The purpose could be testing what passes for human or warming up accounts for later propaganda use or who knows what else.
It would explain a lot.
My faith in humanity would be restored.
Eh? Explain
I don’t really have a problem with a AI asking questions, if the goal is to generate “human” engagement.
Here me out:
I built a bot (back in Slack when we had slack communities) that asked “questions of the day”. It was all copied/pasted questions from the internet like “What’s the right way to hold a taco?” or “Do you wash behind your ears?” Just silly things.
And the discussions were AMAZING. I learned so many random stories and really bonded with people.
AI/bot/ whatever. The prompt is a prompt.
Not really for as long as people engaging in the comments were real people. Though, then again, if they all were bots too but I didn’t know and couldn’t tell, then I’m not sure what the harm there even would be. If anything, I’d only expect the engagement to be more civil.
of course. I did not sign up for a human turing machine position.
I already think a good deal of questions everywhere these days were a person using AI to write the question and a ton of caveats for them. But they are still, technically, being posed by a human. That bothers me. Especially when they do it in NoStupidQuestions; this comm is specifically for questions you are embarassed about asking, such as when you can’t articulate it like a college professor.
yes, what’s the point of a forum if we are mostly talking to bots
Which is why I left reddit. Even if they are real people behind some of those posts, it’s still the same regurgitated garbage.
100%
Honestly, with the state of many questions posted here, I’d be surprised if there wasn’t a fair number of bots posting here.
One user in particular, has a posting history that is highly sus.
This round of bot posters just woke up:
https://lemmy.world/post/48975557
https://lemmy.ml/post/49557938
those don’t look like anything to me.
One user in particular, has a posting history that is highly sus.
When i see the sus posting history people i assume they’re just trolls though, or engaging in a roleplaying fetish.
Is there a specific reason why someone would choose to target this site with fake engagement bots? The most obvious types of bots are the ones that come on here directly advertising something, e.g “this person writes great CVs / Code! Reach out to Botted Name at linkedin or [email protected] to learn more! Buzzword Buzzword Buzzword.” They get quickly removed and don’t come often, so you might not have seen them.
But I just don’t see what value is made from bots that pretend to be people. Is it because they’re researching how to imitate human posters? Or do they just gather data based on how people respond? Sorry I’m kind of uncreative when it comes to this stuff.
I see basically two nefarious reasons for bots to pretend to be people on lemmy. I can’t think of a good reason why you’d want them.
A company shilling it’s product by appearing like a regular person. Bots have already ruined user reviews for products in basically every consumer industry. The best way to discover decent products now is word-of-mouth, so I could see a bot that pretends to be a user so it can show up in recommendation threads, like in Ask Lemmy or Buy It For Life.
The propaganda potential for bot users is tremendous. Kind of like the company shilling its product but on a grander scale. This could be orchestrated by those with economic interests, like promoting car-centric culture or climate change denialism which is of great interest to the oil industry. Or it could be as grand as foreign or domestic influence interfering with elections.
The fediverse isn’t a huge place, but it’s not nothing either. Operating costs are technically lower because you wouldn’t need to use as many bots to infiltrate communities. You could even spin up your own instances so that your own bots don’t get banned. I’m not really sure how you’d go about countering this sort of problem.
I wouldn’t be too surprised for some of the instances.
I don’t want to talk to a machine. I might as well be talking to a wall, or a cloud.
Also, all the resources the literally stupid things use to generate one idiotic response is just disgusting.
Yes. They provide no value and often times trained off if stolen data. Even the “good” bots that inline convert imperial to metric or fahrenheit to Celsius or similar, I think are annoying. I think all bots should be banned, zero tolerance.
As someone who takes the time to answer questions they know, yes. It takes time and effort for a human to formulate and write a response.
If im going to invest suitable effort into an answer, you better damn well be willing to put suitable effort into the question. Anything else is an attack on my time.
Isn’t there value in the discussion? If the question was worth responding to, I’d argue it’s a net benefit.
I’m playing devil’s advocate. I’m not sure what I think.
Perhaps there could be value in some kind of discussion, but I don’t consider a human interacting with an LLM to be a “discussion” any more than a human interacting with a magic eight ball.
I think they meant that the question starts the conversation between humans, in the comments.
Probably is already.
Yes because I’m not a guinea pig. But I’m sure it already happens and we’re doomed anyway.
No. Because we have all seen Reddit.
Wait. There are bots on reddit?
/s
