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AI slop is killing online communities

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Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#131

Post by rgovostes »

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…

So you ran an "experiment" where you deliberately made someone else's community worse to see what would happen? Cool project.

Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#132

Post by noahgolmant »

smcg wrote: post #91
noahgolmant wrote: post #41

There has to be room for an AI-driven project that expresses a unique idea, even if there's no community around it yet. Someone has to express it, and from now on that idea will largely be implemented with AI. > A good use of AI is when it enables people to do something they couldn’t do before, to contribute to a community when they couldn’t before. I agree 100% with the novel contribution aspect. But there's some nu…

Who is going to verify that an AI-driven project is a unique idea? How do you distinguish between a genuinely unique project, a grifter who is shilling their "unique" project, and a new enthusiast who is convinced their project is unique, but is not? This is an impossible moderation task. The only options I see for a community are to either totally ban AI-generated content, or be totally consumed by it.

I don't really know. Certainly we need a higher bar. The Kafka example in the post may be hyperbolic but I agree it pollutes the space. But we also can't swing the other way and rely completely on out of date proxies. If you ban AI code there will be very little code to see in a year. It'll take time but we'll arrive at new norms. We built semi successful ways to filter content farms in the earlier internet days. The signal has to shift to "did they think hard about this problem" which has some observable properties. Like how they articulate the problem, or why it became important to them.

Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#133

Post by mrhottakes »

colechristensen wrote: post #76
mrhottakes wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What do you think happens to the least prolific organisms that lose the survival of the fittest?

Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#135

Post by paganel »

chumblywumbly wrote: post #79
Forgeties79 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

[flagged]

For what it's worth the admins here have let the tone of conversation slip a little when it comes to AI, as in there are many people who now openly mock (and worse) the AI zealots and there's no admin coming in and "saving" the metaphorical day anymore. In the not so distant past that kind of behaviour was almost instantly reprimanded, kindergarten-style.

Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#136

Post by Rebelgecko »

lbriner wrote: post #87
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…

Serious question: If there are so many LLMs on online forums, who is doing it? Is it just 1000s of research students or something more nefarious? Is it AI businesses building up evidence that their output is as highly scored as humans therefore "buy our software"?

Lots of marketing. Not even AI business, just regular consumer crap. They realized that blatantly spamming their product looks bad, so they orchestrate multiple accounts to look more organic. And people actually engage with it.

Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#137

Post by Jblx2 »

noahgolmant wrote: post #41

There has to be room for an AI-driven project that expresses a unique idea, even if there's no community around it yet. Someone has to express it, and from now on that idea will largely be implemented with AI. > A good use of AI is when it enables people to do something they couldn’t do before, to contribute to a community when they couldn’t before. I agree 100% with the novel contribution aspect. But there's some nu…

> A good use of AI is when it enables people to do something they couldn’t do before, to contribute to a community when they couldn’t before.

There are two separate things here that are getting silently conflated.

> A good use of AI is when it enables people to do something they couldn’t do before

This could be good on an individual level, if say, a doctor wants to vibe code an app of some sort for his individual practice.

>to contribute to a community when they couldn’t before.

This is where it goes off the rails. If they couldn't meaningfully contribute before, they aren't going to suddenly be able to discern that whatever slop they want to contribute is of value to the community. That's just another way of saying, if I wanted an AI opinion on something, why wouldn't I get it directly from the source, and write the prompt myself, instead of have some intermediate human prompt the AI for me?

Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#138

Post by thesuitonym »

thegrim33 wrote: post #95
lbriner wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Serious question: If there are so many LLMs on online forums, who is doing it? Is it just 1000s of research students or something more nefarious? Is it AI businesses building up evidence that their output is as highly scored as humans therefore "buy our software"?

We're in the middle of an active cold war where countries are trying to manipulate the citizens of rival countries to destroy their civilization without having to fire a single bullet. Anonymous, over the internet mass manipulation, all for some minimal electricity cost.

That's definitely the most insidious use, but I think the larger portion is advertisers and karma farmers (who later sell to advertisers).

Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#139

Post by Rebelgecko »

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.

If you find one account you can find a few dozen spam accounts by building a graph of what posts they reply to

Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#140

Post by potsandpans »

fwip wrote: post #114
potsandpans wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wasn't suggesting you have a mental illness for having an opinion. More, commenting that just as bad as generated content if not worse is every thread where the top comment is an accusation and ensuing witch hunt. So, no, having an opinion is not a mental illness. Feeling compelled to call it out and discuss it on everything one reads may just be.

The threads that have the top comment saying "this is AI slop" are nearly always about an article that is obvious AI slop. Threads that aren't - like this one - don't.

If you need to tell yourself that in order to cope that's fine with me.
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