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?
No, we absolutely do not agree on this.
Even if bots were AI (they aren’t, for the most part), their presence propping up dead communities DOES NOT HELP ANYONE. If nobody’s there talking, it’s because there’s nothing to be said. Either leave it lie until people show up to talk about that topic again, or let it die, and let a different community take its place. Nobody is harmed by communities running out of steam. Conversations do not have to go on forever.
This. I only come here because I’m interested in what citizens of the fediverse have to say/think is interesting or important.
If I wanted to know what some bot thinks is important I’d be on a bot aggregate site. Scraper bots are no better, If I wanted redditors to be setting my reading agenda I’d be over there.
👆
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.
Nah, I block all the bots.
Edit: Settings -> uncheck “show bot accounts”. Done, easy peasy.
Thank you. Didn’t know this was an option.
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!
Emphasis on tools not fully automated system. An ai could flag problematic material and patterns of it it, till we get true agi a human should always verify.
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.
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 get that standpoint, if that’s all you get but on this community, you get bots and also real users here that also creat posts, combine the two then factor in the conversations that form in the comments.
By getting a bot to automatically post articles (or worse, comments) you’re decreasing the need/opportunity for human beings to post, which makes the entire website less engaging on an individual level.
Sure there might be more “content”, but less human-to-human interaction. And personally I feel that genuine human-to-human interaction is only going to become more important with the propagation of mediocre AI generated content. Even thinking in terms of “supply and demand”, unlimited bot-created content has very little value compared to increasingly rare human-to-human interaction.
Maybe it’s just me, but I’d rather a sub/mag be totally empty than full of AI-generated bot content, because even though it’s not ideal it at least gives people like you and me the opportunity to meaningfully participate.
absolutely, so lets say for instance, a bot posts an article, what stops people from discussing that tech news arcticle in the comments, and a bot might not get every piece of news, so users can then creat posts to fill in those blanks. I guess an argument could be made that less people would make posts, but then if there are no bots at all, there that chance that at some point that people just stop using Lemmy and go back to tradition social platforms because they feel there isn’t as much content.
so when you look at it on both sides; bots, or no bots, both have their potential bad sides. but also potential benefits.
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.
It might not or mightt be true, I know a lot of artist hate it, you’d be hard pressed to not find any that does not like ai, not saying that no one out of these groups could not appreciate it. I do think ai can be great, but it’s all over the internet, that people just don’t like ai. Might even be 50-50 60-40 who knows, but it’s still a noticable amount.
I thought bots were just scripts that hit an API. Guess I’ve been doing AI development longer than I thought.
The post bots kill communities.
There’s not much that’s more frustrating than seeing an interesting looking post, only to find that it’s a link bot and there’s no discussion. I’ve blocked communities for it.
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 shinobu@ani.social. Prior to the lemmy.ml/ani.social defederation it posted in anime@lemmy.ml – 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/ImproveTheNews@fedinews.net – I blocked it a while back since seeing all its threads in new was bugging me at the time.
Hi there! Looks like you linked to a Lemmy community using a URL instead of its name, which doesn’t work well for people on different instances. Try fixing it like this: !anime@lemmy.ml, !episode@ani.social, !episode_discussion@ani.social
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.
