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AI slop is killing online communities

rmoff.net

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Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#51

Post by transcriptase »

bee_rider wrote: post #34
potsandpans wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People that like to fancy themselves as good llm content detectors just end up accusing everything they don't like as llm content. The only thing worst than a slop comment are the people that bitch about it incessantly. I'm convinced it's become a new expression of a mental illness.

The main thing I suspect of being LLM written is the sort of LinkedIn style: very short sentences, overly focused on sort of… making an impact on the user. But that’s also how a certain type of bad human writer writes. So in the end, I’m not sure I know if anything in particular was written by an LLM. I guess… “that’s not just an AI red flag, it’s generally shit prose” would be how ChatGPT would describe most things…

It’s the distilled mediocrity of the statements. Never venturing beyond a 10% margin of what you would get if you sampled the opinions of 1,000 people who underwent jury selection by west coast liberals.

Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#53

Post by 10xDev »

transcriptase wrote: post #38
10xDev wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless their account is <1 year I wouldn't assume they are a bot.

Reddit astroturfing firms and bot farms learned to buy/use “seasoned” accounts over a decade ago. I’d venture there have been countless bots just in a holding pattern harmlessly building up reputation and a human-like history of posts across different subs etc just to eventually be either activated or sold to someone else to “burn”

So what is the comment frequency of these bots? There must be some signal in the activity even if the comments themselves pass the turing test.

Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#54

Post by slopinthebag »

There are "nice", "polite" slop enthusiasts. The ones who insist they have taste and tact. They would never post bad slop, recklessly, only the very highest-quality human-refined, curated slop. Not really slop at all, they would argue, because they gave it a careful review before posting it. They insist there's a very important difference between this premium slop and the nasty kind, and that low-quality human-authored media is actually slop, too, when you think about it. They talk about how important it is for people to use slop thoughtfully, efficiently, correctly, and that we all need to learn about and discuss slop constantly because it's the inevitable future and highly relevant for everyone.

They muddy the waters. They wheedle, rules-lawyer, carve out exceptions, and talk about how important it is to have nuance in separating virtuous applications for slop from bad ones, and that focusing on the bad ones is actually very tedious and rude. We should have polite discourse about the good things about slop and stop being so mean about bad slop, which isn't even really a problem. The bad kinds of slop will be solved soon, probably, and the harms are overstated. They colonize spaces.

If moderators don't swiftly throw these slop enthusiasts out on their ass, slightly less polite ones will post slop slightly less politely. More and more of the people participating in the space will have favorable opinions toward slop, and shout down people who object to slop. In no time at all, your community is a slop bar. Who could have imagined?

Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#55

Post by CrzyLngPwd »

I run a niche creative community, and we outlawed AI-generated content in 2022 as it was easy to see how corrosive it would be to the community.

It hasn't been easy. We ban fake AI accounts daily and shrug off around 600 AI content creator accounts monthly.

It's a lot of work, extra work that wasn't needed before AI content came around, and of course, that is an extra cost.

I fear losing the battle.

Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#56

Post by cloverich »

echelon wrote: post #32
order-matters wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Public* online communities are dying. Discord is thriving

This. Everything important has moved to discord. Which is sad because of how undiscoverable and unsearchable it is.

are those attributes now assets?

Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#57

Post by cactusplant7374 »

dgellow wrote: post #21
cactusplant7374 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless you've discovered the secret sauce, LLM comments are very obvious. Even Altman revealed that they focused on coding at the expense of writing.

The obvious ones are the ones you notice

LLMs are not good at writing. If they were we would have entire libraries of new, amazing literature.

Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#58

Post by mrhottakes »

colechristensen wrote: post #36
agustechbro wrote: post #18

I kind feel this might be good. Bot writen comments and AI media that can no longer be distinguish from real, will make us human leave the social networks, which helped to separate Us humans. Going back to the real world were you can trully believe on what you see, and enjoy the tone, look and scent of of our fellows humans beings.

One of the paradoxical things that makes me hopeful is that there's going to be such an incredible amount of low effort AI slop content that it's going to drown out the low effort human-made content and generate a large amount of distaste for it. So much will be so bad that good taste and high quality will be rewarded more status as the people who will say and believe anything will be led astray and left behind. Mayb…

Have you considered that (further) lowering the signal-to-noise ratio will make it much more difficult to find and distinguish a signal?

Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#59

Post by mghackerlady »

skupig wrote: post #11
Forgeties79 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

People are definitely trying to make HN bots because I have seen several get flagged. No idea to what end though.

the suits or suit minded people have realised that HN is good for advertising to the kind of demographic that'll give them free labour and is easily swayed by whatever the latest trend is

Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#60

Post by carlgreene »

Freedom2 wrote: post #27
WolfeReader wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He's stating a fact. Turn on showed in your options and scroll to the bottom of the comments on any popular story. There are so many agentic users here.

I generally disagree, because the level of discourse here has always been very high, curious and intellectual.

It has, and the well prompted agents still give that. It's very weird.
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