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AI slop is killing online communities

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Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#311

Post by nemomarx »

Karrot_Kream wrote: post #288
kingleopold wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you under estimate human population in certain countries, literally

I just don't see a world where a small community ends up having to deal with a dedicated set of potentially spoofed identities. There are already tools like slow-downs and post limits for new members that can protect against this. HN is the biggest community I'm in by an order of magnitude and it's the only community I know that can't just use a slow mode type mechanic to halt this kind of attack.

Have you considered sock puppets? It's not out of the question to handle with human mods but detecting them automatically is pretty bad if someone is supplying credentials to each one, and sometimes it does take months or years to notice that new user Y is banned user X.

Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#312

Post by Karrot_Kream »

rgblambda wrote: post #305
Karrot_Kream wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't think you'll ever be fully free of spam, so you'll still need to filter bad content. If credentials get sold and used to spam, they'll get banned.

Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#313

Post by sltkr »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #310
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. :)

The question is how reliable that detection is.

Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#314

Post by pojntfx »

thinkingtoilet wrote: post #153
CrzyLngPwd wrote: post #55

I run a niche creative community, and we outlawed AI-generated content in 2022 as it was easy to see how corrosive it would be to the community. It hasn't been easy. We ban fake AI accounts daily and shrug off around 600 AI content creator accounts monthly. It's a lot of work, extra work that wasn't needed before AI content came around, and of course, that is an extra cost. I fear losing the battle.

What about charging $1 or $5 for an account? Seems like you could stem the tide pretty easily with something like that.

If you head to Twitter right now, the vast majority of bots are blue checks. It seems to actually encourage the opposite, where you trusting that someone paying $8 for an account makes you even more likely to fall for slop

Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#315

Post by bobomonkey »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #310
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. :)

It needs help. I often pipe my screed though an LLM and post it. I do request that it use a 10th grade reading level, and no emdashes.

For giggles, here's how it would look for this comment. Rather meta, but in this case it removed the "It needs hellp" so here we are.

I often run my screed through an LLM before posting. I ask it to keep the writing at about a 10th grade reading level and to avoid em dashes.

Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#316

Post by rgblambda »

sgarman wrote: post #301
JTbane wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I interpreted that as an attempt to mask the number of bots on the site so as to not scare paying advertisers into thinking their ads won't be seen by real humans.

Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#317

Post by patrickmay »

20k wrote: post #272
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…

Personally I think we need to start utilising the safety features built into AI, to ensure that who we're talking to is a human. We'll start to have to only reply to people who talk in nsfw cursewords (like cocks), or profess their love of capybaras

Who doesn't love capybaras?

Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#318

Post by kolmogorov »

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…

world.org is doing exactly that including the privacy aspect. the iris scan aspect is scary but the alternatives don't seem to solve the problem either.

Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#319

Post by fn-mote »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #310
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. :)

I have read enough “you are replying to an LLM” comments that I am pretty sure this is still a hit or miss process.

Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#320

Post by AnthonyMouse »

tardedmeme wrote: post #161
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…

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.

> Note that "attestation through a web of trust" means something like needing an invite from an existing user.

It's probably better to call this something like vouching and leave "attestation" as the contemptible power grab by megacorps delenda est. The advantage in using the same word for a useful thing as a completely unrelated vile thing only goes to the villain.

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