with any particular instance) staffed by users familiar with bot detection to flag bot accounts for federated instances to then ban would be the best facsimile of Reddit’s now defunct BotDefense subreddit, which was a critical tool for users to tackle the site’s bot problem.
This account I noticed yesterday is an example of a Threadiverse account just copy+pasting content (or in this case, crossposting to the original community) with little to no change. I have reported it to its host instance as suspicious but it has yet to be removed. An independent and informed instance for flagging bot accounts could more effectively communicate to the host instance as well as to Federated instances that this account is ticking the boxes of a bot account and should be blocked, banned, or at the very least closely monitored.
A detector for bot networks, such as in the screenshot above, would also be helpful. Some sort of indicator of if several accounts are interacting with each other or on the same posts as each other far more often than they are interacting with other accounts and other posts would be helpful.
Maybe like the New Account Highlightenator on the Voyager app, there can be an indicator for when an account has fewer than X amount of posts or comments (i.e. a potential new bot account), as well as an indicator of if the account has returned from a long hiatus of posting/commenting (i.e. a potential former human account that was bought or hacked to become a bot account).
I’ll try to think of more signs of bots and more ways the Threadiverse can build infrastructure against them.
There are in politics conversations, but still not nearly as bad as reddit. Even before I left, it was like a weird kind of prolific dead. Kind of like the conversations in OP’s pics.
It’s actually the blessing of not being big enough to attract their attention
won’t last foerver…everyday I understand why the btulerian jihad came about
Will this LLM detection be something my LLM prompt can include?
Just going to put my tinfoil hat on for a sec…
Part of me does wonder if the seemingly pointless proliferation of ai slop like this botting is being done intentionally to fast-track a ‘need’ for identity verification (and thus more precise tracking and surveillance).
ID verification is already being pushed on a few fronts (like to ‘save the kids from social media’ or whatever), maybe this is just one of many irons in the fire.
With ID verification then Facebook etc could angle themselves as ‘save havens’ from an ai slop enshittified internet. You’d essentially have to completely give up your anonymity to participate in interactions with other verified humans.
So your choices become:
Surely sites like reddit or Facebook, if they tried, could control this stuff otherwise?
Except that Meta has already admitted that it is using AI bot accounts to “drive engagement.”
After an outcry from real users, Meta said it had removed some AI bot accounts. But nothing else they said indicated that the experiment is over.
Eventually, social media is going to be nothing but company-generated AI bots, “bot farms” run by humans in developing countries, and (hopefully) a small number of actual users who can’t tell the difference between those things and real people.
Closed platforms where the only propaganda bots are the ones controlled by the platform. They can then remove ADs from the business model and instead finance the platform by selling access to the bot accounts. And people will think they are in the perfect social media without advertising and only RealPeople™ that they can completely trust.
Well there’s holes in the fact that resale of accounts is an active and common phenomenon, and creating a fraudulent identity for an online service (even if you have to doctor an ID template) is a low-risk barrier of entry.
Remember how people used death stranding photos to get around face ID? It’s the same concept.
I’m not giving my fucking id to anyone.
There is no service I need to use badly enough to do that.
I won’t use anything meta makes. Don’t use Snapchat. Reddit is fucking dead as far as I’m concerned. I’m not on twitter, blue sky.
I know im not fully anonymous and there is shit I do that makes tracking me possible or even easy, but I’m not going to make it easy on anyone.
Go fuck yorself with your surveillance shit.
Wait Lemmy too?