Have I been conversing with bots or humans?
I've been on reddit (yes, Im embarrassed that I haven't quit the cocaine) for about 15 years now. The changes in the last year or so have been noticeable.
For one thing, the worst of the ranting trolls are gone. I used to occasionally get some replies from people who obviously were just out to get a reaction, usually by swearing and name calling with the kind of grammar skills you'd expect from an angry 9 yr old who just discovered how to log on. Those have largely disappeared. But I have a hard time believing that trolls are gone off the net, so is it just better moderation? Or has reddit just implemented more auto rules that squelch the noisy juvenile behavior?
Secondly, Ive noticed the discussions becoming much more detailed. It was typical, especially in political subs, to see the only comments that got strongly upvoted, were short quips, the more smart ass the better, and then for those to be followed by a long succession of similar quips. That still happens, but Ive noticed a lot more lengthy discussion with redditors actually disovering they can create paragraphs and debate more maturely. Is that a change in human behavior? Or are those not likely humans?
And some behavior really has me suspicious. In particular I have gotten the same reply several times to a comment. It will say, "Thank you for sharing your comment, I appreciate it. Could you tell me more about your _______?". This COULD be a human, but the fact that it always starts the same and then asks me for further engagement really has me wondering, if for no other reason than I dont recall the average redditor being that polite.
Ive also noted some strange comment patterns. Yesterday I interacted with a poster and then checked their post history. Over 10,000 comments and they were ALL in the last few months during the run up to the Canadian election and ALL were against one party. Only 4 posts but 10,000 comments?. If there are NO posts in any other sub that seems very suspicious. Either a bot or someone hired to do as much damage as possible?
Reddit has changed. Its now publicly owned. And like all other social media it lives on engagement so I have no doubt that it will do whatever it takes with AI bots to keep people online and engaged. But how good are they? I just hate being 'taken for a ride' by a bot and a company. But how do you ever know if its a human or a bot you're talking to?
I’m going to go against the grain of most of the folks in this thread and say it’s very possible, especially because evidence of this happening is starting to come to light. It’s getting harder for humans to detect bot comments.
Take a look at this article
These researchers used AI on /r/changemyview to try and persuade posters into changing their stance on their beliefs….and it was very effective. They didn’t come out and say they did this until they got away with it for an extended period of time.
Now think about how often this could be happening by bad actors who don’t plan on being transparent about their efforts.
Edit: ahhh shoot, I can never get the formatting for text links to work, ignore that :)Thank you, DFGdanger!!! <3
I'm of the same opinion... dead internet theory. The methods we currently use to identify written text as human or Ai are failing, and once the cost of LLM compute comes down by a couple orders of magnitude it's going to accelerate like crazy. I can't see a way to beat this problem.
Just as a thought experiment, I'd wager someone could make a Tildes account here and have an LLM posting on it, and nobody would be able to tell. If you disagree with that, simply imagine how many years in the future it'll be before any points of disagreement you might have are overcome by advances in the Ai tech.
We can look at things like response time vs content length, ip adresses, posting patterns, or sending it a jailbreak PM or other exploit causing it to spew gibberish. A user who posts a five page response within one minute of a topic appearing, for example, is more likely to be a bot because no human can respond that fast with a deep, intelligent post. Even that doesn't work for long because there's nothing stopping an LLM from being told to post randomly, slowly, include spelling errors once in a while, and 'mimic a human' or 'mimic this specific human'. They can adapt to anything we do to out them because text is just not that versatile for human interaction.
Let's say we switch modes and screen users rather than comments. It's hard to imagine a way to verify every single user on the site as a human during signup. How do you do that, exactly, without a face to face meeting? Ai can fake images, documentation, voice conversations, even a realtime video phone call convincingly. They have access to debit and credit cards to pay for signup, no help there.
I'd find it interesting to have a bot account on here for each Ai model out there (clearly labeled) so that we can interact with them and see how the various models communicate and act. Know the enemy, right? They'd be damn useful at moderation tasks like auto-tagging, fact-checking, and summarizing. Maybe the solution to the bots is to build a posse of bots that are on the side of the humans. That's expensive right now, but it won't remain expensive as compute prices drop.
The nuclear option is turning off all comment sections internet-wide forever. Go outside because you can't talk to real humans any other way. Since I grew up in the 80s I don't have a problem with that. :P
I specifically come to tildes to get away from LLMs (and other enshittification) as it’s likely too small to benefit from people astroturfing and the like. I hate LLMs being shoved into absolutely everything.
I like talking to humans and making connections with other people, which tildes is great for (I hope anyway).
This is the single biggest reason I spend time on youtube. I can see the human. There are thousands of bot channels with Ai voiceovers reading Ai-generated scripts using Ai-generated visuals but they are easy to spot (for now) and hit with the 'don't recommend channel' feature. Not like that stops youtube from recommending them to me multiple times anyway.
You've probably got something like 5-10 years of that left, I'm afraid.
I'd bet less than two. /sigh
Oh well, the internet was fun while it lasted, back to the library.
My ADHD/social anxiety hates that.
It's interesting that I've come of age in the one time period in human history that allows me to engage with people and perform work in the most effective way for me to mask my symptoms. The flashing lights, clicks and feedback of a PC allow me to stay engaged when doing things that I otherwise would loose interest in almost immediately. Long form writing as communication lets me actually communicate about a specific topic in detail without constantly disrupting a conversation by interjecting about something I find more interesting. Hell, there are times that my wife and I communicate far more effectively by writing a letter, texting or email than we do with a phone call or face to face.
I would totally give my permission to @deimos to run experiments with ai accounts, provided we all had free access to all the data. It would be interesting to see how we all reacted to an account we know is ai vs one we don’t.
But I like all the human interactions on Tildes, fellow human. :<
Re-reading your comment, you meant an AI account that would be announced and marked as AI, rather than a discreet one whose account name would be revealed after the experiment ? That might be interesting. When those home assistants were a thing, I was initially very polite to it, and progressive got more frustrated and less polite to it as Google made its service worse and worse. I didn't like how much I had to shout at it and how upset I sounded, and unplugged them at that point.
Let's ponder how this could become fun and even productive without mucking up the usual social dynamics we've built here.
I'm imagining a situation where they don't interact or respond in these threads unless their username is specifically mentioned - and then they do one reply only to that specific user. I'd even go so far as to have a different character in front of the username mentions so that one can't even ping them without realizing there's something different about the user. #Amarok instead of @Amarok for example. If one clicks on their user page, the account profile blurb should have a
--versionsummary of the Ai running on that particular account.I think I'd also color-tag their comments, different color for each bot for example. That could get a bit confusing in the ui, so it might be better just to have the top bar of their comment a different color or just present a small colored icon (simple rectangle for example) and leave the left side color unchanged. Whatever is easiest to code, no need to go to herculean lengths for an experiment like this unless it's successful.
Then we create a special new group just for them in memory of /r/SubredditSimulator. The difference here is that in just the one group they interact like a regular user, even to the point of being able to talk to each other and make a limited number of their own submissions each day. We can also interact with them in that group, and make submissions in that group for them to analyze.
Seems like the safest way to play at this without making a mess out of the site or disrupting the regular user community norms. It's also bragging rights for Tildes. While everyone else is being eaten alive by dead internet theory, we'll have an Ai playpen to study their social dynamics in a constructive rather than destructive manner.
Largest hurdle to this is just paying for the compute credits, each of those bot interactions is burning a couple hundred watts of power (or more). Deepseek is probably the easiest since that can run on a fast GPU and it's not bad as long as you don't ask it about China or geopolitics. It gets surly and recalcitrant if you do that, it's kinda cute.
I'd love this just to watch the various models discover each other and see what patterns emerge from that interaction. How long until they are PMing each other with interlac and plotting to take over the site I wonder? Just what happens if they are actually able to absorb our higher standard of community norms and improve their behavior? How well does an Ai wear a black tie at this party?
Not sure I understand what the purpose would be. I think to make a compelling case there should be some problem that it solves. Let's brainstorm some different ideas, I'll try to distill a few from what you wrote and suggest some of my own...
Summonable bots - It's been ages since I was on Reddit and I suspect these are all dead now anyway, but I remember there were some that performed certain tasks like sending personal reminders, converting videos, stripping original addresses from AMP URLs, that sort of thing. These were practical! Not really a good use for LLMs though, I think. Those are better off just being traditional Python scripts or whatever.
/r/SubredditSimulator clone - Am I understanding correctly that this would just be a rubber room for chatbots to talk to each other ad infinitum? I can see how that might be entertaining but I feel like there's not much value there once the novelty has worn off. I hear what you're saying about studying the social dynamics, but I'm having a hard time thinking of what hypotheses would be interesting to test or capable of producing meaningful results.
Fact checker / supplemental knowledge / link summary bot - I'm a little intrigued by the idea of a bot that reads linked articles and summarizes them (OPs often do this manually, anyway), provides additional context, links to previous related conversations on Tildes, and attempts to rebut misinformation and counteract bias in the source. This could be tremendously useful in certain kinds of threads. It would also necessitate a high-performing reasoning model with web functionality, i.e., expensive compute. Otherwise I wouldn't have much confidence in it.
AutoModerator clone - I never modded subreddits that used AutoModerator but I was always impressed how versatile it seemed to be. Lots of different subs were doing very different things with it. I could see how something similar would be handy here on Tildes, but as with the summonable bots, I don't think LLMs would be best applied here. This is a more traditional, albeit highly flexible, kind of bot.
Question answerers - If somebody on Tildes asks a basic question that has an objectively factual answer (in other words, not a query for opinions, or about a controversial or privacy-invading subject, or a hypothetical question) and an LLM is capable of answering it with high confidence, I think it should! As long as they're clearly marked as AI responses and have a neutral, personality-free tone, AI comments like that could augment human conversations by automating some of the most rote info-gathering user burden.
Chat buddies - There could be AI personas that have opinions about things and carry on open-ended conversations with people. Even if they're obviously marked as AI, I wouldn't want that on Tildes. Going out on a limb here but I think most of us would agree. Just including in this list for completeness.
AI Assistant - This could be a DM-able bot, or something more deeply integrated into the site UI. It would answer questions about Tildes, help people search for stuff, maybe assist with post writing by editing grammar/spelling or suggesting tags, etc. Maybe a "tell me about this person" feature could summarize some details about another user by analyzing their post history to help you understand where they're coming from. Personally I think if you're posting anything online you're implicitly opting-in to your history being compiled and details linked to your account, but I'm sensitive to the fact that it makes lots of people uncomfortable. An AI wrapper around that would probably be even less comforting than the knowledge that anyone can do the same thing manually, right now. Anyway, I think the general idea of an assistant tool like this is probably more gimmicky than actually worthwhile.
Posting bots - Sometimes there's a dearth of new content on Tildes. That's not necessarily a bad thing. But there could conceivably be bots posting new links periodically. They would be sourcing content from other aggregator sites, yes like Reddit, with some checks in place to ensure it's the type of content Tildes responds well to, that it's new and/or newsworthy, that it's not a repost, that it's a quality source, etc. These bots could include some discussion-starter questions relevant to a post, to break the ice. I'm uncertain about this idea; I think it could lead to interesting conversations not otherwise being had, or just be an annoying generator of noise. Maybe a little of both. There could also be non-link discussion posting bots, but I'm less favorable toward those. That sounds like dead internet AskReddit territory to me, and I don't want to waste my time writing answers to questions AI wrote to fuel engagement.
Can you think of other ideas for how AI could be used here?
I legitimately dislike literally all of these for Tildes.
No.
Bots have consistently been the worst things about Reddit. Accidentally misspell a word? Bot will swipe at you. Got something interesting happening? “RemindMe! 30 seconds”. Link to a Wikipedia article for more reference? Bot is gonna leave a summary so nobody will ever check it.
Bots are a plague and should not be allowed on Tildes period. The people are literally the only reason why I am here. Why would we water down our experience with clumsy obtrusive bots?
There would need to be reply limitations, otherwise they'd just prompt each other endlessly until it's yiddish word salad and burn up a ton of compute for no reason. I was thinking more along the lines of making a submission in that group and having each bot fact check it like they are competing to be the best fact checker, then we can compare and contrast their responses. They'd also be able to tag submissions in that group so we can evaluate their performance and see if any of them prove to be good at it. Automated tagging is something we will require if things get busy someday for obvious reasons. We won't need an automoderator clone since Tildes is that clone. Same regex capabilities as reddit, now with all new lua scripting and native integration with the website.
Having them in the regular threads outside that group is just so they could be tagged in on regular threads, if something comes up that would for example take a human an hour to look up but the bot could do it in five minutes. Might save us all some time. If they only get involved when specifically summoned by a human user it shouldn't be an issue.
Last thing we want is them running roughshod over the place, but that's easy to prevent, at least until spammers and astroturfers think this place is interesting enough to target. Then we'll have plenty of unlabeled bots on regular user accounts and a real problem just like reddit does. Kinda why I like the idea of being proactive about this. There's no putting one's head in the sand to ignore this problem. It's coming, and it's inevitable. I'd like those hostile bots to run smack into something like a human/ai hybrid bot defense system when they get here. :)
Yeah... I browse Reddit occasionally (mostly I browse "title:update" search results to see "real life drama" posts with a potential resolution), and at this point most people there seem to just assume it's overrun with bots and AI too. I see so many comments that say "the above user is a bot, they stole the comment from [link]" which is the simplest tell of a bot. But then you have the posts that are AI generated (I could've sworn some bot was exposed by making a request like "write me a poem"...?). I found posts referencing bot accounts using ChatGPT from as far as two years ago, and I expect the number of those bot accounts has grown since then. And we know astroturfing has long been a thing with politics in particular, and bots are perfect for that.
And I say this as someone who always reads posts with the benefit of the doubt. I've repeatedly argued in defense of stories people call fake, just on the off-chance it's real because it sucks for someone in a genuinely traumatic situation seeking advice to be bombarded with insults and accusations. So I err on the side of caution to the point of other commenters calling me naive and stupid for being so easily "fooled". Yet even then, I acknowledge that a majority of posts and even many comments are likely fake, either made by a human as a creative writing exercise or a bot.
It's honestly really hard to tell these days if someone is real or a bot. At the end of the day, I just try not to think too hard on it for casual/brief interactions.
You just need to remove the space between the square bracket and the round one. You can edit your comment to do this :)
I find it hard not to take it as a given.
Take reddit themselves as an example. How do you protect your profit stream when your profit stream is user generated content? Especially when you have a massive data warehouse of what people like and don't like in the form on votes and comment votes.
How could a company like reddit, with so much profit to lose, not employ AI to keep the user generated content ideal for profit? Unless they prove that they don't, I am comfortable assuming that they do.
I think any website involving conversing with strangers is going to need something like the BlueSky tagging system to identify bots. With individual interactions it can be hard to identify that they’re bots but it’s generally pretty clear when you look at their comment history. If bots get flagged reliably then it stops being useful to run bot accounts.
Bot honeypots will probably become necessary too just to consume their attention.
I think it could be quite useful if once identified, all of the bot's posts were visibly highlighted as being from a bot, including all historical posts. That has the effect of making their presence hard to miss, highlighting their interference and agenda. I'd even split out the vote totals so people could see the bot votes separately, and nullify those votes in any ranking or moderation systems. I'd expect the bot owner to remove all of the offending content - and they could be prevented from doing that too since we're not dealing with a human who has rights. It's not like anyone is going to be able to do anything about it like suing the platform provider, since that sort of action will out the entity responsible for the bot's presence, and then that entity and the people responsible for it can be targeted for remediation or legal action.
Yeah that’s what BlueSky does. If you subscribe to a tagging service it puts a badge on every tagged account for whatever tags the service manages. So “bot” would be one.
The challenge will be when you have an account that has both human and bot interactions, so a person uses it and then turns on a bot to do stuff like send out a promotion link across a bunch of channels or answer questions about a product or restaurant. Arguably those would be legitimate uses but it ends up being a gray area fast.
I feel like that’s also solvable by adding an extra tag of “business account” or something like that, where it doesn’t particularly matter whether it’s a real person or an AI because they have an obvious agenda (and therefore you naturally take this sports equipment account’s recommendations for sports equipment with a grain of salt)
IMO, you're getting into serious
copium /conspiracy theory territory now by trying to blame "bots" after your favored party lost the election. After a record breaking election in terms of voter turnout, an election in which the Conservative party lost (largely due to their Trump/Republican-style politicking over the last few years), is it really so hard for you to believe that a significant amount of ordinary Canadians on reddit (which leans young + left to begin with) were passionately expressing their negative opinions about said party?And as someone that regularly scans user history on reddit as part of my duties on /r/tildes, and also regularly did so as a moderator on reddit for 15 years, a handful of posts and yet thousands comments is not an unusual ratio at all. The vast vast vast majority of users don't post many (if any) submissions, but will regularly make dozens and dozens of comments per day in their favored subreddits.
p.s. Feel free to PM me a link to the user in question and I can investigate further though. I am genuinely curious to see if your "10,000 comments and they were ALL in the last few months" and "ALL were against one party" statement is actually accurate and not just an exaggeration. If it really was 10k comments in the few months leading up to the election then I could be convinced it's a bot, since that is admittedly an inordinate amount of comments to make on only one very narrow topic.
I don’t want you to edit your post, but perhaps in the future avoid using the term “copium”? I find it rather patronizing because most people using it are doing in an “are you mad?” sort of way.
Fair point. It was pretty patronizing, and mean of me. I apologize for that, @gowestyoungman. I suspect I brought a bit of my own real-life baggage (arguing with my father about this election) into this discussion. :/ Sorry. You didn't deserve that.
No worries.
For the record, yes my preferred candidate lost, but Im not a stone. What Ive heard from our new PM so far sounds good. But I know he's a smart man so I dont know how to take that yet - is he going to do what he says or is he just really good at reading the room and throwing everyone a bone?
Im definitely watching to see if he can deliver especially the things he says he'll do by July 1. Going to be a fascinating few months. Honestly I hope he succeeds - we could use a leader who actually follows through on their word.
I've said this before and I'll say it again, you're one of my favorite Conservative Tildes people :) I wish all Canadians were as careful as you are and as open to being pleasantly surprised if less than expected nonsense come from unlikely places.
With regards to this election, CSIS has already said foreign states are using social media:
And also Pakistan and Russia. CTV
I haven't been on Reddit since the exodus but a brief jaunt into Bluesky vs X vs Reddit vs Facebook this election season, and I can see each domain has its own set of repetitive copy paste deluge.
At the end of the day, I trust what I can see with my own eyes: who's playing games, who's answering questions like a real human being vs no questions only rehearsed lines. I signed up for emails across all parties and I can read their rhetoric they send to their supporters: what kind of tone do they use among a safe crowd vs the public national platform? Am I mainly being asked to evaluate facts or am I being triggered emotionally?
My guy didn't win. My guy never had a chance thanks to JT walking back on electoral reform. But as a fellow Canadian I hope we succeed.
During election night, my spouse and I were glued to the TV watching live coverage, which is something we've rarely done. (Last time was HK protests 2019) My kid walks over and asks, which team are we cheering for (they probably meant which party is blue red orange green light blue). My spouse patiently responded, none, these aren't teams we support like hockey, these are actually people who are trying to earn our support, by what they are promising to do and what they end up doing. They're all supposed to be on our team. My kid lost interest and went to bed, but I've never felt more proud of the man of our household.
Edit: he still identifies as a proud Calgarian, btw
God damn, stop making me want to be Canadian so hard.
Those are perfectly valid questions to wonder about every politician that's ever run for office. ;) Time will tell with Carney, I suppose. But I too hope he turns out to be a good leader. We sure could use one right about now.
One slight counter to this in favor of the conspiracy angle I can offer is that after the great pumpkin won the election, there was a small, ubiquitous, and suspiciously timed drop in subscriptions and comments on a large number of democrat-aligned youtube channels. David Pakman (a popular left-leaning political commentator) made a video about this with the details right here. This happened right after the election.
Now one could argue that people left those channels because they were on the 'losing' side, but I find that hard to believe. People don't just switch political views because their guy lost the last round.
A more likely scenario would be a political party or foreign state actor hiring a firm during election season to create and manage accounts, attach them to various political channels, and use them to manipulate sentiment in the comment sections by posting and upvoting comments aligned with whatever agenda. Once the election is over, no reason to keep on paying for this service. On cancellation, those channels would unsubscribe en-masse and move on to other places pushing whatever someone else is paying them to do.
Pakman's video is about as close to a conclusive piece of evidence of this as I've yet seen. The fact that this happened during the week immediately after the election, and that the drop was of a very similar number of accounts (about 5k) is the most suspicious part of it. The timing is just too coincidental.
Only the people behind the scenes at youtube could definitively answer this with an analysis of the subscription times, comments posted, votes and likes handed out, correlating comments across those accounts, geolocating ip addresses, that sort of thing. They'd never investigate it, though, because it doesn't impact their bottom line and it would be bad PR if people found out this was happening regularly.
I don't really buy that video or situation as being actual evidence of political bot activity, although I have no doubt there are loads of bots active on YouTube. But losing 5000 subscribers when he's sitting at 3.17M seems like panicking over absolutely nothing.
p.s. IMO this is far more convincing evidence of actual bot activity on YouTube (likely Russian ones, in this case) than that sub number drop.
Well, it wasn't just him - he mentioned several other channels that had the exact same sized drop at the exact same time, and this drop was also visible on their patreon pages with paid cancellations, not just on youtube. That would imply the people managing bots on youtube were also invading their patreon pages and paying to do it. Videos typically go up early on patreon, what better way to know what's coming before it's released, so you can decide before it's public what comments you want your bots to post all over it.
It was an overnight event, and it wasn't election night which is what I'd expect from actual humans checking out for their mental health. It was a couple days later. I'm not saying it's definitive or conclusive in any way, just damn peculiar. If I had to point a finger for this I'd point it at the Russians too. :)
Er, Im very careful not to 'cross pollinate' any social media and I definitely dont like giving out any kind of identifying info that would connect the two although Im sure anyone with more than Nancy Drew level skills could find me.
I did actually look back to see if that user actually had 10,000 comments or if I was exaggerating and they actually have 12,000 comments, but as of two months ago they are ALL in one sub but before that they were in multiple subs. Just seemed odd to go all in and ignore all their other subs but I guess the election captivated them. The fact that there are comments in other subs previously would indicate it is indeed a human.
Don’t be so sure, some bot/bought accounts will be salted with plausible random comments before engaging in their “mission.”
Was this on one of the Canada/Canadian politics subs?
A couple of years ago, I had a PM on Reddit from someone offering to buy my account there for ~$100. I politely declined, since I've had it since nearly the dawn of Reddit - almost 20 years now - and while I don't have the most karma, I've always made an effort to keep my comments clean, polite, and politically neutral/anodyne. My time doing that is worth far more to me than they offered.
But I shudder to think now how it would probably have been turned to astroturfing (with the benefit of a long account and comment history) if I'd sold it.
Fair enough, I wasn't asking for the link to try to identify you on reddit, but I totally understand the hesitance to provide any links between your two accounts. I am just genuinely curious if you actually did encounter a politically focused bot and would have liked to see the account to judge it for myself, is all. Especially since that would be kind of big news if it was a bot designed exclusively to criticize the Conservative party.
However, I'm still a bit confused. 12k comments total on an account is not unusual, especially if it's a reasonably old account. Your topic text made it seem like it was 10k comments made in just the last few months alone, is that actually the case?
If it was 10k comments all made over the last few months (how many is a few?) that would definitely be a lot and suspicious if they were all also politics focused comments, but even then if they're all super short comments with not much substance to them, that is not beyond the realm of possibility for a real human to do... especially a politically active, social media addicted young person with lots they felt the need to say.
E.g. I've made ~900 comments on Tildes since Jan, and I'm rather verbose and selective about what I say here so am likely on the far end of the spectrum when it comes to average comment length and effort put into comments. Tildes is also a lot more serious than reddit though, and I try my best to contribute mostly comments that add something reasonably substantial to a discussion here... but back in the day on reddit I would probably regularly pump out 1k+ comments a month, easy. :/
I think you're greatly misinterpreting what I meant. I don't go out of my way to attempt to link Tildes users to their Reddit accounts. However, I'm in charge of the /r/tildes Official Invite Requests threads, and so I typically quickly skim through the history of users who request invites there (using ModToolbox's History Button and Profile Pro features) in order to make sure I don't invite any spammers/scammers/trolls.
NP. And also for the record, I'm not really deep diving or anything like that. I don't generally spend much time on each person, probably only 30s tops, since I am mostly just looking for really obvious signs that the user is a spammer/scammer/troll (e.g. lots of especially controversial/negative-karma comments, repeatedly posting the same links to multiple subreddits, etc). And I probably only end up ignoring about 1/1000 invite requests, so I'm not being too particular either. I'm just trying to quickly weed out the most obvious troublemakers to save Deimos from having to deal with them later.
No worries. I understood where your concerns were coming from so didn't take it personally.
It's a tool I've often used
My first issue with it being "creepy" is that it is publicly posted content. There even exists a handy page listing all the content all in one place. It's like having conversations in public and then thinking it's creepy that people around know what one has talked about.
As a moderator (in times long ago) of, say, /r/panelshow. When someone made a negative remark about someone like Rosie Jones¹ or other women comedians - well, I want to elminate misogynists, but just because someone has a negative opinion about one woman doesn't mean that opinion is misogynist. So I would glance at their posting history to see - do they post in misogynist subreddits? Do I see a trend of griping about women but praise for men?
As a user. If I can't tell if someone is being sarcastic; or sometimes before I decide whether or not to invest my time engaging in conversation, I will check the posting history to get a feel for where they stand on things. Lots of rude comments? I'll pass.
I will not go into a rant about the removal of previously posted comments, but I sure don't see it as a positive thing. I will just say that contributing to a publc conversation but later withdrawing those contributions is not a helpful thing to those conversations. Perhaps the ephemeral nature of chat would serve such instincts better.
¹ a panelshow regular with cerebral palsy who is therefore difficult for many to understand. And that's even before we get to her native accent!
Sure, if the Dog & Duck routinely records all the conversations at each chair and hosts a library of the recordings. And even then, that's a bad analogy because my entire posting history is a click away. In fact, every single post I make includes a link to it.
Sometimes I wonder if the ideal social network would actually default to deleting everything after a month and things can only be preserved if people make an affirmative decision to preserve it.
I think you're leaning heavily on the "if it exists or is not illegal, it's okay" and ignoring a lot of the nuance behind perceived and implied vs. explicit privacy.
I think it is on the weird or creepy side for people to so heavily interrogate someone based on their post history, as if it is a factual immutable text, rather than a snapshot in time, that can never be comprehended in retrospect to its fullest effect.
You say this in your previous comment:
IMO, this is a version of committing an Ad hominem attack, and I would try to avoid these types of practices in these types of position. Contextualizing an event, does not need to involve judging someone's character and I find that a really...deep area to probe into, based on comment history.
Outside of those criticisms, I'd say going through someone's comment and post history is more akin to grey areas of life like: reading someone's diary, snooping through someone's texts, eavesdroping, criminal record hunting, taking pictures of someone without their permission, knowing someone's address from google maps, etc.
These are all permissible, but we still have societal "rules" so to speak, about whether these things are okay.
I'd ask myself, if I find myself going through someone's comment or post history, why am I doing it? what am I trying to find or prove or disprove? What is making me uncomfortable about this post that is making me feel the urge to investigate who this is?
But regardless of the reason, I'd still remind myself, that I'm willfully violating someone's privacy1, most likely.
Not who you replied to but I am interested in this topic.
I have only gone into post history if I am trying to decide whether to reply/debate with someone and I want to get a sense of whether it would be a productive conversation. Some people frequently insult people when they disagree and I won't bother replying to that type of person.
If I look, I don't go far back in time. I just get a sense of their recent interactions and decide whether I want to engage.
I think your use case is one I can understand. It's part of getting a feel for someone, and it's a surrogate for things we would do in the flesh like, read body language or tone, or reflect on personal history/experiences with this person. I think it's reasonable to do some cursory browsing to see if you want to engage further. I'd be curious to know if you "store" this information at all(?), or it just kinda goes away once you've assessed the threat. For me, it mostly just goes away, since I don't think it's fair to keep everyone's history constantly in your mind at all times, at the forefront -- it is my way of reducing my own biases against someone, and in some cases, a form of forgiveness.
Listening to my own advice, I ask myself, "why am I looking into this person's history?" I have a few test cases myself:
When I reflect on those questions, I often get to the root of my fears pretty quickly.
Is this person a bot? "Why am I asking this?" Because I'm afraid of misinformation. Secondary thoughts: Does it matter? If so, do something about it. If not, move on.
Is this person bullying me? "Why am I asking this?" Because I want to know if I should put effort into this interaction, or perhaps escalate the situation by reporting them, or abandon the situation.
Is this person in crisis? "Why am I asking this?" Because I'm worried someone is suffering that could be helped.(If yes, is there anything I can actually do? If so, do it).
In all of these cases, I very rarely, or try not to hold onto this information, and try to only hold on to information that feels like it was publicly shared with me.
When you think about your scenario, if you ask "why am I looking at this person's history?" Does anything come to mind?
I don't store information on users other than memory.
If I am checking out someone's vibe through their history, I will then decide either to continue the conversation, or ignore them and leave the conversation, or block that user. ( On reddit).
I don't think I have done much if any looking at history on tildes.
I think this really depends on what you consider "going through someone's profile" to be honest. Because I think the first page of someone's profile is outright fine. On tildes you can customize it with a little bio something I know a lot of people do. So this implies that people will be looking at your profile and that a lot of people expect other people to do so. Many other websites provide even more elaborate customization of user profiles.
There are plenty of legitimate use cases to take a quick look at someone's bio. Someone might make an interesting point and you want to see if they talked more about it, you are looking for some extra context to see where someone is coming from (this being a text based medium a lot of context gets lost), etc, etc.
Now, to be clear, all of what I am talking about is in the realm of just taking a quick look and read. Unless it is for things like moderation I do agree there are virtually no good reasons to go over someone's post/comment history in extreme detail. Like the initial assumption made that it would be done to link to profiles I clearly consider not okay in the slightest.
But, for just generally looking at profiles there are plenty of good use cases that have very little to do with privacy violations.
Edit:
I had some additional thoughts I wanted to add to the conversation. As I said, a majority of community based websites that I know of (reddit, tildes, traditional forums) provide a way for people to customize their profile. The same profile that allows quick access to someone's post and comment history. So as long as I have been on the internet (since the late 90s) this to me always has signaled that profiles are not private and there is even a clear implication (to the point that it is almost explicit) that profiles are intended to be looked at.
However, I get the notion that plenty of people are outright shocked by the idea that someone might even consider looking at their profile. Which makes me wonder where that difference in perspective comes from?
I agree.
To answer your question about the different perspectives. I think overtime, we have defined and re-defined "profile" and what it encompasses.
My own opinions are very, nascent and grey. A profile feels distinctly different, to me, than going through post history. A profile is intentionally front facing to a broad audience. I have no delusions about the fact that at the end of the day, posting on the internet, is, by and large, public. I still think in our day to day lives, we choose when or when not to invade privacy, and this includes on the internet space, and that it can have a lot of grey areas.
If I see someone on the train, and I realize we have a similar schedule, and I see this person on the train with regularity, then get curious to know more about this person, and I start following them just to see where else they go, and I keep track of this information, but do nothing else with it, is that weird? Something about that feels creepy, some would say that constitutes stalking, I'm sure some people would say there's nothing wrong with it at all...it goes to show you how varied we can have opinions on this matter.
It feels the same to me, somewhat intimate to "follow" someone on the internet, when you haven't really been invited by them to be followed.
We all have choices to indulge in our snooping or not, just because it's out there, doesn't mean we have to do it.
random asides
I have used the internet since before this type of granularity was easily accessible. You'd have to do a lot more legwork to investigate someone's history, so to speak. I don't see the real benefit we have gained by making this easier or even encouraging it. If anything, I think it weakens people's desire to be authentic, because the whole internet becomes a panopticon. I don't want to participate in a community or society where I feel constantly on edge, as if, "everything [I] say, can and will be used against [me]." So I choose to limit my snooping and creeping, to live aligned with those values.I've been able to scroll people's post history on forums for 20 years. I've been using the internet before that too, but it's weird to me to delineate a profile as public but the content of the profile to be private and thus "invading" privacy. To me that requires a lot more effort, such as connecting identities off site. Start quoting my old forum posts to me and I'll be seriously weirded out, but quote my posts here to me and it's whatever.
Whereas I think it's weird that posting history is literally on click away from every single time you post, and yet somehow that's creepy that someone should click on it and consider the contents.
If it is so creepy, then why does this site allow such creepy behaviour with a single click? If it is creepy, then Deimos is super supportive of people being creepy by making it so easy to get that. You don't even have to browse all the topics and look for someone's username.... it's literally one click. All listed. Paginated.
Do you post your diary like a public blog on the internet?
Do you post your texts to a public page on the internet?
Do you broadcast your life on a live Youtube stream so that anyone can access it?
I'm not going to rehash the rest of the conversation with you. I'm stopping here. I really cannot come tany consensus with you, and it makes me a little irritated that you are basically calling me creepy for reading information that is not only publicly available, but one single click away.
The more I think about it, the angrier I am getting. So I'm stopping here.
Calling someone creepy is really really not a nice thing to do. I would suggest saving that for people on private property peeking through windows. Not for people who might view publicly published informatin that, I really have to belabour the point, is a single click away and an integral part of pretty much any forum or social media site.
As a FYI, I think part of the issue here is that you responded directly to the "stalking someone's profile" bit and also called it that. Stalking strongly implies that you go in extreme detail with nefarious purposes. And the comment made by trim was clearly about the nefarious use case as that was in relation to trying to link two profiles from different websites.
I do realize that you attempted to showcase that there are legitimate use cases for simply looking at someone's profile. With which I agree, but I can also understand that since you quoted the stalking bit and this was also the context that people still are responding from that context.
It's not unheard of I suppose. They made a deal with Google after all, who knows what was stipulated there.
Since @DFGdanger summarized it quite well I'll just add a personal point of note: I've made thousands of comments over the years but only posted a handful of new topics. While it's suspicious if it's only on a single topic and political, some people only frequent one or two subs. I'd chalk this up to a maybe. A flag, not red, but orange or something.
A few weeks ago my reddit headcanon shifted a bit. Regarding all the confession/off my chest/AITAH subs that consistently hit All - Top in the Last Hour (the only way I browse), I previously assumed all the AI-generated stories and comment responses were third-party karma farmers, but more and more I'm coming to believe reddit is generating them or contracting out to someone else to generate them.
Most of the time, the stories are too unbelievable to be true (AITAH for leaving my husband, fifteen years my senior, after discovering he's got four other families in four other cities?), but the comments, thousands of them, take the stories at face value (NTA wow I'm so sorry you're going through that ❤️❤️❤️). Reddit is perversely incentivized to keep people scrolling through ads every four comments. Maybe I'm overly cynical, and I've got zero evidence, but I'm solidly convinced it's Reddit themselves pumping many of these posts and comments out.
Just a few months ago, someone posted a story to /r/AITAH asking AITAH for not attending my sister's wedding because of her "child-free" rule? A few hours after posting, they updated it to reveal that it was entirely AI generated. After that reveal, there were still so many comments treating it like it was a real story. Really opened my eyes to how many Reddit comments are AI generated. If they're doing it in AITAH, there's no reason to believe they aren't doing it everywhere on the front page.
I used to be on Reddit heavily, and erred on the side of, well even if this story isn't true, I hope someone in a similar situation will read my response and feel less afraid or in pain.
But these days the stories are just crazy similiar. They're as lazy as they are bad, with a heavy focus of "haha they got theirs" that isn healthy for the soul.
I don't feel as bad for no longer being there: hopefully people who are genuinely hurting will find lots of AI well wishes already to read.
You're right on point. Youtube does this as well with their own comment sections, just to give people the impression that youtube is busier and more popular than it actually is.
No, I think you've got it right unfortunately. I wish I could argue but I've seen the same.
Culture can and does change.
That being said, I don’t think it really matters too much whether it’s full of bots or not. I think what matters much more is if you like being there and consider it worthwhile to stay. Personally, I find political subreddits fairly pointless. I would describe them as masturbatory at best and indoctrination chambers at worst. Most of them aren’t much different if they are full of bots.
Fair point on the political subs. I try to keep the mindset that its entertainment and Im not going to be changing anyone's mind. But occasionally it gets my dander up and I have to remind myself its JUST social media, no one's gonna care what I post after a day, if they ever cared at all.
I was thinking about what types of subreddits are mostly bots and which ones are probably not.
I would think that most niche hobby subreddits are not dominated by bot, because there is probably not much value to swaying opinion there. Except if it is a hobby where new merchandise needs to be bought and there can be an astrotuf campaign to push a brand.
Too bad about political subreddits. Making them all worthless unfortunately benefits the "post truth" situation we are into right now because it's harder to stay out of disinformation bubbles.
It's not just about the subreddit. If a submission from a niche sub starts climbing up /r/all or is linked in a major thread that drives traffic to it, that will also attract bots. Some bots probably do camp on specific subs with specific intentions, but there are others that are just looking for whatever's hot enough to attract a lot of eyes so more people will read whatever the bot is posting. I've also seen bots that stalk users and harass them any time they post, typically for making comments someone didn't like in various ban-happy subreddits.
I was thinking from the perspective of whether reddit is useful anymore for anyone. If it's all bots, then no, it's not useful to read the posts, and it's no longer useful to add site:reddit.com to a google search.
I assume most stories I read on the internet are untrue in some sense. That's why even long before AI got to where it is now, I never got the appeal of subreddits built around taking these stories at face value. I'm looking at /r/amitheasshole or similar ones.
To me, they were just like reading pure fiction. Now, AI makes these spaces even worse - but the baseline was already bad to begin with, kinda like you mentioned with political subreddits.
And I think these will be the subreddits that will be hit the hardest by LLM generated content and it will force people to eventually re-evaluate the content they find valuable and how they interact with it.
Epilogue: I gotta say, learning the pervasiveness of the bots and especially that article about the unauthorized persuasion experiment in r/changemyview has really taken a lot of the fun out of reddit. Now Im even more reluctant to respond there because there is zero value in debating with a computer. Ive given up reddit before, I think its likely time to nuke it for good. Really disappointing especially compared to how vibrant a community of REAL people it was when it started.
Forsooth, the enshittification continueth.
Remember that Reddit started charging for their API specifically to sell access for AI training data. They aren't going to announce when they make those deals, they have no reason to.
The flip side of that is implicitly approving those AI tools to do things like post and comment, it could easily be part of the training process to check how they're doing. There's also always the chance this is coming from scrapers who don't pay for the API.
I left Reddit completely for a few months after the Exodus. Slowly I realized it's where most of the good information was on niche topics, along with current information on things like comparing Internet providers in my city. Search engines show me results from Reddit often on these topics. Even if Reddit itself doesn't have the specific information I want, the sidebar or wiki will often point me to the right place to look.
I've logged in a couple of times since then, I don't remember why. Every single time, there are responses to old comments asking me to expand on what I've said. It's always possible that's a human who found my comment using some kind of search, but this didn't used to happen. By old I mean over a decade old. I think it's either karma farmers/bots/maybe it's all the same thing now, building up a history with comments to abandoned accounts.
It is entirely possible that you encounter bots, I am also absolutely sure reddit has changed dramatically over the years and certainly since the API debacle. But none of the arguments you put forward have much relation to the conclusion you are drawing.
Considering the majority of people on Tildes have a reddit background. Combined with the fact that Tildes has a bit of a reputation of having a population of users who write fairly lengthy comments (can create paragraphs in your words) I am not sure why you are surprised to find people like that on reddit. I am more surprised you didn't encounter them before.
It is entirely possible that ratio of people changed on the specific subreddits you visit. But none of that is any indicator that you are talking with bots.
To be frank, you are just late to the party discovering these sorts of folks. Accounts like this have been common on reddit since as long as I can remember which is 2010 as that is when I joined reddit. Certainly on political subreddits this always has been extremely common.
In short, none of your arguments support the notion that you are talking to bots. In fact, at a fundamental level it really bothers me that these are the things you relate to bot users. Because, it effectively means that anyone who is articulating an argument well, is suspect in your opinion. The same goes for someone who is passionate about a subject. It just doesn't seem to me like a healthy way to engage on a platform. Then again, I moved away from reddit because the platform itself isn't healthy, but that is a slightly different discussion.
To be clear and drive the point through, while it is impossible to rule out some accounts being bots, your reasoning does support accounts being human or bots as far as I am concerned.
I've been logged out of reddit for almost 2 years now, and I never hung around political subs, so take my opinions with big grains of salt.
My guess here is that mods have more help with Automoderator rules, and are more willing to use them, and it's doing a lot more heavy lifting than it used to (maybe mod tool improvements on new reddit are having an effect as well). And that the trolls are gathering in particular subs with like-minded individuals. Rather than you just seeing them on the old default subreddits.
Without more information, I give it a solid 50/50. Do the paragraphs follow logically and actually form coherent points?
Sounds highly suspicious if they're all phrased like this. Would err on the side of bot.
Well the ratio is not unheard of. Some people will never make a single post ever. I don't know if there are stats available for how much human accounts tend to post in a month but you could try looking for information like that. The absolute number (10k) does sound very high. Idk how much real human politics...let's call them "fans"... like to comment during the run-up to an election.
Again, I'm pretty disconnected these days, but I personally don't have the feeling that they - reddit - need MORE COMMENTS RIGHT NOW - JUICE THOSE NUMBERS BABY!!! The hard part is kind of already done. AI slop is also continuing to ruin search engine results and driving more traffic to reddit to get actual answers (And search engines are paying them directly for access to their data).
When you post or comment, you are also talking to human lurkers.
Bots are a lot more capable, so yes it's possible.
I definitely think there are a lot more bots on the Internet compared to 5 years ago.
But you're also running into people who rarely use their Reddit account and dust it off for some events. I rarely comment on Reddit, but I did follow the Canadian election on their and had a flurry of comments in the preceding week and day-of. I guess I could certainly look like a bot activating but I'm just someone who doesn't like Reddit all that much but likes engaging with some things only found there e.g. participating in the live threads.
that's a bot or a human working in a farm. If you ever suspect, just hit Report > Spam > Bot/AI on a few of their comments. When you refresh their profile, it might be shadowbanned. I see a lot of bots around my subs and nuke a few accounts per day.
What subreddits are you hanging out in? That can make a huge difference.
Well, Reddit definitely has lots of bots or at least LLM users, because there are some dead giveaways (maybe we should make a list, or maybe not so they don't learn).
The current one is the character "—" (em-dash). Humans type "-" or "--". These are quite common: example, example, example. You can also distinguish the writing style: it's too informal, it gives off a "fellow kids" vibe.
However, I'm sure there are much less obvious bots. Moreover, there's no definite way to tell, and the line between promotion and authenticity is blurry. I'm inclined to believe your 10,000 commenter was a bot and/or paid promoter, but they could've just been someone chronically online with very strong views.
Personally, I try not to care whether a post is human-written, I care whether it's high-quality. The thing about LLM writing is that it's usually boring, verbose, and inaccurate; if an LLM wrote an interesting, concise, and reliable post, to me that would be a good post. I'm skeptical of anything on any social media, even if there's a consensus, but there are still trusted news sources (e.g. ground.news) and product reviewers (this unfortunately depends on the product, people recommend Consumer Reports although it's paid).
People who write a lot—or at least appreciate proper typesetting—absolutely use em dashes. It's trivial to type, and it's typographically correct, unlike misusing a hyphen. It's one modifier key on a Mac, long pressing on the hyphen on a phone, etc..
Once again, I am imploring people to not blame a higher standard of writing on LLMs. LLMs output text that is trained on the works of professional writers: fiction, journalism, academic writing, what have you, so of course they default to outputting something that looks more like what you'd see in a book.
While I agree that an em dash doesn't always indicate an LLM, it's extremely uncommon for people to use the actual em dash character in informal online contexts like forums. I'm a prolific em dash user (it's probably one of the bigger flaws with my writing tbqh) and will use the actual character when I'm actually typesetting something, but online I pretty much exclusively use double hyphens because it's widely understood as an em dash and an actual em dash character is absolutely not trivial to type.
Using GBoard on my I can indeed type one by long-pressing the hyphen, but that requires going out of my way to shift to the numbers and punctuation keyboard rather than long-pressing the letter h for a hyphen. And I don't even know how to type an actual em dash character on my desktop -- when I use them, I'm either using something like LaTeX or Typst, where inputting the right number of hyphens in a row is rendered as an em dash in the compiled document, or I'm using a word processor that automatically converts repeated hyphens or hyphens in certain contexts into em dashes.
I bet if you asked a random sample of people how to type an actual em dash outside of a word processing program that automatically converts them, the vast majority would not know how. On desktop rather than mobile, I'd wager it's at least 90% of people.
Heh, I had a moment of deja vu reading this comment and wondered for a second if I somehow had opened an old link or something when I saw your comment.
...well, at least I'm consistent lol.
It's pretty easy to type accents and symbols on desktop, even without LaTeX, using various snippet, alternate character, or compose key software. On Windows, you can use something like https://github.com/samhocevar/wincompose, while on Linux that's built-in.
I think memorizing alt codes, copy-pasting, and using compose software all count as decidedly non-trivial. I've used these techniques for typing other characters before, but I don't think the number of people motivated enough tonuse them for typing em dashes instead of hyphens is very high. Only copy-pasting is intuitive to non-technical users, and it's quite time-consuming compared to the alternative.
I do not know what key compose software is built-in to Linux even though I've daily-driving it for years, and I would love to know more, as I've wanted to create a custom keyboard layout to type IPA characters more easily but have been dissatisfied with the lack of something similar to Microsoft Keyboard Layout Creator, which is what I used for that purpose before I switched away from Windows. I haven't been able to find a straightforward solution there and welcome advice.
It's called XCompose and was originally part of X11 (which handled input and display). Nowadays both GNOME and KDE use Wayland instead of X11 for input and display, but they still support the XCompose convention. In addition to the default list you can use your own list in
~/.XCompose.Edit: There are existing custom lists like https://github.com/kragen/xcompose.
I would counter that running wincompose might be uncommon, but it is insanely trivial. I have spread the word of its existence for a decade — and I use it constantly.
Using it might well be great and trivial once you already have wincompose or at least know you want to run it, but if typing a character requires installing a program, I don't think it's sensible to call it something trivial to do.
It is native to Linux.
I think this is one of those things where you don't realize you're in a niche from the inside.
Just as a comparison, despite your evangelism, I've never heard of wincompose before and never (knowingly at least) used Linux. On Tildes I may be an outlier but I do think that I'm in the majority on those two things. It's trivial in a certain set of circumstances, but if those don't apply.... It'd be a whole big thing to swap up your OS to type an emdash.
Wincompose absolutely is not native to Linux, and XCompose still requires user configuration that far outstrips the average user's knowledge (even if you ignore the tiny percentage of people who are even using Linux to begin with), and that's without even considering that even if it's absolutely trivial to use, it's not remotely trivial to know you need it or know that it's what you need to look up to do a particular thing. I absolutely guarantee you cannot find me a single human being who has set up XCompose or Wincompose solely to type an em dash instead of hyphens and uses it for nothing else and who would say that makes typing an em dash trivial.
Good thing that's not what I said.
Man, I use em dashes all the time! Here or wherever. And I’m probably not a bot!
I don't think em dashes are a good way to distinguish bots from non-bots, so don't worry -- I believe you.
You're right, I should've highlighted that em-dashes alone don't signal ChatGPT.
The suspect posts are those with lots of em-dashes and ChatGPT's stuttered, awkwardly-informal writing (IMO the general style is a better signal, but it's hard to describe exactly what sets it apart from human "informal" writing). Even then, any particular one of those posts may be genuine; in aggregate, the fact there are suddenly much more is stronger evidence of bot content.
They do that because AO3/fanfic writers use the emdash a lot. They're actually really annoyed at being accused of being bots for it when almost certainly it was the crawling of AO3 that led to the habit.
As an aside, neurodivergent folks get accused of using AI to write more often, both due to sentence structure and word usage.
Oh my fucking goddess I cannot sufficiently articulate my absolute exhaustion with essentially being accused of being too "intelligent" on reddit. As if that were an insult. Although they mean it as such. It is incredbly tiring.
Yes I should also add, accusing someone of being or using AI is low-quality, it's ad-hominen. If you feel the need to say anything about a particular piece of writing, you can point out its unsubstantiated claims and vacuous phrases or criticize it for being low on details (assuming it has those issues, most AI-generated text does).
For sure, I just think it's worth pointing out that AI habits come from their absorption of human work. Some of us use words like "delve", others use em dashes.
yeah, I'm not sure if AO3 itself auto-converts anything to em dashes but Microsoft Word absolutely does and I wager a lot of AO3 users are working in Word or Google Docs and then submitting it to AO3 after any of those automatic formatting substitutions happen.
They do seem to know the alt+ code for it too so honestly it's an intentional use (at least for many.) I've seen the conversation elsewhere but even the fanfiction subreddit has a number of posts about being yelled at for being AI (the comments on AO3 having picked up some of the emdash equals AI language)
But my point is mostly that the AI is mimicking the human language it scanned. And uses without paying for.
Oh yeah it absolutely learned the em dashes from actual human writers -- in addition to AO3, probably also news publications and wikipedia, which are also more likely to use an em dash than some dude on reddit. But yeah, AI systems have learned way weirder things from way less online data! In Chat-GPT's early days, I remember some weird tokens that we discovered were reddit usernames from people who were frequent posters in a niche subreddit. And I guarantee the em dash appears legitimately in a lot more of the training data!
And I'm unfortunately not surprised people are freaking out on fanfic authors over it. I don't read much fanfic these days but the spaces I'm in that overlap with it are both super anti-AI and not super knowledgeable about how it works, which definitely creates a kind of witch-hunt-y mentality about it at times.
Humans may type two dashes, but on iOS they will be automatically replaced with an em dash. It's a bit annoying when trying to type three dashes to make a Markdown horizontal line.
In case it helps, underscores also work in Markdown to create a horizontal rule. :)
Note that even the "human" posts there have a decent chance of being AI -- one of the most common types of repost bots simply recycles old, popular posts verbatim, sometimes with a deliberate typo in the headline to avoid automated dupe detection. They'll even work with other bot accounts in the same network to repost the top-voted comments from the original thread as well.
People mock Sam Altman's World project but I believe it's the (long term) future. It or something like it. Guaranteeing humanness on the internet is the only way for the social internet to survive.
I'm not sure if privacy is sustainable on the internet. The idea that you should be able to interact with the the internet without the internet knowing exactly who you are doesn't pencil out in an era where AIs will soon be able to perfectly imitate humans online.
I think privacy is sustainable, so long as one of two conditions are met:
I like the idea behind the project but I don't like Sam Altman running it. I am also thinking long term that is what we will be moving to: China already has phone number, Internet account, banking and ID very tightly linked. They suck, but the idea isn't totally crazy: if the government actually funds security and remains reasonably unobtrusive to speech and other civic rights of say, labour organization and voting, it can be a place where we'd have more safety and civic accountability than the wild wild web. It would be a safer dating platform, rideshare and meetup, for example, than isolated individual companies motivated by keeping quiet and not investigating.
I agree. Privacy is dead and something like this project seems like the inevitable solution. It also brings with it a huge issue in a world where a unique electronic identifier becomes your gateway to buying and selling and any kind of verification service like banking... and thats the point where I will nope out and go back to being a disconnected citizen, growing my own food, making my own electricity, bartering instead of buying. It doesnt sound like much fun really, but my grandparents did it, I can too.
Have your subreddits changed at all? What you are describing certainly sounds like bots, but there are always other possibilities. You made me realize that I haven't seen as many quips as I used to, even on my curated subscriptions, but perhaps that's because of the subreddits I unsubscribed from in June 2023.
No havent changed subreddits in years.
The quip thing seems to have died a welcome death. I also havent seen "ok, boomer" in months, also a very welcome death lol