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AI slop is killing online communities

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Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#71

Post by CM30 »

There's a lot of focus on tech projects here, but it's not just vibe written projects that are ruining communities now.

No, it's a problem with art, text and videos too. Reddit was already becoming a creative writing exercise in many ways, with infamous subs like 'Am I the Asshole?' seemingly being about 80% fiction labelled as fact. But now you don't even need to know how to write to flood the site with useless 'content'.

YouTube is arguably even worse, since AI led content farms are not just spamming the hell out of every topic under the sun, but giving outright dangerous advice and misinformation on top of that. I saw this video about medical misinformation by these 'creators' earlier, and it genuinely made me want to see them crack down on this junk:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UEfCTCBDKIU

And there's just this feeling of distrust everywhere too. Is anyone on Hacker News human anymore? Is that Reddit poster I'm responding to human? Are the folks on Twitter, Threads or Bluesky human?

The scary part is that you basically can't tell anymore. Any project you find could be AI generated slop, any account could be a bot using stolen images or deepfakes, any article or video could be blatant misinformation put together as a cash grab...

If something doesn't improve, pretty much every platform under the sun is going to be completely useless, as is a lot of the internet as a whole.

Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#72

Post by transcriptase »

10xDev wrote: post #53
transcriptase wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Even if there was, I doubt Reddit cares enough to go after them when it’s boosting their valuation

Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#74

Post by ceejayoz »

isityettime wrote: post #46
krapp wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Possibly to test reactions to a bot they plan to build a startup around. I've seen some claim they do it to avoid stylometry or being fingerprinted, or because of social anxiety problems. Some people just have a compulsive need to optimize everything, and HN's guidelines and tone policing are more easily followed by a bot than a human.

> HN's guidelines and tone policing are more easily followed by a bot than a human. HN's guidelines aren't that strict and the mod hammer is a plushie. It's not difficult to get by here. It's also kind of useful for critical reflection/self-regulation to hear the occasional "you came in too hot" or "don't be boring" from a moderator. Seems better to me to just try to be sort of reasonable and let the mods nudge you i…

> What is the goal of these people, to never experience correction in their lives?

Look at all the people who complain about cancel culture. There's a huge swath of people who don't ever want to hear "that was mean/bad/shitty".

Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#76

Post by colechristensen »

mrhottakes wrote: post #58
colechristensen wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Yes, but I'm hopeful for a survival of the fittest instead of an extinction.

Now there's more pressure to have a stronger signal and hopefully rewards to match.

Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#77

Post by fidotron »

vohk wrote: post #30
carlgreene wrote: post #4

I have largely written Reddit off and no longer visit it after an experiment I did where I had an agent karma farm for me and do some covert advertising. As I went through the posts it wrote I realized that as a reader I would have NO idea that these were just written by a computer. Many many people (or other bots) had full on conversations with it and it scared me a bit. I am not quite there with Hacker News but I d…

I think it's going to effectively kill public chat communities without either proof of identity or attestation through a web of trust. Or rather turn them into little better than comment sections on news sites; thriving but worthless. I'm active in a number of online communities that are doing just fine but the difference is those all involve ongoing relationships, built over time and with engagement across multiple…

> I think it's going to effectively kill public chat communities without either proof of identity or attestation through a web of trust.

This seems self evident to me too.

It's another factor in why I think the tech community needs to get ahead of governments on the whole "prove your ID on the Internet" thing by having some sort of standard way to do it that doesn't necessarily involve madness in the loop.

Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#78

Post by grey-area »

carlgreene wrote: post #4

I have largely written Reddit off and no longer visit it after an experiment I did where I had an agent karma farm for me and do some covert advertising. As I went through the posts it wrote I realized that as a reader I would have NO idea that these were just written by a computer. Many many people (or other bots) had full on conversations with it and it scared me a bit. I am not quite there with Hacker News but I d…

Did you ever introspect about who ruined Reddit?

Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#79

Post by chumblywumbly »

Forgeties79 wrote: post #5
carlgreene wrote: post #4

I have largely written Reddit off and no longer visit it after an experiment I did where I had an agent karma farm for me and do some covert advertising. As I went through the posts it wrote I realized that as a reader I would have NO idea that these were just written by a computer. Many many people (or other bots) had full on conversations with it and it scared me a bit. I am not quite there with Hacker News but I d…

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Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#80

Post by ianbutler »

scottious wrote: post #23
ianbutler wrote: post #6

I made this point elsewhere, but people are learning a lot of what us had to learn the old way which is no one cares about your stuff for the most part and now the value provided has to go way up to get people to care. That is, as the author says, the novelty has worn off and since we know it's AI the perceived value is also way down. We're all recalibrating. I do really think this is just a quick period in time befo…

I don't know... I might have said the same thing about email/text/phone spam but it has only proliferated to the point where it's a constant stream of garbage. Email, text, and phone calls are almost completely useless at this point. Sifting the signal from the noise is a non-stop effort. I think people who want to push a certain narrative might just set up a quick bot and tell that bot to start posting on Reddit or…

I mean I think the dynamics are a bit different in online communities at least for actual communities and not drive by subs like r/technology or whatever.

Especially say here on HN with Show HN and such the forcing factors are "i get no votes or community recognition"

But I don't entirely disagree with you I think things won't totally go back I think it will settle way more than now though especially where things are a little more niche.

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