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Recently I've had a related observation while browsing a different website, which has an amount of bots and shills. But interestingly people seem to really despise it if you call a bot a bot, or a shill a shill. They might defend some obvious AI slop by saying "it's not a crime to write well" or "many people use em-dashes legitimately" or even just call you an idiot with no further explanation. All humanly written posts, all defending an obvious bot with vigor. I saw a similar thing on a local Facebook group, where an obvious paid shill posted a wall of text clearly written by ChatGPT, yet everybody just ate it up. It seems like when you bring up concerns, you end up as the bad guy for disturbing the peace, while the bot is the good guy because it's following the right conventions.
I remember a previous discussion about non-autistic vs autistic communication, where autistic communication is centered around an exchange of facts, while the core of non-autistic communication is emotional signalling. It seems that that this phenomenon extends to bad actors insofar as they can provide the right emotional cues to be accepted. Or at least people feel that it's not a disqualifying factor from engaging at face value. Meanwhile I know a shill is paid to say anything necessary in order to spread his message, and a bot is just a program with no emotions or sense of true or false.
But I think this touches on the idea of arguments as soldiers. To many people, it likely doesn't matter what the facts are, just the emotional message that they encode. And while debunkings exist, the practice they just act as another soldier from the other side knocking on the door.
Looping back into current events, it seems like there's little incentive for the administration not to bend the truth. The enemy was already deploying their rapid response arguments with zero regard for the truth, saying that a boneheaded ice agent just executed an innocent bystander on the street in cold blood. What good does it do to say "The agent made a split second judgement thinking he was grabbing a gun, which turned out to be the wrong call" (the truth) versus "an armed and violent individual resisted arrest and was shot while police were trying to disarm him" (not technically a lie). Twitter autists might try to go over the frame by frame, but for everyone else they're gonna live the lie.
To be fair, I don't think most people's AI-dar is well-calibrated in either direction.
I recently had the frustrating experience of being accused of using AI to write some posts on Reddit, even though I did not use AI. The OP blocked me, and I learned first-hand how annoying Reddit's implementation of block is, because I kept getting notifications when people replied to my posts in the OP's thread, but when I clicked the notifications Reddit pretended the thread didn't exist. I had to log out to see that the thread wasn't, in fact, broken.
I didn't even get the chance to defend myself regarding the supposed AI usage. The OP just decided I was using AI after a few posts (their evidence was that I supposedly wrote in "ridiculously long paragraphs" and had posted in AI subs in the past), and then blocked me, effectively ceding the whole discussion to the other side of the argument in that thread.
Obviously, a false positive like this isn't the end of the world, but it will be annoying going forward if everyone's good faith efforts to argue an unpopular opinion on Reddit somewhere gets them accused of AI usage and blocked.
The way they implemented blocking is completely idiotic. The one thing you are still able to do is edit your own posts in the thread and add something like "lol this loser blocked me" which helps a bit at least.
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False AI accusations are awful and I almost feel like they follow the same dynamic. When you're the one posting: "hey that's actually not ai" you'll be attacked just as much.
It seems like whether or not an account is a bot barely matters, it's only what side it's on that matters to the masses. Posting some wrongthink - insult and the account as much you want and people will love you. Posting the approved message - any criticism will draw hate.
In Nice Facebook Group people may be more genuinely unsettled by factual explanations in a that's our preferred style of bot way. On reddit, bot or AI accusations are regularly and routinely used to derail discussion. A portion of it is bots, trolls, or propagandists of intent, but then a greater number are people who have observed this and get the same use out of the technique-- a handy way to route around any type of discussion. "Echo chamber" is an accurate description of this phenomena despite being so popular to be meaningless. Bots are bad>bots say bad>you say bad>you're a bad bot.
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