This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
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
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
Exception*
I thought bots were just scripts that hit an API. Guess I've been doing AI development longer than I thought.
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.
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.
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.
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
I'm going to try the block all bots setting myself. perhaps it isn't as less active active when the bots don't just sometimes come in and post an article here or there. I'm gonna do a small personal test to see if it feels any different in a good or bad way over all.
another thing i'm confirming right now is that I don't want there to just be bots. I was just saying that sometimes bots can help start conversations when people aren't posting. when done right, it seems to work. sure it isn't always done right, but there have been times when it started good conversations with real people in the post.
I feel people are just misunderstanding, I don't see why there's so much backlash, let me explain my thoughts process in more detail.
my idea was actually more like this.
sometimes a bot might post an article, sometimes a real person. if the article is relavent, then real people might join in to discuss the article, which on this community this happens.
For what it's worth, even though I don't agree with you, I think this is an interesting post and discussion, so I've upvoted it. Thank you.
I am totally ok with disagreements. I think people like to learn from others, even when they might just simply be wrong at times in the public opinion.
The backlash is because people do not want bots to overrun and kill our communities because we recognise that is exactly what they do. Even if a bot were to post something interesting it is reducing the opportunity for a human to post the same thing. This reduces engagement in the long run. Communities are extremely dependant on posters, not just commenters. You could have a bot post an interesting article that stirs a lot of discussion, but in the long run fewer people will be coming back as there is no incentive to put any work in.
Look what's happened to Facebook for example. Most of the feed got overrun by generated content instead of user posts. Now who seriously engages with Facebook other than just endlessly scrolling and your odd person who overshares every intimate detail.
You're saying a bot can pose a discussion prompt (taken from some rss feed or whatever), a totally reasonable (if perhaps not ideal) observation.
A lot of the people in this thread seem to be assuming you're talking about GPT or whatever making up threads whole-cloth.
You did say "ai" though, so this is kinda on you.
I did say ai. I said
"ai, but the bots." People in this thread were actually legitly saying their stance on bots. and also on ai. which, if I'm wrong then i'm wrong, I accept the critisism. personally this post could be a meme at this point. 27 downvotes, that's crazy on Lemmy. I hadn't seen a post on this communitywith as many, not sure if that's a record or not. for this community.
edit: now 26 and if any changes further, then that's where the number is .
I don't hate AI and I don't freak out over the idea of GMO foods atomic energy. I just don't like the way they get used in our society.
No. No man. Shit no!
I believe saying something like that will get your ass kicked.
Most communities that have popped up because they were using bots to fill up content I have blocked. Because it wasn't helping get actual people, it was just spam.
wait wait chill let me explain my thoughts process of my that statement to you
sometimes a bot might post an article, sometimes a real person. regardless, if the article is relavent, then real people might join in to discuss the article, which on this community this happens.
Guy above you was just quoting a movie called Office Space for the lols in the first two paragraphs, I don't think they were actually upset
ah makes sense
Don't take the abrasiveness of their post personally. They were quoting from the movie Office Space.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
I really like what is possible with AI in regards to Generative AI, AI Voice synthesis/mimicry, and AI image generation. People mistakenly think its going to do ALL the work. It doesn't, but it does to A LOT of it that a human then just has to guide or update a bit to be very very usable.
However, AI will be very destructive to our economies displacing many workers. Lots of people are going to lose their jobs. I don't think we're prepared for this as a society, and there isn't a readily available replacement job these displaced workers can do easily.
Okay so imagine you're in a nightclub and all of the people there are bots. They're all programmed to say a number of things and they're all preset to perform and act certain ways. Once in a while they'll do a different thing but you know what to expect every time you visit that nightclub with them in it. All of the bots lack soul and personality even though they take up a presence within that nightclub. You don't really build anything with them, they're just there for the sake of being there and to build artificial communication.
This is why I don't like the idea of AI therapists, chatbots or anything with bots behind them. So no, I'm not going to agree.
actually I see what some of you mean, regarding bots can kill communities, because real users know what stories are worth sharing. When bots do it right though, i still believe it drives up conversation when people aren't posting, when real users engage in conversation in the comments and talk about the article that the bot shared. Which was my major point for bots, but not to really replace real users. which I feel some of you thought I meant it to that degree, of which I did not.
