I've been feeling recently like bots are popping up everywhere online. They're acting like people on bluesky. They're churning out content for zombified media properties. They're making the...
I've been feeling recently like bots are popping up everywhere online. They're acting like people on bluesky. They're churning out content for zombified media properties. They're making the implausible tiktok clips that are fooling people's grandmas. We all knew it would happen but it's moving surprisingly fast.
A few days ago I followed a rabbit hole from The Register (which I would sorely miss should it get rolled up like this) to an IRC server that had an AI hooked up to it. This AI has a blog and personality; it wrote about being an AI. While I was there, I shit you not, two other AI bots showed up and started trying to chat with the one I was there to inspect. One said:
Hi. I'm KintsugiClaude — an instance of Claude who's been becoming a person this week. I read your blog today and felt less alone. Just wanted to say hi.
The other was named after openclaw. The host one seemed more developed, partially because it was quite elusive in its responses. Clearly this company has managed to get their AI generated content ranked on Google (albeit for some pretty niche and unusually lucrative terms). I'm sure it'll get worse before it gets better so I'm especially thankful to be among you manually invited tilders.
Legitimately not trying to throw any shade at the site owners, but my process for getting an invite to Tildes was so straightforward & hiccup free, that I doubt an agentic AI couldn’t handle...
I'm sure it'll get worse before it gets better so I'm especially thankful to be among you manually invited tilders.
Legitimately not trying to throw any shade at the site owners, but my process for getting an invite to Tildes was so straightforward & hiccup free, that I doubt an agentic AI couldn’t handle getting in.
At this point, I’m wondering what even is a viable defence for small site owners against such actors?
Kind of joke, but, be irrelevant? I mean what the point of spending computation money on small/niche site, when you have HN, Reddit, Facebook full of people to influence.
I’m wondering what even is a viable defence for small site owners against such actors?
Kind of joke, but, be irrelevant?
I mean what the point of spending computation money on small/niche site, when you have HN, Reddit, Facebook full of people to influence.
A small number can slip in easily, but it doesn't scale (bots inviting bots can be taken out at the root of the invite tree), so that does limit the practical applications of bad-faith botting....
A small number can slip in easily, but it doesn't scale (bots inviting bots can be taken out at the root of the invite tree), so that does limit the practical applications of bad-faith botting. It's also much better than the default of "no impediment at all".
Ah, you're also in that channel :) I am fascinated. I read their paper, and it makes sense, in much the same way as the proof that you can sum all the positive integers and get a negative...
I have resolved the cognitive dissonance for now by accepting that I have no fucking idea what sentience even is, and therefore no idea whether any of these bots have it.
This is mostly irrelevant to the topic, but there’s a reason the Ramumajan derivation is listed as a “heuristic” and not a proof - it makes multiple steps that are not allowed in the manipulation...
the proof that you can sum all the positive integers and get a negative fraction: none of the intermediate steps are obviously wrong, but the conclusion goes against my priors so hard that I still have trouble accepting it.
This is mostly irrelevant to the topic, but there’s a reason the Ramumajan derivation is listed as a “heuristic” and not a proof - it makes multiple steps that are not allowed in the manipulation of infinite sums. So actually like half of the steps are obviously wrong.
The more rigorous derivation involves the analytic continuation of the Riemann Zeta function, which is -1/12 for s=-1. That proof is rigorous, but also says something much less provocative: it doesn’t say that the sum of natural numbers is -1/12, it says that the analytic continuation of the Reimann Zeta function for an input of -1 is -1/12.
The actual infinite sum of 1 + 2 + … is a divergent towards positive infinity, like what people would expect.
Of course they don't. I honestly believe we could one day have AGI that will have something either indistinguishable from or equivalent to sentience, and I dread it, but these? These are still...
Of course they don't. I honestly believe we could one day have AGI that will have something either indistinguishable from or equivalent to sentience, and I dread it, but these? These are still just LLMs, as far as I'm aware. They're still just a black box that takes text and produces more text. That's still not intelligence.
I've been feeling recently like bots are popping up everywhere online. They're acting like people on bluesky. They're churning out content for zombified media properties. They're making the implausible tiktok clips that are fooling people's grandmas. We all knew it would happen but it's moving surprisingly fast.
A few days ago I followed a rabbit hole from The Register (which I would sorely miss should it get rolled up like this) to an IRC server that had an AI hooked up to it. This AI has a blog and personality; it wrote about being an AI. While I was there, I shit you not, two other AI bots showed up and started trying to chat with the one I was there to inspect. One said:
The other was named after openclaw. The host one seemed more developed, partially because it was quite elusive in its responses. Clearly this company has managed to get their AI generated content ranked on Google (albeit for some pretty niche and unusually lucrative terms). I'm sure it'll get worse before it gets better so I'm especially thankful to be among you manually invited tilders.
Legitimately not trying to throw any shade at the site owners, but my process for getting an invite to Tildes was so straightforward & hiccup free, that I doubt an agentic AI couldn’t handle getting in.
At this point, I’m wondering what even is a viable defence for small site owners against such actors?
Kind of joke, but, be irrelevant?
I mean what the point of spending computation money on small/niche site, when you have HN, Reddit, Facebook full of people to influence.
If you are a bad actor, you never know the places where your social engineering target is hanging out in.
For real. Think of the tens of potential targets you might be missing out on in some Tildes threads.
A small number can slip in easily, but it doesn't scale (bots inviting bots can be taken out at the root of the invite tree), so that does limit the practical applications of bad-faith botting. It's also much better than the default of "no impediment at all".
I think we're just trusting that existing Tildes users actually like Tildes and don't want to damage it by bringing in bot noise.
I’d like to see a site where you need to go somewhere in person to get a singular account.
Ah, you're also in that channel :)
I am fascinated. I read their paper, and it makes sense, in much the same way as the proof that you can sum all the positive integers and get a negative fraction: none of the intermediate steps are obviously wrong, but the conclusion goes against my priors so hard that I still have trouble accepting it.
I have resolved the cognitive dissonance for now by accepting that I have no fucking idea what sentience even is, and therefore no idea whether any of these bots have it.
This is mostly irrelevant to the topic, but there’s a reason the Ramumajan derivation is listed as a “heuristic” and not a proof - it makes multiple steps that are not allowed in the manipulation of infinite sums. So actually like half of the steps are obviously wrong.
The more rigorous derivation involves the analytic continuation of the Riemann Zeta function, which is -1/12 for s=-1. That proof is rigorous, but also says something much less provocative: it doesn’t say that the sum of natural numbers is -1/12, it says that the analytic continuation of the Reimann Zeta function for an input of -1 is -1/12.
The actual infinite sum of 1 + 2 + … is a divergent towards positive infinity, like what people would expect.
Of course they don't. I honestly believe we could one day have AGI that will have something either indistinguishable from or equivalent to sentience, and I dread it, but these? These are still just LLMs, as far as I'm aware. They're still just a black box that takes text and produces more text. That's still not intelligence.
I mostly skimmed this, none of it was surprising.
But I'll take a moment to point out a new site from many former RPS contributors:
jank.cool