How do you all feel about bots?
I’ve seen a gpt powered summarization bot pop up recently. Do you find this useful? Do you hate this?
Do you think bots serve any useful purposes on this website or do you think we should ban all bots? Should we have a set of rules for how bots should interact - only when called, needing to explicitly call out they are a bot on their profile, etc?
I’d love to hear your thoughts
spoiler
sdfsaf
I’m in favor of the guidelines listed by @Lionir for bots operating on Beehaw. Particularly the part about contacting community mods before deploying - it feels like the nice thing to do before adding new wrinkles to the moderation workload (which includes monitoring discussions about the appearance of the bots). That also provides an opportunity for a discussion within the community to engage with, or pre-emptively disengage from the bot account should they choose, rather than having to do it in the spur of the moment.
Direct link to Lionir’s comment on bots - it’s very near your comment in the discussion right now, but adding a link just in case these drift apart.
I appreciate you doing that, thank you
Please keep the bots to a minimum.
Approved bots that the admins manually review the use cases for is absolutely fine.
I just don’t want things to revert back to reddit days where I’m constantly BLOCKING new novelty bots that are absolutely freaking useless and add nothing to a conversation.
Also; PLEASE; implement the following ideas into a(n) agreement/covenant for bot operators; I quote this directly from the Tao of IRC:
The master Nap then said: “Any automata should not speak unless spoken to. Any automata shall only whisper when spoken to.”
I like summary bots, summoned bots that serve a purpose, and meme bots if they stay in specific communities where they are expected to be. All bots should self identify.
I could be mistaken but doesn’t Lemmy just have a setting for the user to not see bot posts?
I also figure users can block specific bots if they don’t like them.
Is anyone checking the AI “summariser” bot for accuracy? I’d rather not get misleading ideas in my head from a poor summary.
The bot has now been disabled as per the decision of Beehaw. Contact your favorite community mods if you’d like to change that.
To answer your question, yes, I am checking it for accuracy as I’m the author and I’d like it to be as useful as it can be. I’d say its summary is really helpful in 90+% of cases, the rest could be better and only once I’ve seen it post a summary that wasn’t helpful at all.
Honestly, as a programmer, I’d like the freedom to share bots that can benefit the community. Although, I do think that there should be measures in place to ensure bots don’t degrade the quality of the community.
One of the things I like about Beehaw is the lack of bot posts in every thread. Personally I think all bots should be banned because it eliminates some unwanted spam, but a good compromise for me is that bots be explicitly labeled, and can only respond to a trigger command. Nothing that auto posts.
I think some comment bots are nice, like the TLDR / summarization bot, reminder bot, youtube piped links, maybe one that replaces an amp link with the original? But these bots should be labeled as bots in settings so users have the option to toggle off seeing them.
I don’t like having bots post posts though, I’ve seen some in other instances and there’s not much discussion happening in the comments a lot of the time.
I just saw a summarization bot on here make a summary that was longer than the post. Kind of silly.