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AI slop is killing online communities

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Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#561

Post by intended »

octoberfranklin wrote: post #434
sgarman wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The problem is that it has become very popular to ban people from a sub based on what other subs they post to. It was turning Reddit into a two-party universe. The better fix would be to make the support for multiple accounts in the reddit app not so incredibly-shitty, where you're basically logging out and logging back in. Instead, just tell it "posts to this sub use this account, posts to that sub use that account"…

That two-party universe thing comes from the issue of having to moderate, and moderation is ideological by nature.

Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#563

Post by intended »

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.

The issue is that the physical world for someone in the hinterlands of Tibet is not the same as the physical world for someone in SF.

People were finding each other online when they couldn’t in person.

This isn’t to say I disagree with you. Just expressing sorrow over the loss of such a grand moment in our shared history.

Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#564

Post by rramadass »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #540
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.

High quality anecdata are exactly the reason why I love HN. Thanks for posting about it. > fake AI accounts First, how do you identify them? Is it strictly admins monitoring posts/server-side logs or do users report odd behaviour? Second, what is the purpose of these accounts? Are they basically running submarine adverts, or are they just trolling (to harm the community)?

A starting point for study;

AI Deception: A Survey of Examples, Risks, and Potential Solutions - https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.14752

Deception Analysis with Artificial Intelligence: An Interdisciplinary Perspective - https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.05724

Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#565

Post by danaris »

alaudet wrote: post #307

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 t…

> whoever figures out how to give authentic online experiences is going to be successful

The problem is, there is fundamentally no way to scale this.

The only way to give authentic human interaction with like-minded individuals is to connect real humans to other real humans who share interests. And as we've already seen over the first few ages of the Internet, once such a community scales past a certain size, it a) ceases to be a place where people can come to chat, discuss, and hang out with their interest-sharing friends, because there are just too many people for one person to know, and b) becomes a target for profit-minded interests who will cheerfully eviscerate any authenticity and connection the community brought if it will make them a small profit before the community crumbles and collapses.

So anyone trying to "give authentic online experiences" as a business model is going to have to accept that they are going to be, at best, a small, modestly profitable company. And given the state of things today, I very much doubt that this is in the cards.

Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#566

Post by mastermage »

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.

It realy is time for a Butlerian Jihad

Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#567

Post by intended »

noahgolmant wrote: post #132
smcg wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who is going to verify that an AI-driven project is a unique idea? How do you distinguish between a genuinely unique project, a grifter who is shilling their "unique" project, and a new enthusiast who is convinced their project is unique, but is not? This is an impossible moderation task. The only options I see for a community are to either totally ban AI-generated content, or be totally consumed by it.

I don't really know. Certainly we need a higher bar. The Kafka example in the post may be hyperbolic but I agree it pollutes the space. But we also can't swing the other way and rely completely on out of date proxies. If you ban AI code there will be very little code to see in a year. It'll take time but we'll arrive at new norms. We built semi successful ways to filter content farms in the earlier internet days. The…

Just because we get new norms, doesn’t mean the new norms are good.

Feudalism had norms.

AI is ending an era of large public communities which will likely never come again.

Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#568

Post by mschuster91 »

thin_carapace wrote: post #439
mschuster91 wrote: post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You have to ask why Trump killed Radio Free America as well when it was clearly not an big expense. The obvious answer to that question is "because he's a Russian asset". But that doesn't mean the obvious answer is also the correct one. IMHO, we're seeing another and much more concerning trend at play here... the utter and complete rejection of anything but violence by the far-right. Diplomacy? Development aid? Cul…

wouldnt it be more productive to talk about the systemic framework leading to this inflamed state of affairs, and ways that we can tackle the issue on the ground level? perhaps inhabitants of the west would prefer pseudo masculinity to another few decades of migrant influx without corresponding upgrades to social infrastructure. this sort of internal struggle would provide a ripe substrate for foreign agents to perfo…

> in other words, extremists are violent regardless as to their political persuasions

No matter where you look, the far-right kills and maims substantially much more people than the far-left does.

Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#569

Post by Seattle3503 »

CrzyLngPwd wrote: post #150
RodgerTheGreat wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed. Take a soft approach, or "wait and see", and you'll just allow your community to get infested with slop enthusiast crybullies that loudly protest any pushback against "genai content". The communities that draw a firm line and hold it will be the only ones that endure.

It was a surprise to us how vehemently some folk defended AI content and assumed it was their right to post it within our community. We had no problems with people using it and posting elsewhere, it was the demands that we must allow it that were problematic and made us question whether we were doing the right thing. No regrets now, though, as we see competitors being flooded with AI slop and they are too invested in…

I have a similar problem in a community I'm a a part of? How are you reliably detecting AI?

Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#570

Post by intended »

erpellan wrote: post #295

Invert the economics. Right now there is value in posting LLM generated content that is more than the cost of using the model. If platforms had a subscription model that you had to pay for in order to do more than just read comments, there’d be a lot less LLM content. There would also be a lot less of all content. But maybe that’s the price you pay (literally) to get rid of AI slop.

Good idea, but models are only going to get cheaper. Unless governments add an information environment pollution tax.

Oh hey, now thats an idea.

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