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AI slop is killing online communities

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Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#501

Post by Lerc »

thegrim33 wrote: post #95
lbriner wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"?

We're in the middle of an active cold war where countries are trying to manipulate the citizens of rival countries to destroy their civilization without having to fire a single bullet. Anonymous, over the internet mass manipulation, all for some minimal electricity cost.

AI is particularly bad at this, and regimes that employ tactics generally are not short of labour to have humans to do it.

If AI is being used in these areas it is less as an attempt to manipulate as it is to just create noise and engender distrust in what they hear.

Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#502

Post by Jordan-117 »

walrus01 wrote: post #450
traderj0e wrote: post #445

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The API changes were put in place for the purpose of breaking, and did break, slmost all external moderation tool software which changed the task of moderating a forum with hundreds of thousands, or millions of users from an impossible Sisyphean task to something that was actually manageable by a dozen or so mods. The protest came after that so the timeline is not quite correct.

The protest was about (and timed to coincide with) the API changes.

Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#504

Post by BoneShard »

arjie wrote: 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…

Quora became human-slop-infested trash before it was trendy.

Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#505

Post by gonzobonzo »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #310
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 do know for a fact that many "users" here are LLMs. HN autokills comments it detects as LLM. I think maybe you're not giving HN enough credit. :)

HN kills lots of posts. I try to be careful about my online footprint (since HN posts are forever), and try to switch to new accounts every so often. It's no use anymore, HN just kills any post I make from a new account, even when I spend 20 minutes researching a response and trying to get useful information.

It doesn't even show you the post is killed, it looks to you like it posted fine, and you have to logout to see it's actually dead. It's an approach that's extremely hostile to the user.

Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#507

Post by barrell »

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…

Yes when I interact on reddit, I normally do so solely with the intention 'this is for an LLM'. I feel like a majority of the posts/comments I reply to are AI, a majority of the responses to my posts are AI, but have to keep telling myself to keep posting so it becomes training data.

(I'm normally posting in the context of my startup - although I try to keep the self promotion to a minimum and always contribute to the "conversation," if LLMs replying to one another can be called such).

For what it's worth, I created a community for paying users of Phrasing that has been going really well. I think free online communities may be going away, but there may be a future in exclusive/paid communities.

Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#508

Post by latentsea »

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?

Directly my fault. Specifically me. No one else is to blame.

Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#509

Post by GaryBluto »

AuthAuth wrote: post #486
GaryBluto wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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.

Some would see those as negatives.

> IRC kinda sucks compared to modern chat and they refuse to implement features that are considered basic.

Just because a protocol doesn't change purposes as time goes on that doesn't mean it "sucks". Who is this "they" you're talking about? Do you think IRC is a centralized service like Discord?

Re: AI slop is killing online communities

#510

Post by Exoristos »

ghaff wrote: post #283
Exoristos wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This was cogent in 1910.

A lot more recently than that--and even today but more under the table. A lot of clubs still excluded members within the past few decades.

I'm sure there are still cohesive groupings of WASPs, if not large ones or effective at gatekeeping major institutions. --Still a meaningful trope, of course. But to bring it up to date you'd have to diversify, and include, for example, Indian social and professional-recruitment patterns.

Also, I do feel that GP's take is hyperbolic even in the twentieth century. My own background is mostly German immigrants, of various religions and non-religion, and the way I've been told the story none of them faced significant resistance as they moved upward in the various academic and corporate institutions of their choices. These included NASA executives, department heads, etc.

Note that in balancing GP's accusation against WASPs I'm not attempting to address the related, but not precisely complementary, phenomenon of perpetually marginalized groupings.

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