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AI slop is killing online communities

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Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#221

Post by pessimizer »

tardedmeme wrote: post #166
pessimizer wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you farm a fleet of good accounts, you control the discourse. On HN, you could boost whatever you're trying to push, and downvote or flagkill whoever objects. There are obvious benefits to controlling public discourse, right? Even if it's just to support some project you're working on.

There are certain topics that seem to get instantly flag-killed unusually often. IPv6 is one.

I've been more disturbed by comments that were flagkilled just for being wrongthink, not because they were rude or not well argued. I've also seen a lot less of those flagkills over the last 6 months, which makes me feel like there were some fake accounts that got caught and culled.

Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#222

Post by phainopepla2 »

layer8 wrote: post #186
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.

If it can no longer be distinguished from real, why would it make people leave?

It might be hard to recognize an individual user or post as AI, but it's not hard to recognize the negative effect in aggregate

Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#223

Post by 2ndorderthought »

order-matters wrote: post #15
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…

Public* online communities are dying. Discord is thriving

Discord is terrible. Full of bots, creeps and ai slopped to the gills.

Some communities are better than others but the sheer volume of stinky trash is immense despite discord and the poor volunteer moderators efforts to prevent it. Most mods are neutral on it too.

There are chat communities that are still somewhat safe with zero user verification. But I will not mention them.

Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#224

Post by dwaltrip »

Like many modern woes, it’s a problem of trust.

The baseline level of trust in an online interaction has been eroded significantly by LLMs.

The question is, how can we reverse this trend and increase trust?

I have a sneaking suspicion that it would help enormously if the stock prices of the largest companies in the world were not tied to how effective they are at hijacking as much of humanity’s time and attention as possible.

Maybe the fediverse can (eventually) help? It’s been a while since I looked at it.

Let’s empower people to effectively have more control over the content they interact with.

Social dynamics can make this difficult. We all want to be in the loop. The recent striking successes of the movement to ban phones in schools gives me hope.

Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#225

Post by colechristensen »

mrhottakes wrote: post #133
colechristensen wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

To be clear I'm talking metaphorical survival of the fittest that takes the form of prestige/popularity/status/etc. of people and organizations.

Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#226

Post by kogasa240p »

dfxm12 wrote: post #37

AI slop is hurting my community in a different way. We have an internal viva engage community for quick development how to type questions at work. More frequently, instead of asking "how to" questions to the crowd to crowdsource answers, people are reaching out to me directly to ask me why the solution AI suggested doesn't work. That people trust AI over an organizational knowledge is bad enough. I fear that AI is tu…

>I fear that AI is turning people generally antisocial.

This is by design btw.

Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#227

Post by tracker1 »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #101
fidotron wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I'd be interested in working on a problem like that. I have a strong preference for remaining anonymous or at least making it a reasonably high bar to tying my online identity to my personal identity I would love to be involved in helping to design a sort of "human verified" badge that doesn't necessarily make it possible or at least not easy for everyone to find your real identity I've been thinking about it a bunch…

I'm not sure that it would be too hard technically... basically, auth+social-network. Basically Facebook auth without the rest of facebook, adding attestation.

IE: you use this network as your auth provider, you get the user's real name, handle, network id as well as the id's (only id's not extra info) of first-third level connections.

The user is incentivized to connect (only) people that they know in person, and this forms a layer of trust. Downstream reports can break a branch or have network effect upstream. By connecting an account to another account, you attest that "this is a real person, that I have met in real life." Using a bot for anything associate with the account is forbidden, with exception to explicit API access to downstream services defined by those services.

I think it could work, but you'd have to charge a modest, but not overbearing fee to use the auth provider... say $100/site/year for an app to use this for user authentication.

Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#228

Post by fl4regun »

rexpop wrote: post #158
slaw wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

People live in and depend on that waterway. Just because it's beneath your standards doesn't mean it isn't vital. You're giving "let them eat cake" energy.

I can assure you nobody in the world "lives in" nor "depends" on reddit to live.

Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#229

Post by retinaros »

AI is lifting the voices of the lazys and below average to average people. for those who would never have progressed it might seem like a god given gift. for the ones with the desire to grow and learn and go beyond average... this is a curse.
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