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AI slop is killing online communities

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Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#451

Post by FeteCommuniste »

octoberfranklin wrote: post #429
Morromist wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah, I think "pay to enter" or maybe "pay to be able to post" is ultimately going to be the solution. Then we'll have the paid "gated" social networks, filled with mostly humans, and the free ones will all be bot-swarmed wastelands.

Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#452

Post by _factor »

fidotron wrote: post #77
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…

> 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.

Tell your TPM who you are and prove it with face and fingerprint ID that get matched to a real old person.

Leave them on the device, authorize the device to validate before age inappropriate content appears.

Website wants to know your age? Your face and fingerprint support your attestation signed by a trusted party.

Can it be tricked potentially? Sure, but then you’re probably a super genius kid and not the reason that these laws were created (as if).

Don’t let anyone tell you anonymity must die for safety to exist.

Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#453

Post by pibaker »

lbriner wrote: post #87
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…

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"?

In the case of Reddit and HN a lot of it is done by businesses either blatantly advertising themselves or building up the karma they need to effectively do so. I recall reading obviously AI generated replies to news articles written by accounts associated with businesses related to the events in the news. This isn't new in the LLM era. Hobby subreddits are well known to be always full of businesses selling hobby gears and items doing self promotion. It's just that now it is a lot more obvious because of the AI text smell.

That, and probably political astroturfing. Before every election my local subreddit sees a surge of crime stories. Go figure.

Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#454

Post by FeteCommuniste »

XorNot wrote: post #214
TulliusCicero wrote: post #205

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. I'm happy to verify my identity as an honest-to-god sack of meat if it's done in a privacy-protecting way. That probably is where things are gonna go, in the long run. Too hard to stop bots otherwise.

That is effectively impossible though. There's data centers of stripped down phones, so "it's actually a phone" doesn't do it.

There's some work on using phone accelerometer data as a "proof of human," e.g. "move your phone in a figure eight," which I guess machines can't quite do in a human enough way yet.

Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#455

Post by selicos »

smcg wrote: post #88
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.

This seems naive. As long as people are "enjoying" the AI-infested social networks, or at least not annoyed enough to leave, they will stay on them, and become further disconnected from reality. We have half of EU teenagers talking to chatbots regularly. Alienated people flock to them.

Social media that caters to what the user wants/interacts with can become infinitely more so. This is already applied to entertainment content across tv and the internet.

At some point an instagram/tiktok/etc user could see nothing by real people and not even know what is promoted vs ad vs post.

Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#456

Post by shimman »

traderj0e wrote: post #445
bmurphy1976 wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's never forget the summer of 2023 when Reddit forceably removed mods from many major communities and replaced them with corporate shills. That was a major loss of dedicated people who cared more for their communities than Spez's pocket book.

The ones who got removed were shutting down their pages to protest API changes, right? Pride comes before the fall I guess

You say that but many specialty subreddits never returned to their pre-protest engagements. Quality has definitely taken a nose dive in these subreddits as those people moved to other platforms like youtube, tiktok, patreon, or just posting on their own sites.

Mods were rightfully upset because they were losing control of their communities when reddit preferred only caring about their upcoming IPO.

I honestly don't think you could remake reddit if you did everything exactly the same starting in 2016. Corporate social media has definitely ruined the individual aspect of social media that is unlikely to return.

No one wants to share on a place with a bunch spammers.

Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#457

Post by pibaker »

skupig wrote: post #11
Forgeties79 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

People are definitely trying to make HN bots because I have seen several get flagged. No idea to what end though.

People still see HN as a valuable place for promoting their businesses. Usually some poorly thought out SaaS.

If you look at what people outside HN talk about HN, it's not uncommon to see wannabe tech entrepreneurs talking about how to promote their products via Show HNs and how to stay HN front page. It's honestly a little sad considering that HN has a tendency to rip these projects apart.

Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#458

Post by bluGill »

eloisius wrote: post #415
coldtea wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish there was an internet-wide "don't show again" button for such slop pages

You can ban a domain from search results with Kagi

You you can bend a handful with duck duck go as well. However, it's only a handful and you run out and you're stuck.

Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#459

Post by 2pEXgD0fZ5cF »

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?

Problem at scale. Doesn't matter if someone is consciously able to identify individual bot accounts or comments. There can still be a strong general feeling that something is very wrong. Leading to more and more frustration and unhappiness.

"Popular" reddit posts and subreddits are a good example of this.

Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#460

Post by spaqin »

Zopieux wrote: post #388
sixtyj wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IRL communities have to have some guides because a lot of people forgot how to gather. It can be seen among kids - try to give them soccer ball and see what they do with it :) Yesterday I was watching people on the street and on the tram. Every other person was staring at their phone and scrolling through something. That might scare me more than the fact that someone is chatting with an LLM bot online. (I am pro-ai,…

I don't really see the problem of using your phone while commuting. Doesn't make you an asocial weirdo.

As long as you're not sharing the things you're watching with a loudspeaker. And that's really not a given among commuters.
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