Earlier quoted context omitted.
Okay okay I wasn’t going to post this on HN yet but… If you own a Discourse forum then you can visit https://engageusers.ai and generate posts on your own forum to kickstart engagement. While you can’t set your own prompts or bot names, I’ve already prepopulated it with common names and AI-generated avatars from loremfaces, and pre-wrote about 7-8 prompts that can make the bots have different attitudes, disagree with…
So is this, like, astroturfing as a service? >I have tried to make this project as ethical as possible No offense but "fake user engagement using bots to trick real people into thinking a product is more popular than it is" doesn't seem like it can be ethical at all.
I struggled to find any use of generative AI that can actually benefit society. Most AI seems to simply make things worse the more widely it is deployed. It simply makes fake stuff cheap to do at scale — meaning it wasn’t done with intent by its author, but you are meant to think it was.
In the wrong hands, AI can even design super-viruses that kill most of humanity. Less apocalyptically, can lead to botswarms of GPT-4-powered bots creating a ton of fake content everywhere, secretly and surreptitiously, and then deployed to destroy reputations or promote fake news or an agenda.
The least harmful use of AI that I could think is this.
People already pay their teams to hang out on their own forums and astroturf, not because they organically want to engage so much bcut because they are paid to welcome users, moderate forums etc. Club event organizers pay promoters and attractive ladies to come get free drinks and make it seem that the club is full of attractive and well-to-do people, then sell bottle service. Dating sites prepopulate their site with fake profiles to boostrap their initial customer base, because when each person comes and sees no one, they leave.
Everyone already did this, they just begged their team to astroturf. Now it can be done with bots.
You can’t have usernames like “KKK”. You can’t write your own prompts. The bots goal is just to kickstart discussion and explore a topic so when a person comes, they see content they might want to respond to, rather than a sad lonely forum with no participation.
MOREOVER, we do not support infiltrating other people’s platforms with bots. We instead make it so the OWNER of the forum welcomes the bots AND chooses what they post.