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A distraction from the war and ICE. I was thinking about posting in the fun thread, but it's not really a fun topic, though it may not be culture war either since I expect most people to be on the "this is bad" side. Maybe we should have a recurring "Butlerian Jihad Roundup" for posts like these?
Bots are taking over the internet. Corporate shills and (foreign) government propagandists have upgraded with virtual cybernetics. A related but lesser change is people using LLMs to reword their own posts (+ emails and other communications).
Some AI writing is obvious, but sometimes it's indistinguishable from (if not completely identical to) what a human would write. NYT has a quiz to distinguish human and AI writing. I did bad (3/5), but in my defense, I think most of the human examples are awful, making the quiz harder. See for yourself.
On Hacker News, it’s now so bad there's a new guideline, “don’t post generated/AI-edited comments”. Unfortunately, due to the extreme intellect of the average Hacker News commenter, it can be hard to distinguish their profound technological insights from even a markov chain trained on buzzwords. Indeed, looking at top threads I still notice lots of slop-like posts from brand new or previously inactive accounts, like this one. I've been sarcastic, but I really like Hacker News, and hope it finds a way to stop the slop.
Other networks are taking a different approach. For example, Meta has acquired MoltBook (the AI social network) in an effort to add even more bots to FaceBook. I’m joking — no wait, they may actually be doing that. Not content with the Metaverse, maybe Zuckerburg has become addicted to burning money on uncanny social experiments.
On the Motte, at least for now, I haven't seen any obvious bot posts. There were a couple AI-assisted posts (by "known" humans) over the past couple months that got called out.
How will social media evolve? Will people move to invite-only sites like https://lobste.rs and Discord? Will most people accept AI discourse as natural or even prefer it? Will AI discourse become so good that we prefer it? Right now, it seems even the best AI writing (prompted to be consice and human) is unnecessarily wordy and has certain tropes; but what if someone discovers how to train an AI on a specific human's writing, so that it's effectively indistinguishable?
Realistically the public, anonymous internet is simply over at this point. The only ways forward are either the end of anonymity or accepting that you'll be writing to an LLM half of the time.
At this point I've pretty much cut down my internet usage down to private Discords/IRCs and various Substacks/tweets/articles from accounts that are known to be human. I don't really have any issues with reading LLM content per-se, and even like reading LLM takes on various topics, but if I wanted that I'd just prompt it myself.
I still check The Motte as I think the relative obscurity, active moderation and high concentration of regulars protects it from the worst of the dead internet, but unfortunately it seems unlikely that it'll be able to stem the tide forever.
I don't think it's over quite yet, but yeah, I think we are pretty close. Surely it won't be long before you can give your computer instructions along the following lines:
Something similar could be done to infiltrate Facebook, Wikipedia, YouTube, and so on. It seems to me the only way to stop it is by very intrusive measures, such as requiring people to present their passport. And I think most people wouldn't bother with these sites if they had to submit to something like that.
I personally do not understand why someone would create an AI bot to argue for them. Especially on non-monetized sites. My point of posting on themotte is to express my opinions, think I am smart, an occasionally get to tell other people they are wrong.
I guess I figured they're just investing in shills that will appear "real" when day when they need to express some activist opinion/astroturfed movement. If you try to spam bot comments on [current political topic], they can fairly easily be flagged as new/inactive/low effort accounts. If they've all been posting about random tech news for years, perhaps there's more cover.
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I think there are multiple reasons. For one thing, it would be like having a sockpuppet on steroids. For another, it seems like it would be a good trolling technique. But if nothing else, there are a lot of activists out there who would like to create a consensus cascade for their views.
Activist makes sense to me. I post online because it entertains me
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illusion of consensus?
I don't know. This is the same generation that thinks "getting ratioed" is a sign one has lost an argument.
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