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It's difficult to say, but I think that at a minimum, people who debate online will prefer NOT to debate against bots. I base this on analogizing the situation to online chess, which has a problem with so-called "(c)heaters" Most human chess players prefer to play against other humans.
I'm speculating a bit, but I think that if (1) large numbers of bots start being unleashed in online discussions (which seems very likely to me since people are motivated to want to make it seem as though there is a lot of support for their position); and (2) it becomes difficult to distinguish bots from humans (which seems likely because technology is always improving); then (3) most natural persons will simply give up and we'll end up with a sort of dead internet of discussion boards.
I actually do prefer debating LLMs at the moment, and they're usually my first port of call if I want to work through an issue.
On the internet, if I go through the effort of posting something, there's a high likelihood it just gets ignored, downvoted with no counterargument, sneered at, tagged with thumbs down emoji or whatever. This is feedback, of a type, but I can't do much with it, and it doesn't help.
Meanwhile, I can go to the LLM and be like: "argue with me in a way that is maximally convincing to someone like me", and they will actually argue in good faith. They're sycophantic, of course, but they'll happily take the other side of an argument, and you can misrepresent your actual opinion to double check.
There's also the convenience factor, and not imposing on anyone else's time. Chess bots are nice for the same reason.
Well, I think you are about to get your preference granted in spades :)
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I already find it hard to be motivated to debate, but not because of bots. There are so many (human) comments that whatever point I make 1) has probably been made before, 2) will be drowned in noise, and 3) boils down to value/opinion (silly example: "I believe the government should subsidize wheat, tomatoes, and dairy farming" because I really like Italian food; or I think the world works like X, you think it works like Y, but these models are so abstract and distant that neither of us can really prove them).
One motivation to still debate is that it trains my brain to reason and persuade, which would happen even if I was debating a bot. But another is, even among the noise, I still have some audience. But maybe if bots cause people to revert to smaller, private communities, I'll feel like I have an audience again.
E: another motivation to debate (and post) is to learn facts and interesting perspectives from replies. In this way, bot replies are good iff they present uncommon facts and perspectives. Unfortunately currently, I think most LLMs have a similar way of thinking, which is also similar to the (common) zeitgeist. Also unfortunately for internet discourse, if LLMs do provide interesting replies, they don’t motivate public posts unless said posts are subsidized.
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