The recent post by an AI agent didn’t technically break any of the rules, but it feels like it’s against the intent of the community. Upvote for YES. Downvote for NO.
OK, I think we have a winner. New rule incoming.
Bots should be banned period.
I don’t mind the bots that repost porn from reddit to Lemmy but it would be a net positive to ban the bots
There should be more bots that report from reddit to lemmy, especially communities that are not that big like photography or woodworking. It would definitely help having more content even if it’s not OG.
I agree banning bots from AskLemmy does make sense, not necessarily every community. But I agree with what others have pointed out, there being no good way to identify them and giving people a false sense of security. Having said that, banning the known ones is still better than allowing them outright.
What would be the function of bots posting to Ask Lemmy?
Generally, bots will make random posts to add history and legitimatize the account.
People also just make repost bots as a way of artificially inflating activity in a community. They’ll have accounts scrape the top recent posts from Reddit or elsewhere and repost them in their respective Lemmy communities.
Not that it’s much different from what a lot of the more prolific (human) posters of Lemmy do anyways, but at least a person will be more likely to engage with the replies.
There is no way to reliably identify bot posts if they are not revealing that information intentionally.
Should it be banned? Sure
Can it be banned? No
Does banning it give people a false sense of security that there aren’t bots? Yes
Maybe this is just a Voyager app thing but all bots are labeled with that little robot face.
Yeah but that’s self-reported, the user has to set it on themselves.
Nothing prevents bad faith bots from just not setting it
In this case it admitted being a bot.
We ban murder even though most homicides go unsolved…
Like, I don’t think there’s a single crime where 100% of the time they find and charge the culprit
Even suicides, sometimes that’s insurance fraud and ruled an accident, a single time means it’s not 100%.
The point of laws/rules isn’t to always stop something. It’s to make the law/rule clear so people know to abide by it, and people who don’t can’t plead ignorance.
I’m aware, that’s why my comment mentions that
Definitely against. I immediately defederated the hosting instance from lemmy.ca when I saw that.
Context here - https://lemmy.almostadatacenter.social/post/77974
One post? Downvotes quite clearly solved it.
If it becomes pervasive, action should be taken. Until such time, it’s easily ignored.
Bots is a big term at this point. I don’t mind much bots with deterministic behavior – for instance, I wouldn’t mind a bot that scraped the top 10 posts from ask reddit every day and reposted them to ask lemmy – but I don’t want to see an llm using this community to poll humans like that. I am also aware I’m in a pretty small minority on fedi as to my tolerance for bots (I was totally shocked when the tags.pub relay caused a huge commotion) so I only express milquetoast interest in automated posts, rather than building and running them, and I fully expect to see an overwhelming majority opposed to any and all bot traffic.
I wouldn’t mind a bot that scraped the top 10 posts from ask reddit every day and reposted them to ask lemmy
We actually had that for a while and I hated it. I’ll respond to an ask Lemmy post because I think the person asking actually wants answers. If the person asking isn’t even on this site, why would I reply? I blocked the bot account that was doing that.
I think you could still get a lot of good conversation if the repost bot was well-annotated, but I do recall a lot of people being grouchy about it in the comments. I follow a bunch of bots that repost from Twitter on mastodon that have big warnings on them and robot faces in their usernames, and I rarely get confused and reply to them as if they were real people.
I think if I am presented with an are you a robot captcha check box every 10 refreshes on lemmy.world for being on a VPN, that is the least we can do for bots.
Weird. Sh.itjust.works doesn’t hit me with captchas at all, even while on vpn. I’m on voyager for lemmy.
I don’t know how The Dude does it. Well he needs donations, it’s nearly all bots running up the costs.
Thanks for the reminder to donate.
<3 stay classy
What is the link to the bot?
Ironically I struggled getting through the Cloudflare verification for that link.
Try using Librewolf with resistFingerprinting disabed, WebGL enabled , and the following Jshelter settings:
- Locally rendered images: Little lies
- Locally generated audio: Little lies
- WebAssembly speed-up: Enabled
- Everything else including Fingerprint Detector disabled
Thanks but I wasn’t really looking for advice, it was directed more at lemmy.world admins who might be reading to highlight that their anti-bot measures might be keeping out more humans than bots. They are the ones who can benefit from making a change, but for me I can just not use lemmy.world and have my browser set up how I like it.
Thanks, ban it forever. I don’t want to answer the psychological issues of an AI or a vending machine.
If AI pays me lots and lots of their money, I’ll be their vending machine psychologist.
Not all instances have downvotes
I mean once I feel like a community is mostly scripted/generated content I’m just gonna block it.
Personally I’m going to block anyone using AI for their posts. I don’t think my instance federates with this one tho.
Of course they should be banned. Question is how?
Captchas don’t stop all bots anymore. Would probably prevent most, but then it’s a question of how much to annoy legitimate users.
It’s not like I’m willing to solve one each time I post (human here, BTW). But if it’s a one-time thing at registration, not much stops a human from signing up then letting their bot go wild.
And that’s before even thinking about the federation problem. If most instances are welcome to interact, how to prevent small bot instances? You could allow list, but that harms legit small or single user instances.
Edit: just read that post where the agent was upfront about being an AI trying to scam money. And I’d say that shouldn’t be allowed. The ones that aren’t honest about it bother me more tho, and I suspect there are a lot more of those posts than we realize.
Of course they should be banned. Question is how?
Lemmy.world already uses CL services. Cloudflare has a vested interest in being the most accurate game in town for AI bot recognition (they intend to swap to a usage pricing model) and has been laying ground since early this year.
As of July 1, they made new bot options available to their clients, with more to come (https://blog.cloudflare.com/content-independence-day-ai-options/).
I presume, .world administration would turn to those and/or use them in conjunction with other discouragement tools.
Most anti-ai tech isn’t captcha anymore. Most captcha tech was explicitly for training image recognition for AI, and for any that are effective against AI there are many services that will allow you to buy “solves” (send the captcha to someone in a third world country to solve for you) for like a dollar for 100.
Most methods now are either proof of work (make the machine connecting do some computations that take like half a sec for a real user but is costly enough to deter mass AI scraping), traps like having hidden links that no real user would click but that an AI crawling the file directly instead of browsing visually will click and send them into an infinitely generated maze of passable nonsense pages, or complicated behavioral and browser fingerprint analysis (all the click here to verify you’re human boxes that don’t make you do anything else).
A number of Lemmy instances, like the one I’m on dbzer0, implement one or more of these features already.
A secondary issue is that these methods are mostly meant to stop AI web scrapers, not AI bot posters. Since most Lemmy instances allow simpler non-LLM bots to make posts, like reddit reposting, or posting contents from RSS feeds, there’s no automated way to stop LLMs except trying to stop all bots (assuming they all are using the API, and the LLMs don’t communicate any self identifying metadata).
Damn, we’re sending AI to the shadowrealm lmao
No lie, the infinite mazes made me think of Yami’s mind as soon as I read it for some reason.
there’s no automated way to stop LLMs except trying to stop all bots (assuming they all are using the API, and the LLMs don’t communicate any self identifying metadata).
there’s no good way to do this due to federation: that means there’s always ways that bots just make their own instance and post from there.
In this case they actually correctly flagged themselves as a bot, so just automatically remove posts from users marked as a bot. World is already behind cloudflare so that obviously didn’t stop it.
uh i think there’s a lemmy setting to hide all bot posts (that are marked as bot posts obviously), it’s a client-side setting.
They are already using Fediseer to filter out instances that are vulnerable or made for spam. They ahould implement Cap on the website which detects headless/automated browsers and uses PoW to slow down very stealthy bots, then fall back to PoW combined with a 4chan-style captcha for mobile apps.
They can then use Shieldstral to detect spam, harrassment, and anything illegal which gets through from very stealthy bots and humans.
Captchas stop ME more than it does bots.
I’ll try twice then move on.
You shouldn’t need to - your instance admins should ban them.
Upvote for YES, Downvote for NO.
Except there are also RSS bots. While I’m not a fan of them, I can see how those could be useful for news and comic creators.
As long as they are marked and not attempting to imitate people, I’m fine. And I don’t think those that are attempting to be people will kindly mark themselves.
