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AI slop is killing online communities

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Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#491

Post by MeetingsBrowser »

solid_fuel wrote: post #424
pojntfx wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't think so.

The people leaving LLM replies are paying minimum $20/month for LLM access, and probably more in practice.

A one time $10 fee is not a deterrent.

Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#492

Post by ssl-3 »

Bjartr wrote: post #423
ssl-3 wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The web of trust doesn't know that they're bots, though. It knows only that I've introduced new members. They didn't show up with tattoos across their digital foreheads that say "BOT" -- they instead came in acting just as people do.

If the bots behave themselves, then they have as much capacity to rise in rank/trust as any new well-behaved bonafide human members do.

Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#493

Post by daemin »

grey-area wrote: post #78
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…

Did you ever introspect about who ruined Reddit?

Reddit itself by virtue of being a venture capital backed startup.

It was a midpoint between Facebook and Geocities, it got people to build communities within its walled garden, but it was always going to betray them for cash.

Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#494

Post by phs318u »

chongli wrote: post #474
laughing_man wrote: post #425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Facebook is fine if you join groups based on your interests (hobbies etc) and then aggressively unfollow/block anything you don't want to see. It's not really conducive to discussions like Reddit, though. Mostly drive-by comments.

This. But damn it’s effing hard work!

Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#495

Post by chongli »

layer8 wrote: post #186
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.

If it can no longer be distinguished from real, why would it make people leave?

It's a market for lemons [1]. The issue is that if AI slop can't be readily distinguished from real human content, the real human stuff will get less and less attention over time. With less attention, people lose interest in writing, and eventually abandon the community altogether. As genuine human writers leave the community, the concentration of AI slop increases, and readers begin to realize that there isn't anything of value left to read, so they depart as well.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons

Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#496

Post by deepfriedbits »

plumbline wrote: post #427
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…

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.

I've thought about this a lot as well and could definitely see it happening.

Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#497

Post by Jblx2 »

fragmede wrote: post #390
Jblx2 wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A good use of AI is when it enables people to do something they couldn’t do before, to contribute to a community when they couldn’t before. There are two separate things here that are getting silently conflated. > A good use of AI is when it enables people to do something they couldn’t do before This could be good on an individual level, if say, a doctor wants to vibe code an app of some sort for his individual pra…

Because of the convenience. Why should I have to go and spend my time prompting an AI, if someone else has already done that for me. Same thing with food. I know how to cook a chicken risotto, but sometimes I like having someone else do it for me.

This is some unknown stranger offering partially cooked ingredients to you because they want you to finish off preparing the meal they want to eat.

Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#499

Post by raincole »

ishouldstayaway wrote: post #268
raincole wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I sincerely believe it's a ridiculous comment that deserves to be ridiculed.

Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#500

Post by Nathanba »

vohk wrote: post #30
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 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…

I'm in many public chat communities as well and the issue whether someone is an AI or not is not really coming up, I've not seen any actual AI chatters and the only AI spam that exists is the one that humans regurgitate. The more real impact AI has on chat communities in my opinion is that people are shifting some of their chatting to AI bots via voice or text on other platforms, resulting in fewer chatters.
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