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AI slop is killing online communities

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Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#121

Post by kube-system »

cactusplant7374 wrote: post #7
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…

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.

With the current batch of SOTA models, it is not hard to prompt a model to pass the sniff test on social media forums. If you don't believe me, try it.

All you really need to do is give it some guidelines of a style to follow and styles to avoid. There's also a bunch of skills people have already written to accomplish this.

Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#122

Post by colechristensen »

aliasxneo wrote: post #96
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…

> 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. I really want to believe this will be true. However, I also suspect there's some external driving force, that I cannot readily name, which is making people incapable of consuming anything except this low-effort content. I mean, obviously it's workin…

In my opinion there isn't an external _nefarious_ force causing all of this. Certainly those forces exist but without them much the same would be happening.

It's the economy of everything being free but supported with advertising. That mechanic is what leads to the race to the bottom lowest common denominator human motivation hacking attention toxicity. (yes that's a bit of a ramble).

If people weren't getting paid for the smallest increment of attention they could grab, it wouldn't be promoted the way it is. I don't have a high opinion of the things which grab my attention, but they still manage to do it sometimes. I think many people are in that boat. If there were other mechanisms with which we rewarded people for doing things, something different would be optimized.

And people just wouldn't reward the 10-second-gratification in anywhere near the same way if it weren't for the advertising.

Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#123

Post by order-matters »

ceejayoz wrote: post #40
echelon wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

This shit will come to Discord too.

on the public servers yeah. but the ones im in with real people who know each other will be fine.

I think the problem is not keeping agents out of private real people spaces, but for people who dont have any pre-existing or 'real world' connections to these communities to find a way to prove they are a real person over the internet alone and get an invite

On a related note, I think this is going to be the biggest challenge to most folks when it comes in resisting using government ID online. it will be the apple offered for easy proof youre not a bot to normal circles.

Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#124

Post by liminis »

I'll remove the particulars to avoid anything partisan, but:

I failed to truly appreciate how cooked reddit was with bots until I accidentally clicked Popular and stumbled upon a national subreddit post with a 'chad meme', starring a particular political leader, whose unpopularity is hard to adequately convey to foreigners.

It was not just that this post had been so severely upvoted, but the comment section itself had a mantra more or less, with very little actual conversation, just echoing the same sentiment; and all those comments in turn upvoted to the point of drowning out the lone comments at the bottom (not downvoted, just not upvoted) expressing "???". I don't know if I'd ever even written the word 'astroturfing' before expressing my bafflement at a friend, so I don't think I'm very tinfoil hat about these things.

It was just utterly bizarre to see someone who can barely get a single win in public discourse being heralded -- monotonously -- like he was the second coming.

Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#125

Post by hackable_sand »

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.

Maybe 1:100 comments match any one of those attributes.

Most comments are just grammatically "correct". Not a high bar.

Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#126

Post by mrhottakes »

romanhn wrote: post #108
cactusplant7374 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Neither are most humans

Agreed, some humans are good writers, and no LLMs are good writers.

Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#127

Post by paganel »

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…

Reddit was already on its way way before this LLM craze, hopefully the recent tech-related changes will only accelerate that process.

Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#128

Post by olup »

I feel that a lot in my side projects: maybe one should keep the half-baked AI repo for oneself and rather share what the experiment, the thesis, and the learning from the building are. No one cares much about the (un)finished product, as it can be replicated better in most cases with a couple hours' work of claude coding.

For instance, I really liked how Karpathy shared a high-level idea on the LLM-based wiki. It was sadly followed by a long tail of no-one-cares-about "Here is my LLM wiki product" posts pointing to the generic LLM-generated landing page.

Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#129

Post by dwringer »

cactusplant7374 wrote: post #57
dgellow wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is rather moving the goalposts from "plausibly human comment" to "meaningful literature", I think

Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#130

Post by order-matters »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #85
cloverich wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

are those attributes now assets?

Sort of, except if no one can ever discover a community it is always dying by default Personally I'd love to find a decent online community these days, my social circle has shrunk considerably, but idk. It seems difficult to start fresh with new people nowadays

we were made to socialize in person. you can mimic it online and nourish existing connections over it but nothing helps build friendship more than being in the same place at the same time a few different times and talking to each other
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