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AI slop is killing online communities
421–430 of 781 posts
Re: AI slop is killing online communities
#422I have pondered the sensibility of using AI to support the initial birth of new communities. Given the needed social validation of seeing both 1. A populated community and 2. The tone of the community being grounded, non-toxic and useful.
The alternative is having a community born that will be small, have early adopters who can be overly passionate or critical and gatekeep folks from discussion. That means high effort to curate initially.
Re: AI slop is killing online communities
#423Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's why a web of trust was suggested. You keep track of who vouched for who and down weight those who vouch for users that prove to be bots. In theory at least. It's certainly more complicated than only that in practice.
If the web of trust only extends to the people who I actually know to be real, then that works -- but it's a very small web. And by small, I mean: This whole trusted group could fit into one quiet discord channel. This doesn't seem to be big enough to be useful. However,if it extends beyond that, then things get dicier: Suppose Bill trusts me, as well as those that I myself trust. Bill does this in order to make his…
Critically, it doesn't have to be binary trusted/untrusted, and it doesn't have to be statically determined. If Bill vouched for you yesterday and today you are trusting a bunch of discovered bots, that would down weight the amount of trust the network has in Bill a lot more than if he vouched for you did months ago.
The question is whether we can arrive at a set of rules and heuristics and applications of the system that sufficiently incentivizes being a trustworthy member of the network.
Re: AI slop is killing online communities
#424Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
I think twitter is an odd-one-out here, twitter as a whole has been heading down hill ever since the acquisition, and I wouldn't be surprised if many of those blue checks are officially sanctioned bots. Especially given the way so many of them push the same narratives that Musk does at the same time he does.
Re: AI slop is killing online communities
#425Earlier quoted context omitted.
For a while there were a lot of posts from people experimenting with ChatGPT to write anger bait posts on Reddit where they would later edit the post to say it was fake, written by ChatGPT. I assume they thought they'd be teaching people a lesson by making them feel foolish for responding to AI stories, most of which were too fake to be believable. However it did not matter. The posts remained popular and continued t…
> However it did not matter. The posts remained popular and continued to bring in comments even after the admission that they were fake That's 90% of current Facebook pages and groups.
The decline of Facebook is sad. I liked it early on. I used it primarily to follow family and casual friends from high school. When they posted, it would show up on my feed, I read all the posts, and that was that.
After awhile I had to wade through all sorts of nonsense to get to the posts I actually wanted to see, and even later Facebook stopped putting posts from people I follow in my feed. It was 100% garbage. I can't imagine why anyone uses Facebook for anything other than the marketplace.
Re: AI slop is killing online communities
#426Do we need a new carbon-credit style market for companies that want to continue putting out such slop and paying for moderators to remove the waste after it's been made?
Re: AI slop is killing online communities
#427I 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…
This is actually my hope for AI-gen content as well. That after it gets so 'good' that people genuinely can't distinguish it from reality anymore that they'll retreat (or return triumphantly rather) to the physical world to gather truthful fulfilling experiences and dopamine.
Re: AI slop is killing online communities
#428Like 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…
I think what could work is requiring users to prove their authenticity and uniqueness using a national ID of some sort. It would be bad for privacy, no doubt, but it surely would work. But the users' actual names should not be displayed.
I was thinking about that. It should be possible to do this in a way that mostly preserves privacy.
Sites and apps don’t need your actual national ID, just to know that you have one. I think it could be possible to have 3rd party verification services that don’t know where the verification request is coming from, thus preserving privacy on both sides.
Re: AI slop is killing online communities
#429Earlier 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…
Money is great at thwarting spam/Sybil attacks. You don't have to raise the price very much to make them fail.
Honestly I think "this person is real" is the wrong goal. You'll never accomplish it without a centralized state or some biometric monstrosity like that thing Sam Altman created.
Just settle for stopping spam.
Re: AI slop is killing online communities
#430Earlier quoted context omitted.
> However it did not matter. The posts remained popular and continued to bring in comments even after the admission that they were fake That's 90% of current Facebook pages and groups.
The decline of Facebook is sad. I liked it early on. I used it primarily to follow family and casual friends from high school. When they posted, it would show up on my feed, I read all the posts, and that was that. After awhile I had to wade through all sorts of nonsense to get to the posts I actually wanted to see, and even later Facebook stopped putting posts from people I follow in my feed. It was 100% garbage. I…
I primarily use it for browsing memes now, and occasionally interaction with friends.