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AI slop is killing online communities

rmoff.net

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Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#482
post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Everybody lives in and depends on our shared social substrate.

Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#483
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.

Thank you. Those are kind words! I've mostly been pretty happy about the lists I've curated blocking users. I don't use words because I'm sure I'll clbuttic/scunthorpe my way into missing something and so on. The current problem I have is that on my iPhone, I use Chrome and it doesn't have extensions so I have to view everyone. I'd much rather view people I like, so I'm going to have to make an iOS app.

Really enjoyed https://hackernews-insight.vercel.app/user-analysis

That spike in users near the end is really something!

Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#484
post #87

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…

Serious question: If there are so many LLMs on online forums, who is doing it? Is it just 1000s of research students or something more nefarious? Is it AI businesses building up evidence that their output is as highly scored as humans therefore "buy our software"?

I've noticed 4 categories of inauthentic users. Ranked by my perceived prevalence:

Account farmers: these can be people in 3rd world countries automated/not automated. Can be using hundreds of mobile phones to create accounts and do daily activity to make the account look legitimate. While they're building an activity history they are also being paid to like/follow/interact with content.

Advertisers: these are brought accounts that are used to pose inauthentic reviews of their service and inject it into discussion and to do PR

Sloppers: people who build AI pipelines and then just pump the most dogshit content directly into a platform trying to make any amount of money.

Nation State propaganda arms: These accounts build a narrative character and then join discussion pushing a certain narrative, boost real content creators who share their message and bog down discussion.

Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#485
post #466

1. human verification for auth. 2. only human generated input composer, no copy/paste, no file uploads ect. control the composer. control the camera sessions for photos videos. 3. no algorithmic feed that is designed for ad-spend and eyeballs. 4. moderate

> 1. human verification for auth.

How, at scale?

Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#486

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Public* online communities are dying. Discord is thriving

If all you value is sub-IRC level irreverent discussion, maybe.

Discord is far better for discussion than IRC. You can be much more expressive on discord, instantly jump into a call and screenshare, easily link people to other rooms, tag, import bots etc. IRC kinda sucks compared to modern chat and they refuse to implement features that are considered basic.

Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#487
post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Public* online communities are dying. Discord is thriving

I really don't understand the folks fleeing to Discord. A mailing list does 99% of the same thing for most of the communities. Sure, if you want to chat while gaming, that's the whole point of Discord. Ganbatte. But, for everything else, Discord is such a horrible misfit that I don't understand why it's the default.

You are booming out. I cant believe suggesting a mailing list

Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#488
post #86

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…

There's this old meme where someone asks what will happen when AI bots posts helpful, curious and thoughtful messages!? That's mission accomplish :D They can't be better then the average human though because of training data, so I don't worry about AI comments getting up-voted by real humans, I am however worried about fake upvotes.

If posting good messages is automated then the AI will post a good question and another AI will answer it and the humans will look and see nothing extra to contribute.

Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#489

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.

>shrug off around 600 AI content creator accounts monthly. >I fear losing the battle. I was in a small niche creative writing community for a while. Circa 2021\22. AI wasn't why I was there but I demo'd a few LLMs to a lot of the users in the Off Topic section because people were curious. Even with an explanation of how they operated, almost everyone was at least interested. One author told me how he operated similar…

This is entirely vibes based on reading research on similar campaigns so I cant pull a paper with hard evidence about this specifically. But I believe chinese/North Korean infowar campaigns are behind these seeded talking points. They seed in these far left activist communities and then once they find one that sticks the real people in these communities start carrying the message out to other communities and then the CN/NK botnets amplify the messages and suppress the responses. They dont just do this on the left im just highlight left for this specific point.
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