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AI slop is killing online communities

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Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#301

Post by sgarman »

JTbane wrote: post #84
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 is more or less dead to me, as the popular subs are botfests and the niche subs are empty. I'm lucky to get a single reply on gaming subs.

The fact that reddit enabled hiding your posts is crazy to me. In a time where knowing who's engaging in a community is more important than ever (am I talking to a bot or a troll?) reddit removes even more options to validate.

Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#302

Post by isityettime »

krapp wrote: post #65
isityettime wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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? To never write an unpopular comment? Yes?

That seems like a really extreme goal to me. I should hope there's a better way to address the anxiety or whatever it is that's motivating it.

Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#303

Post by NoMoreNicksLeft »

tardedmeme wrote: post #163
NoMoreNicksLeft wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I think it's going to effectively kill public chat communities without either proof of identity How? I have an identity. A state driver's license, birth certificate, social security number. I've even considered getting a federal license before, never bit the bullet. If I wanted to run a bot, what stops me from giving it my identity? How do I prove I'm really me (a "me" exists, that's provable), and not something I'm…

Digital totalitarianism would prevent it. The moment you were found to be running a bot, your identity would be blacklisted across the entire internet.

You claim this, but you've not presented any evidence. Who would be the enforcement agency for that? Where and how would you train them? Can the money be scrounged up to do it properly? As you blacklist people from the internet, you lose their tax revenue (they're locked out of the economy), but you also make it impossible for them to tell people how bad it was... most of the deterrent effect is gone. But the incentives are only ever growing higher, as people surmise that running their own little bot farm is a way to get ahead when hustling. Any you do hunt down and disconnect are now highly radicalized and desperate, but you've just turned off the feeb's ability to monitor them and intervene.

China gets away with this shit because they've been conditioning their population for 60 years... everyone's eased into it. Elsewhere, not even slightly so.

Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#304

Post by bluefirebrand »

tracker1 wrote: post #227
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'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 th…

I don't think the main challenge is building this system, the main challenge is getting enough people using it to make it worthwhile.

Personally I think it should be a government provided service, not something with a sign up fee. There's actually no point at all in building this if people have to pay to use it, because they won't

Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#305

Post by rgblambda »

Karrot_Kream wrote: post #207
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…

Verifiable credentials are all about this. You need some sort of credentialing body that generates the credential for you, but after that you'll just have an opaque identifier. Any caller that wants to verify whether you're human submits the id to a verifier and the verifier says yes or no. You can also do attestations like age, so gate a forum on 16+ or something. You never end up having to actually give away your n…

What happens when someone agrees to sell or give away their id? The credentialing body could catch the very worst abusers who seem to be signing in to various sites and services multiple times an hour, but would fail to catch anything else.

Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#306

Post by Gigachad »

smcg wrote: post #88
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.

This seems naive. As long as people are "enjoying" the AI-infested social networks, or at least not annoyed enough to leave, they will stay on them, and become further disconnected from reality. We have half of EU teenagers talking to chatbots regularly. Alienated people flock to them.

For one point, I was a daily active user of Reddit for 10 years, I deleted my account and left the platform in January over LLM content.

Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#307

Post by alaudet »

The balance is so far out of whack with LLM's now in online communities. People crave human interaction with like minded individuals, and whoever figures out how to give authentic online experiences is going to be successful. Maybe small communities need to come back, where you build credibility slowly. Why does every site have to be a monstrosity that wants to build a hundred million users to IPO. It just attracts the worst. I was active on Reddit for years under the same username I have here. I have pretty much abandoned it.

Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#308

Post by 2ndorderthought »

adrian17 wrote: post #282
2ndorderthought wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I left multiple online communities because the slop and the slop users were unbearable. I use ai okay. I think it's useful. But people who dove hard into this stuff treat all text on their screen like it's a chat bot and not a person. "Rewrite this code using the new API" "excuse me?" "Can you do it I need it right now chatgpt won't compile!" "Show me your code please" provides the biggest pile of dookie ever "hey ca…

I've seen people like this 15+ years ago on #learnprogramming on Freenode, I'm guessing LLMs just tend to validate that behavior instead.

It adds a depth of nuisance that's for sure. I've seen users talk about how they can't wait until they don't need to ask for help anymore and can just use LLMs. Meanwhile I'm directly messaging with the person who made a package and asking why they designed it the way they did beyond greatful to learn 8 new things in 6 sentences.

Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#309

Post by Karrot_Kream »

arjie wrote: post #90

Human slop is realistically just as bad. In a strange twist, human commentary on the Internet is asymptotically approaching an older LLM. Trite cliches, repetitive tropes, and tribal affiliation signals dominate conversation. I have turned to blunt instruments: blocking individuals on their first cliche banner-wave. It has substantially improved comment quality but I still suffer from the problem that I don’t block s…

You've written about this before so I'm curious how effective you find it? Did you try a blocklist on top of doing things like muting words? Btw I enjoy your content on this site quite a bit.

Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#310

Post by sillysaurusx »

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 do know for a fact that many "users" here are LLMs.

HN autokills comments it detects as LLM. I think maybe you're not giving HN enough credit. :)

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