most people hate ai, but the bots on lemmy are an acception since they bring life to the communities when activities dries up. I mean- am I wrong here?thoughts? opinions?
I don’t hate AI and the bots aren’t that great imo. A posting bot isn’t AI though
Good points, although they do tend to bring activity back to communities and give a reason to use them when people aren’t posting. and while the bots aren’t necesarily ai, they essentially do the same thing, automated tasks by a cpu.
I can tell you really want that to be true, but the bots posting links to “elsewhere” articles with a summary or TLDR that reads like it’s been run thru 15 really crappy language translators & fail to even make sense let alone properly summarize the pertinent details - yeah that’s what drives me away. I’m prolly a fringe user, my primary use is to satisfy my hobbyist/DIY addictions, & I enjoy being able to read & learn in the same place/format. I generally have little interest in the social media/what’s trending or political subs. I used to appreciate seeing occasional posts from the social/politics but they are so toxic & devoid of any conversation that might interest me. I’m really hoping that the humans that are still out in the real world doing amazing things will find their way to federated freedom so I can selfishly return to my daily realization of how little I know. Because those bot posts coupled with all the ignorant hate comments have the opposite effect - I start feeling like there’s nothing left to learn here…
The bots are usually not AI
The Bot that keeps posting old reddit links can go to hell.
I think we should incorporate more ai tech in Lemmy. Like accessibility features and moderation tools.
but I absolutely hate these post bots. I always feel cheated when I engage because op won’t have a discussion. All blocked.
AI-based moderation tools sound like a recipe for disaster. Facebook has them, and it’s not good.
Screw whatever “AI moderation” means, A simole “Automod for Lemmy” would be nice!
Nah, I block all the bots.
If the community is dead and it’s only bots posting I don’t think that makes the community any less dead.
look at it in perspective, like on this community, alot of people like talking about tech, but when users aren’t posting, they might still seek new content. so when the bots do post something, it brings life to the community and activity. and usually when they do post something it is relatively new if not brand new news articles that bring people together to talk about.
Some bots I tolerate, others not so much, so I block those. The ones that just mine another site for any new content, I block, as I could just go to that site and read it. The piped.video bot that provides an alternate to youtube (when the piped.video link actaully works) I allow, because Youtube will eventual defeat my work around. So it’s more personal taste.
Ah yes, ‘life,’ one of the qualities that computers definitely have.
If a community is not very active but there are a lot of bot posts, it just feels like “lipstick on a pig” - they’re trying to make it seem more active than it really is, and diluting what little “real” activity there is.
Going into a community expecting human interaction and instead finding nothing but bots is like joining a game server only to find out that it’s 18/20 bots. I think it sucks and it’s not what I want. Frankly, if I wanted to talk to AI chat bots (and I really don’t) there is already no shortage of places to do that.
I do worry a little bit that one day the internet will be so full of AI-generated garbage (words, images, music, etc.) that it will lose most of its value and utility to actual human beings. Centralized corporate social media already has a massive problems with bots and sockpuppets, and technology only seems to be moving in a direction that will make that problem worse. I’m sure the corporate parts of the internet at large will become majority bots sometime in my lifetime, maybe even in just a few years.
So, whether it’s Mastodon, Peertube, Kbin or whatever, I genuinely think and hope that the Fediverse represents a small opportunity to keep mostly human communities alive and thriving, and so I hope that bots are used rarely and transparently, if at all.
I haven’t seen any bots but maybe I just don’t know what they look like. How are the bots posting?
My understanding is that Lemmy bot accounts generally do not federate over to kbin. If you want to see an example of a bot making regular posts, you can check out [email protected]. Prior to the lemmy.ml/ani.social defederation it posted in [email protected] – i.e. go to https://lemmy.ml/c/anime sort by new and look like 10-ish pages back (currently) and you should see a bunch of bot posts (sometimes drowning out posts from real people). You can see it posting to https://ani.social/c/episode_discussion currently as well; there are a lot of bot threads and very few comments. When the bot had an outage a while ago (prior to the defederation) there was a discussion with various opinions on the bot and how/if it should operate. I think I’ve also seen another thread about it as well with more discussion, but I’m having trouble finding it again.
Edit: Just remembered another example. @ITNbot is a kbin bot (on a non kbin.social instance); you can see its behavior here – https://kbin.social/m/[email protected] – I blocked it a while back since seeing all its threads in new was bugging me at the time.
Oh wow, that’s severe. In those cases the bots are just posting news articles or announcements. It makes the community seem active but there’s practically no engagement. It seems like the communities would just be dead without them.
most people hate ai
I don’t think that’s true. There’s a lot of concern about it – particularly regarding companies scraping the everloving shit out of the internet and then reselling what they got for free; with it upending the apple cart on difficulty of production (and what that means for various professions); with people using it idiotically in inflexible, unauditable, bureaucratic ways (though they were already doing that “computer says ‘No’” thing even without the new AI techniques; it’s a broader social challenge that involves any computerized processing of people in 2023); etc. – but people are using it as a tool to do really neat things too, and a lot of the results from that are just fun.
Here’s a few examples of fun AI visual art from threads I’ve seen over the last few weeks:
- What have you DONE?! – https://feddit.de/post/4778843
- (Somewhat disturbing) Elvis performing a circumcision on a sentient hotdog – https://lemmy.ca/post/6735764
- (Mild NSFW) Sexy Anthropomorphic Plane – https://lemmy.ml/post/7072314
- When a Ninja Turtle’s Addiction Has Gone Too Far – https://lemmy.world/post/7522233
- Banana-Whale – https://lemmy.ml/post/7598841
- Storing Linux Commands as Bottled Spells in a Sorcerer’s Library – https://lemmy.world/post/7463201
- Doughy Desert Colossus – https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/7336600
- Spiderman providing therapy to Batman – https://lemmy.world/post/7520721
- Hot Spaghetti 3 – https://lemmy.world/post/8035624
- Back to work – https://lemmy.world/post/7539961
- This entire thread is fun if you want more: Your username is the prompt, what did you get?
For some of these, something similar might have been made eventually (the spiderman one, in particular, I could see actually existing), but for most of them? Nah. Without AI gen they probably just never would’ve been made, and that’d be a shame!
These are really cool, thanks.
