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Notes -
I already used GPT-4 to create a /r/themotte post featured here (after all, its database ends in 2021 - the sub was back on Reddit then.) I would guess this sort of a thread, if actually made would get a fair amount of pushback here for being exactly the sort of bland lib stuff that sounds, well, very Reddit.
I also used it to simulate other forums. It created a "typical Something Awful post" that I, having been a goon myself, could only characterize as "GBS as fuck", and a Kiwi Farms post that I couldn't recreate again in the same form (ChatGPT doesn't show previous threads and I might have deleted it) but was, indeed, about the challenges of running a farm in New Zealand. The funniest one was a post for the notorious Punk in Finland forum which was in Finnish so it's no use linking it here, but it simulated exactly what a 60-year-old record company exec trying to push a new band "organically" on a punk forum would sound like. ("How do you do, fellow punks?")
Anyways...
A while back, I learned that years and years ago the Finnish version of 4chan had discovered a Finnish message board for Los Serrano (*Serranon perhe *in Finnish) fans. Los Serrano, in case you don't know it (and I would guess most don't, being American and all) was a Spanish slice-of-life sitcom that aired in 2003-2008 and was also shown in Finland. It had a modicum of popularity back then - I remember several friends going "You gotta watch the Serranos, it's so nice and pleasant!". I watched a few episodes, but nice and pleasant slice-of-life sitcoms aren't really my bag, so I havent thought about it ever since...
...until I learned of the message board for the Finnish fans of the series. Already back when the Finnish version of 4chan had discovered it, it had tens of thousands of posts, and it now has more, with discussion continuing to the present day. This is already highly unusual for a Spanish sitcom that last aired 15 years ago and wasn't really that big a deal here, at least for the entire five-year period. Imagine a highly popular forum for Everybody Loves Raymond fans, expect it's only Everybody Loves Raymond fans in the state of Minnesota, or something.
Naturally, the Finnish anons were intrigued and delved deeper. They soon discovered that much of the forums posting was highly autistic, characterized by repetitive phrases by similar users, extremely intricate "forums contests" on arcane stuff and similar fare. Quickly the Finnish anons deduced that, even if the forums might have had real users back when Los Serrano was on air, it now appeared to have two or maybe three users.
One of them was the guy (probably) who runs almost all the accounts, including the mod and admin accounts, sets up the "contests" between their endless sockpuppet accounts, and, at least years ago when the whole setup was first discovered, posted hundreds of messages, some of them 5000 words long, mostly to themselves daily. Oh, and they also ran another forum for some series that I don't remember right now with similar rates of spam, and they posted screencaps from their forums on Photobucket, and they had forums accounts on other Finnish forums, and they had intricate avatars and gifs for their users, and so on.
They also found out that the forums had at least one other user, thought to be a shy and possibly developmentally disabled girl, who was endlessly banned or otherwise sanctioned by the power user for minor strange infractions, but still kept returning to the forum.
As you might guess from the years, the forums continue running ever now, though I am not deep enough in the lore to know which accounts are which - ie. is it still just this one guy posting to himself or if the other person is still involved or what.
I guess the point here is that even if we could have AI's simulating a bunch of posters, it's still just simulating something that you already get if you get a human who is committed, crazy and autistics enough. "Look what they need to mimic a fraction of our power..."
Is there an archive of themotte from Reddit around anywhere? It would be nice to train an LLM to generate the response a given redditor would give to a post. I could probably make a model learn that if I could find 50k or so posts. Having a digital Deiseach around might fill the void her absence created, not to mention the other dearly departed.
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