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KulakRevolt  1yr ago (text post)   3304 thread views

Meta: Is the Motte beset by bots?

So there's a delusional take you see on twitter Etc. All the time. From both sides of almost any issue but especially anything related to Russia, elections, Etc. You see people who respond to normal criticism or an abundance of criticism (usually relatively earned by how bad their takes are) accusing their detractors or those who disagree of being bots or astroturfed Putin or Clinton agents... The implied premise being that only lumps of code or Chinese sweatshop workers employed by bad faith actors could hold views that disagree with the complainer. That only bots or paid shills could oppose Ukraine, or support Clinton over Bernie, or Biden over Trump... Etc.

I used to dismiss these complaints... but now I feel I might owe a general apology.

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I've noticed since TheMotte moved to its new Site that the Quality of a lot of Comments are just off. Not that the takes are bad or low quality or have odd opinions But that they're Bizarrely and Unnervingly detached from even the barest context of the discussion itself. Stuff completely out of character for even a bad rulebreaking poster on the motte.

Short comments that don't engage with any arguments presented, or even engage with the context of the discussion... but that Immediately tangent off on some culture war point utterly unrelated to the discussion, and then not engaging wit any replies (often with a single external link)... I've seen weird shit on twitter so I've dug into a few of these accounts... and all of their comments are like this, short snipes that never engage even 1 or 2 comments deep with anyone who replies. but that are slowly wracking up a history on the platform...

And then today I was hit by a smoking gun, this Comment:

“The Ukraine conflict is one of the clearest examples of good vs. evil in the past century"

You said it! Look at how despicable these people are!

Video: Ukraine Soldiers Sing Praises Of WW II Era Nazi: https://youtube.com/watch?v=4H-yMmNh5Cs

And now NPR is just casually rehabilitating the Nazis: https://www.npr.org/2022/03/03/1084113728/a-closer-look-at-the-volunteers-who-are-signing-up-to-fight-the-russians

Now the links are to real pieces of media, The Jimmy Dore Show and NPR... both respectable enough... and there'd be little to suggest this was a bot trying to manipulate the discussion... except for one thing:

No one had said the quote he was replying too...

Indeed I know where he got the quote. It was from a discussion/long take weeks before in relation to Ukraine, and would not even have fit the discussion in that piece, since it was a meta-discussion about how figures discuss Ukraine relative to other wars. I'd quoted it back then as an example of something we'd think was delusional and completely detached from intellectual rigor if said about Iraq 1991 or WW1...

Indeed another comment making the opposite argument used the same quote and drew other quotes from the same two week old discussion... except arguing the opposite way (pro-Ukraine)... And likewise replied not at all to having it pointed out that nothing they quoted was at all mentioned in the actual thread or discussion that was being had.

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This obviously killed the discussion in that thread... when half the thread becomes comments quoting things, points and arugments, that were never said, and the other half must become replies saying in effect WTF!?

Well you can't have a discussion any more. Any organic back and forth between actual mottizens was killed. And obviously none of these either schizos or bots responded to keep discussion going.

Now if this becomes the norm it will kill the space...

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But its also really unnerved me with regards to the rest of the internet.

The "Dead Internet Theory" doesn't feel like a theory anymore. The Motte is an obscure space with discussion levels high enough you notice if an actor isn't actually thinking or engaging with what's been said... and 2 out of 15 comments in that thread were Fairly undeniably bots....

On a site that's only been up a few months.

What the hell must it be like on other forums? Newspaper comments? YouTube comments?

Hell 4Chan had to implement Capchas for every comment to avoid the problem.

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I said it. I'm not a bot. But I have learned I am really, really good at causing cognitive dissonance and shaking people out of what they "know" to be true with evidence to the contrary. The Ukraine conflict is good vs. evil, right? But then you turn it on its head and present evidence that we're on the side of the Nazis, who are pure evil. Blammo, brain explodes.

People really, really don't like it. Boy, they don't like it. They especially don't like when I back it up with facts from "their" sources like NPR. They don't like it so much that they will come up with conspiracy theories like "U R a bot" to wash away the cognitive dissonance.

Dude we wondering if you were a bot because you were quoting from an article 3 weeks earlier by a different author as if it was the the piece presented, didn't realize it was unrelated to the piece you were commenting on, and didn't even realize the previous author agreed with your take. and was presenting the quote to argue against it...

Honestly this reply is so detached from the actual state of the conversation I'm leaning back towards bot

See what I mean? Cognitive dissonance makes people grasp for straws in rebuttal, and the one that frequently comes to mind is "you're a bot".

This then resolves the nagging, damaging mental pain and the facts can be disregarded.

The "Dead Internet Theory" doesn't feel like a theory anymore. The Motte is an obscure space with discussion levels high enough you notice if an actor isn't actually thinking or engaging with what's been said... and 2 out of 15 comments in that thread were Fairly undeniably bots....

The Motte is obscure, yes. Also, its userbase contains plenty of people who might want (and ability to), for whatever reason, launch GPT-3 bots or something.

What the hell must it be like on other forums? Newspaper comments? YouTube comments?

Well... Why the future is now and it's scarier than you think

Bot? No insight, but I'd be surprised if TheMotte didn't track on someone's social-media target board. There's following the news, but then there's also following a party line as it changes in response to the news, and that can be much more insightful. Once you can identify what an organization's line is, tracking how fast people map to it (ie, hours as opposed to days) can be an indication of whether they're following a change in conversation, or trying to lead it in conjunction with other controlled actors.

If it seems surprising that anyone would try to propagandize the Motte, don't be. Not only has the motte been a place of organized troll efforts, but as a descendant of Scott Alexander's blog- one in which national-visiblity figures used to post under their own name or were known to have read- it's not exactly a 'nobody who would ever influence anything would ever come here' environment.

I think there's certainly something weirdly compelling about dead internet theory, but I haven't noticed a huge decline in comment quality here. On the other hand, it may be that I don't spend enough time here to notice. But I agree its potentially a problem. Perhaps we need to bring back mass email chains? Something analogous to the way 16th century radicals disseminated their ideas? I don't know, but more long-form writing might equate to more effortposts, higher barriers to entry, and higher quality in general.

Occam's razor: Someone on rdrama made a GPT-bot trained on the Motte corpus and unleashed it for the drama.

The funny part is that someone actually did do this; we banned it within a day, and they said it had taken rdrama a few weeks to catch on.

Entirely possible someone's done it again, of course.

If so, I find it subtly hilarious that a group nominally against AI takeover of the world is without a unified outgroup while being beset by motte bots. Where’s John Conner when you need him?

There was a time when the GPT-2 subreddit simulator sub had a delightfully on-point bot for SSC, but it got banned. It might have been owned or bought by our puppetmaster.

I would just like to add a few thoughts:

Watermelon. Zaibatsu. Camraderie. Drum.

Hopefully this is at least modest evidence that my account isn't a chatbot.

Really not looking forward to endless 'prove you're not an AI' interactions in coming days...

Need to hire some Blade Runners to keep an eye on things.

Really not looking forward to endless 'prove you're not an AI' interactions in coming days...

Honestly I would probably tell people to stop doing this if it became a regular thing.

I made a casual comment about something feeling off two weeks ago but people who replied did not notice anything different.

On my anti-Ukraine comment, I got a reply from one poster whose English was highly unnatural and who only ever replied on the forum 20 days before, for a previous discussion on Ukraine. He also criticized the forum for posting about “transsexuals”, a give-away that he is not familiar with the discussions (which always use trans or transgender) and that he would have no interest in browsing themotte simply waiting for Ukraine to come up. I thought that was, not a bot, but someone pinged out of the West of Ukraine because their google search for forums about Zelensky came up. I have no evidence, and it’s not like his content was low quality, so I don’t exactly care much. (If you’re not, apologies, but I think some doubt is warranted.)

I think the sad reality of discussions on Russia and Ukraine is that we know it is littered with Ukrainian and Russian bots and paid agents who are pinged from indexed search engines to participate in these discussions. There’s nothing you can do about it and there will usually never be any proof. I can’t imagine any way to substantively combat the problem, let alone on a small forum.

West of Ukraine

Now how dare you.

/images/16670317188400383.webp

It's certainly not that people disagree with you, they are just bots. And that is certainly suspicious that they are not very interested in discussion of transsexuals when their city is bombed.

Bots participating here might be a thing, but people with your rhetoric certainly lower quality of discussion here. lesswrong and slatestarcodex were heterodox — but they were correct about things. About cryptocurrencies, Artificial Intelligence, COVID. Now, when it comes to geopolitics, freaking worldnews has better takes than the New Right that populates rat-adjacent forums including this one (you might say that I am biased — but compare predictions made there and by people like Karlin).

And yes, I am sure that kulaksrevolt didn't create this post just because article on AA he reposted was subpar, and some people noted it. Oh no, it was because of bots. Possibly from the West of Ukraine.

Worldnews is more interested in bullshit and propaganda than predictions.

I did not mean in that way, and apologies. I appreciate the allusions that prove your authenticity. I think everyone would love an OP post about your experiences about the conflict some day!

edit also, your English is very good. You just miss a couple small native phrases. The small phrases made me think you were not native speaker, hence “unnatural”, but otherwise your English is perfect.

Sure, I'll post about my experiences, and thank you.

He also criticized the forum for posting about “transsexuals”, a give-away that he is not familiar with the discussions (which always use trans or transgender)

I'm a long time poster on the old subreddit and I use "transsexuals" as a term quite often (and particularly did more often once Reddit as a whole cracked down on using "tranny", my preferred nomenclature), mostly because I don't like woke nuspeak (as I perceive it). Am I a bot?

Have you ever thought about troon or train? They don't strike me as particularly worse than tranny.

I've used both along with "trainee" but it depends.

I think the quality has been going down, but I wouldn't peg bots. This might very well just be a personal opinion, just this morning, I was thinking about how increasing amount of subthreads are about trans stuff, a subject that, in the end, doesn't hold a great deal of interest to me. Not only that but it seems to be about endlessly relitigating a few particular facets of this particular culture war. Probably not something that it would be easy to write a bot for, though.

Trans stuff in general picked up steam in the mainstream, for instance with Tavistock - the largest "gender affirming clinic" in UK closing down in late July and now there is a lot of topics around it from both sides generating content outside of it. There is still tangential issue of the whole "Parental rights in education" AKA "Don't say gay" bill in Florida, that now has some real impact. So while you may be sick and tired of the topic, it is now resonating with mainstream people many of whom are are now really pondering it for the first time. And as just a last nugget, a few days ago Biden accepted to be interviewed by transgender person called Dylan Mulvaney

I guess even if there may not be any novel things for you - although I'd wager that you may not be aware of the scientific reasons for closing Tavistock - there is still the meta level where this picked up steam and is relevant for broader culture now that transgender topics filtered into the mainstream as more people are now forced to engange with the topic.

Last week's dominating topic seems to have been race, and this week's topic is trans issues. I guess AI and AI art come in at a possible third place in terms of common-ness.

Trans stuff is one of this forum's hobby horses and is one of the reasons it had to leave reddit. If anything, what gets endlessly regurgitated is people discussing the new LOTR show.

My subjective feeling is that the trans stuff occupies far more of this forum's time here than on Reddit.

Of course, one reason might be that during the last years there's been other topics occupying the forum's attention that do not do so the same way - the Covid is Over and Ukraine war clearly does not seem to exist the same way in American headspace as in the first half of the year (first month of war, arguably).

My subjective feeling is that the trans stuff occupies far more of this forum's time here than on Reddit.

You're not wrong, and I think it's that there's no longer the feat that openly doing the trans debate would lead to a banhammer. Likewise I see HBD discussed a lot more than on Reddit, probably for the same reason.

The trans stuff is a topic that is in itself practically optimal for incandescent heat and zero light, and the way the CW treats it only adds to that. And few if any mottizens are immune to the morbid charms of doing a little fighting the CW. A topic on which nothing of value can be said and on which everyone can very conveniently point out the errors of their enemies and which keeps pushing itself center stage will be too great a bait for most to resist.

I want for the world to ignore the entire topic as it deserves, and for the Motte to do likewise, but this is one of those pointless battles where nothing can be gained but everyone still needs to fight it just to stall and frustrate their enemies. It's the worst part of the CW but also one of the hottest, so we can't exactly pretend that it's not happening or that it is strategically irrelevant.

IMO a containment thread would be the best solution - if we had the numbers to split people's attention like that.

I think the migration just failed, and I plan on doing some data scraping / analytics this weekend to demonstrate it.

What kind of analysis or "hypothesis's" do you want to test. I tried doing a causal text analysis before on a specific subreddit and data is tremendously noisy, don't expect to not be disappointed.

You can use my source code to speed up your process if you want. https://github.com/f3zinker/RedScare-Analysis

Hey, thanks for that. I liked going through the analysis.

Also, I found this pretty funny (hopefully the table looks alright):

EDIT: it doesn't look like anything!

It was one comment being "hell yeah dude" getting readability_qual = "college level"

That's actually a mistake on my part, I reread the code again.

The metric I used returned negative grades. "Hell yeah dude" got 'between grade -2 and grade -3'. When I binned them into real life grade values, I should have added x < 4 -> "grade 4 and below" instead of 0 < x < 4 -> "grade 4 and below". Or I planned to drop negative values when I was doing the analysis and forgot to do it.

Just need to change one line of code, but I don't think it would really change anything all that much.

Ah, well... Fuck. That covers every idea I had and more.

What did you have in mind? I wanna know how others would come up with ways to assess a forums change in "quality"

Not a direct measure of quality, but I would expect it to be correlated: the number of different users participating. My concern is that the long tail of normal people didn't make it in the migration, and only the insane people are left.

@Porean

I think "sanity" is on an axis that is orthogonal to quality. My definition of quality isn't to do with how out of norm ones political opinions is but the quality of their insights, how well defended their arguments are, how logically consistent is the text to itself and its subject, etc.

The abundance of trans and race posting relative to all other CW issues has been a problem before the migration. But I would +1 to the quality going down.

There is a certain growing subgroup of users who just state their opinion (preferred policy) on the matter without any further analysis added to the discussion and call it a day.

Also I think the motte has reached an age where a lot of posts are just references/links to old posts users previously made. To be fair to them, there isn't much appeal to write out yet another 1000 word comment on trans or race issues, you can write out your opinions on that once and just cite it for eternity. Replying to yet another newbie entering the CW and going "does anyone else trans or race issuess??""

"SoMetHiNg neEDs To bE doNe" (BLR!!) to breathe new life to discussions here.

I think the quality of top level posts has gone up a bit

One kind of sees now why the original decision to make a containment thread was made in the first place.

Separate threads for CW stuff and "normal politics" (economy, global politics, electoral horse race stuff etc.)? To be fair it's the latter that interests me more.

Or one specific dedicated thread for each of the done-to-death CW issues and keep the main thread clean for discussion of new topics.

So...I was working on this whole bit:

Uh, I was there for that thread, and didn't get an impression that guy was a bot. He was arguably sealioning, determined to continue a "discussion" from your older post, and I agree that it's a faux pas to drop a critique and then rig for silent running.

There's a few reasons the midwit NPC meme is so seductive. How do you tell the difference between a bot and a human who's not interested in actual engagement? It's a reverse Turing test--are you human enough to make a half-awake partisan sit up and put in a more thoughtful response?

Except when I checked the quotes, I realized I was conflating it with sliders' decidedly non-bot post. Awkward.

Clearly, Mr. @stiffly saw sliders' quote and decided to drop in. He (it?) did so in a way that definitely triggers my bot sonar. There's a plausible scenario where he is a human who saw an opportunity for edgy gotchas...but I can't be sure. As an experiment, here's some bait:

Ukraine is superior to Russia! Putin has egg on his face! 30,000 black MANPADs of Allah will wipe clean the skies of Russian infidels!

There. If that doesn't deserve some fact-checking, nothing does.

Twitter is full of bots, obviously.

Reddit is also full of bots, and the day of Ghislaine Maxwell's arrest one of the biggest /r/worldnews accounts posting every day for years stopped posting.

Reddit will censor any opinion contrary to their bot-promoted hivemind leading to seas of [deleted] and [removed] on any slightly controversial topic. The average Reddit user who is able to keep an account afloat despite that might as well just be a bot.

The Biden admin has already admitted that they worked with social media companies to push the vaccines and censor anti-vaccine opinions.

All American news media + big tech colluded to suppress the Hunter Biden laptop story and before that gamergate.

Of course the internet is full of bots.

Not much of that content is organic, and what is left is so self-censored it might as well just be bots anyway. You can tell somebody is saying the truth when they start to shut them down. Ask Kanye West.

Saying the truth is not the only reason why people get shut down. Just because a corrupt cop will still stop a bank robbery doesn't mean that the bank robbery suspect is innocent.

Kanye wasn't shut down for telling the truth; he was shut down for lying.

Where is the lie?

I haven't seen a single fact check of Kanye's claims.

Here's a 12 yo fact check and it's not convincing to me.

Do Jews Really Control the Media?

The voting patterns are sometimes weird. Child comments that are way deep not uncommonly get 3-4x as many votes as the parent even if they are similar or agree. Some comments get 6 votes in 10 minutes and others get 6 total ever despite both being in close proximity and sorta similar . Reddit had a 24 hour delay so it was hard to see voting patterns. As for bots, I have not noticed anything conspicuous.

I wonder how much having the votes at the bottom of a post is having an effect on longer posts simply getting much less voting engagement. I doubt weird voting patterns are bots here just because it does seem trivial enough to to pull a Unidan and create however many alt accounts you want to upvote yourself if you need the self-esteem boost. I don't even think it would be against the written rules. It's possible no one is doing that but it's an easy way to explain specific comments being singled out for praise or disdain with votes and that happening in quick succession.

We've seen write-only trolls who've either copied paragraphs from elsewhere, or had the paragraphs on their hard drives for future use. That's not the same as bots, though.

The only specific example you provide is very obviously not a bot. Is that all you’ve got?

Why didn't you link an archive of the thread in question? The first commenter, sliders1234, specifically says "Critiqueing your other post". He just came across another post on the same Substack and was more interested in responding to it than the one actually linked. The second post by stiffly is clearly responding to that line because he saw it quoted in sliders1234's post. Maybe he didn't actually read your post and thought the quote in the other reply was from the linked post, maybe he knew it was from another post but wanted to respond to it anyway. Neither are mining TheMotte for content, just responding to another post on the same Substack and then to another reply in the same thread. Among repliers more will read the other replies than read the linked article, so it's not weird that stiffly would end up replying to something quoted by sliders1234. And looking at the linked archives of their comment histories neither seem like bots to me.

I have removed some posts that were clearly AI generated. All the cases I saw were rdrama users trying to troll.

Long posts written by bots are often easy to identify. They feel like someone typed up the words of a drunkard, and added in a bunch of proper punctuation. They tend to have a disconnect between the quality of ideas presented (crappy) and the quality of the presentation (near perfect).

Shorter posts might be a way for bots to hide. Because they tend to pattern match low effort posters. But that is just a problem with low effort posters disguised as a bot problem. Low effort crappy posts are bad coming from humans or bots. Alternative high quality posts seem fine to me, even if an AI wrote it.

I don't have any special or serious insights to add to this discussion.

But it does seem like one hypothesis you can't eliminate is that /r/themotte was overrun by bots, to which your thinking calibrated, and when we moved the bots all stayed behind on reddit and what you're complaining about is just what talking to regular people looks like...

No.

If bot activity is widespread it starts showing telltale signs really fast, and then kills discussion. This is why Twitter conversations never really go anymore than 1 reply deep now, if you try you get burned really fast.

On twitter, if you say something about a key issue and a bot brigades you they run through a series of replies copied right of some UR post they mined... you only notice when you ask them if they're a bot and ask them to reply with the color of mint, only for them to reply to that challenge with yet more text copy pasted from some article that supports whatever position they're shilling.

"...and that's why the donbass is essentially Ukrainian"

"Wait that didn't engage with anything I said. are you a bot? What colour is the sky?"

"When you look Crimea however there's..."

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I've never seen anything like that here,... where entire bot reply chains happen to create the illusion of 50/50 or greater support for one issue... and after you notice and start calling it, they keep going and following the script... so maybe I'm talking out of my ass and blowing a few bad/non-sequiter comments out of proportion...

But its the kind-of thing that you don't forget if it happens to you and it paranoia poisons all your future interactions.

Its possible in my experience here one person schizo'd out, and another didn't read the ariticle and took their detached out of context quotations as representative... but it something I've grown paranoid about and wanted to gauge everyone else's sense of the vibe

If you watch Youtube economics videos, you will see a lot of this sort of thing in the comments:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=WN-YkZ8YTlM&lc=UgwWe_CeXm7MVMSDom14AaABAg

One tell-tale sign is the use of real names, rather than things like Queefburglar69.

Quite a lot of effort for minimal advertising, but I suppose that the cost of bots is much lower.

Which comments do you think are bots?

The highlighted comment and those below it.

I’m not sure about this. The kind of person who searches extremely niche economic forecasts videos on inflation from small think tanks is surely more likely to use their real name and not QueefBurglar420

I'm not sure if you know many economists. It's hard enough to get them to not use names like QueefBurglar69 in their academic papers...

I...I’m not sure that’s true.

Perhaps it depends on the economist. But i’ve noticdd wide differences in names according to video content

That is absolutely amazingly blatant. It's terrifying to imagine when all that will be done flawlessly by AIs without Indian accents so strong you can hear it when they type.

Will the internet even be usable at that point, if you couldn't search for anything without getting fake conversations generated on the fly to con you?

There tend to be arms races with this sort of thing. So things like Zoom may become more important to prove that you're human, and then as quality AI video becomes possible, maybe there will be complex "Show a smile, then a frown, then dance the Limavady Jig" tests.

Alternative theory: there is no new theMotte. TheMotte.org takes each user to an individualized forum populated by simulations of former users of the subreddit who posted enough to form a model and important enough to be worth the effort. Each user is real, but the community has been forked into a thousand little simulations where we all argue with a bunch of bots.*

Alternatively, consider the story of the CIA sponsoring publications in East Germany that were seen to be subversive

A publishing front headed by a former U-boat commander created slick fakes of East German publications targeting official audiences, even a jazz magazine that became popular among East German youth organizations. As Bill Harvey, its swashbuckling CIA overseer, told his bosses, “Along with astrology, we consider [jazz] one of the most potent psychological forces available to the West for an attack on Moscow Communism."

The magazine Shlagzeug successfully increased circulation and garnered respect, but ultimately their CIA handlers realized that they weren't actually doing anything to undermine Communism, while their German employees were spending money like water on sponsoring Jazz concerts and buying records and record players. Part of covert operations is that sometimes the deceivers are the easiest to deceive, the players get lost in the confusion of their own shadow games.

So I could see some flunky in the Russian info-ops command or its American equivalent deciding that themotte seems important. Or deciding that because themotte will never ban them, if they can convince their supervisor that it is important it's easier than trying not to get banned somewhere else. Or they like reading themotte and want to hang out there anyway.

Well, there was already Soviet jazz in the thirties. The musical Happy-Go-Lucky Guys (or Jolly Fellows) was tremendously popular in 1934.

Ok shoot, what's the great Soviet jazz record that I'm missing out on? What's the Red answer to the Blue Note sessions?

their German employees were spending money like water on sponsoring Jazz concerts

Well, duh. Jazz was already passé by that time. They really should have sponsored rock'n roll concerts instead!

The moral of the story: If you're going to astroturf, you need to astroturf in a way that's actually effective for your target audience.

Nah, your timing is off. Kind of Blue didn't even come out until 1959, Johny B Goode wouldn't come out until 1958. Coltrane, I don't think had even recorded a studio album. Jazz was still at its peak in 1956. Your flawed perception is an example of how we collapse the past into those who would become winners and ignore everyone else. Like Mishima's Honda in Runaway Horses complaining of how he and his friends will be erased and lumped in with the asshole jocks from the fencing team as the representatives of Japanese militaristic youth of the time.

I mean, the tech is clearly there with GPT, and god knows what the various feds around the world have at their disposal. They were interested in disrupting internet conversations years ago, the leaks by Snowden showed it.

I'm fully expecting an internet of endless government and corporate psyops when the technology matures.

But why here and now ? Some technologically competent sneerer with a GPT3 trained on something, out here to fuck with us? Possible.

However: that commenter looks just like some teenager.

I'd feel happier if there was some onerous captcha to complete, because fucking with forums is rather easy now.

GPT 3 is really good, and you don’t even have to fine tune it, just provide a good prompt and you’re good to go.

GPT 3 is really good...

I keep hearing this but I have yet to see it.

This is probably the best greentext post I've seen in about a decade.

Well you can see for yourself, https://openai.com/api/ register then go to Playground.

It depends on what you consider good, I guess. It is unreliable but outputs mostly coherent speech; understands tasks given, although that often requires a lot of restating and clarification; at least once I got a genuinely useful idea out of discussing something with it.

Certainly it can do good quality forum bots, especially with a bit of moderation.

Well you can see for yourself, https://openai.com/api/ register then go to Playground.

I have, messing around in open AI is exactly the sort of thing I'm talking about when I say that I'm unimpressed.

Nah most of these comments wouldn't require anything so complex.

Just a simple format...

quote->Affirmation/disagreement->[Content to be pushed]

quote->Contextual content taking from past comments that are matched based on word choice->[content to be pushed/no content if disruption, etc. is the goal

There are tons of easy hacks to get people to engage/think they're interacting with something real that requires no dynamic intelligence at all.

Telemarketers regularly get in 5-10minute chats with recordings and elaborate voicemails that affect some emotional valence to justify never answering a question... and that's faking a dynamic back and forth... not one off sniping.

Here's a automatic recording/telemarketer bait that lasted 14 minutes

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