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AI slop is killing online communities

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Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#261

Post by Exoristos »

ghaff wrote: post #218
tardedmeme wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Note that "attestation through a web of trust" means something like needing an invite from an existing user. It doesn't have to mean mass surveillance.

Which is, funnily (?) enough, how a lot of IRL organizations used to be. And basically don't be of the wrong ethnicity or religion. It still happens more informally today, of course, but it used to be a pretty (if un-spoken) part of how a lot of WASPy organizations operated to a greater or lesser degree.

This was cogent in 1910.

Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#262

Post by SL61 »

liminis wrote: post #124

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 ha…

[dead]

Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#263

Post by kingleopold »

Morromist wrote: post #157
bluefirebrand wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 agree its a very, very interesting problem. Maybe one of the biggest problems of the coming decade. I suspect it will be a long process: first there will be goverments that force people to use ID, but that will be abused, hacked and considerably restrict freedom of speech, so after that phase people will start to create better ids. The problem is really pretty simple: You need an authoratitive source to say "This p…

it can also be "rented" btw, rented by llms? interesting

Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#264

Post by platevoltage »

retinaros wrote: post #229

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.

Took the words right out of my mouth.

Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#265

Post by krapp »

antisthenes wrote: post #154
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 am not quite there with Hacker News but I do know for a fact that many "users" here are LLMs. This just makes me wonder...so what? Some of the oldest posters here with the most karma continue to post absolute garbage takes on topics ranging from US healthcare to history of USSR, that are trivially disproven by learning the very basics from a Wiki article (e.g. not a high bar). To be fair, this opinion slop is als…

An irascible human being with "wrong" opinions is still better than a polite and factually correct bot because there's no fucking point in having a conversation with a bot. We're here to have conversations with people, not to prove fact beyond a reasonable doubt.

Do you really not care one way or the other? Would you really rather just be talking to LLMs here? Or would you just script yourself as well and call it a day? Then what?

Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#266

Post by kingleopold »

Karrot_Kream wrote: post #215
WillPostForFood wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

*You need an authoratitive source to say "This person is real"* Does that even accomplish much? It may cut down on mass fake account creation. But, real people can then create authenticated account, and use an LLM to post as an authenticated real person.

If there's only 1 or just a handful of verifiers, then a human can at most go through a few of those credentials before they run out. The risk is of course getting someone else's credential but that isn't as big an issue, especially for smaller online communities.

you under estimate human population in certain countries, literally

Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#267

Post by traderj0e »

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 seen a lot of ipv6 wars here without flagkilling happening

Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#268

Post by ishouldstayaway »

raincole wrote: post #149
grey-area wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you ever introspect about who ruined Reddit?

Yeah, if carlgreene specifically stopped doing that Reddit would be saved. They are the one savior.

Do you sincerely believe that that's how grey-area's comment was meant to be read?

Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#269

Post by Forgeties79 »

carlgreene wrote: post #60
Freedom2 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I just don’t even understand the appeal of having a bot interact on forums for you unless you’re astroturfing for your company or personal brand or whatever

Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#270

Post by toofy »

vlod wrote: post #252
vohk wrote: post #30

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. 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…

> without either proof of identity or attestation through a web of trust. Let's put aside the idea whether it will be the end of all privacy as we know it (I'm not sure if I personally think it's a good idea), but isn't Sam Altman's World eye ID thing supposed to do that? ( https://world.org ). How does it work (like OpenId)? Do I have an orb on my desk, or some sort of phone app? I still want to use my desktop to lo…

this eye thing will never work. people in general are realizing the last people we should trust with our personal stuff are tech bro billionaires. they’ve broken trust too many times.

even worse many of them are just plain vocal about their disdain for people in general.

at least from what i’m seeing, people are starting to walk away from online at an increasing rate so i definitely don’t see widespread adoption of his creepy eye thing.

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