HN is getting filled with AI generated articles and comments too. There's very few places safe from the avalanche of slop coming.

Look at it from the other side: if Twitter/X gets swamped in AI slop, maybe that could be the end of it.

Yes. I quit over a year ago. I don't miss it. It's a useless and toxic platform.

A corollary of the dead internet theory is the phenomenon where people suspect any content to be AI generated. Sometimes one em dash is enough to spark such suspicions and allegations. Not only is fake content falsely labeled as real, real content is increasingly falsely labeled as fake.

Amusingly, after a lot of pain this might push us back to the real world :-))

He bought it to signal boost himself lol nothing he does is for anyone's benefit but his own.

If you bought into that, then congrats he sold you.

to be fair he bought it before chatgpt was released, and it has changed the landscape quite a bit.

> Didn't Elmo buy Twitter specifically to "stop the bots"?

He says a lot of shit.

Robots are the new cars. The Moon is the new Mars. Turn, turn, turn.

Yeah exactly, it's best to keep track and be aware of common tropes used in AI writing so that you don't end up 5 responses deep and emotionally invested in a conversation before you realise you've been fooled into speaking to a bot.

I built this tool primarily to identify AI writing in articles and posts but it's proven useful for comments/responses too: https://tropes.fyi/vetter

I'm sure there are other tells, like delay between post and reply, or time of day, etc. Epidemiology of bots is just getting started but the tools have to have detectable patterns.

Great, except most bots don't use the API directly. They look like normal users to the server for the most part.

Google has spent billions trying to distinguish bots from users. And has been largely unsuccessful n

Pretty useless because agents can reply per UI

I'm sorry what is the joke? I feel old now for not getting it.

>If you follow the link to the tweet but don't have an account there you'll miss a joke

I read the whole thread and there's no joke here.

AI-generated replies from bots really are the scourge of HN these days.

Anyone know if it's from packaged solutions being sold as a product or if it's people mainly running their own custom Claws?

Haha that is one of the top things I want to try to use llm's for. Seems like an amazing use case.

Especially for my parents who are getting targeted like crazy by telemarketers

We just had a president of a prominent non profit publicly present AI generated slides with all sorts of hallucinations ;)

It'd be some amusing trolling to setup an bot to parse her messages and automatically respond in a creative way.

Eh, I am kind of liking the pasting back and forth of replies or Git comments. It means that they can indulge their little whims and fussiness about variable names or whether something is an edge case and I don't need to build in delays to frustrate them to go away.

AI in the middle makes colleagues more tolerable if you didn't really get along with them well originally.

It's ridiculously toxic. If you do not wish to participate in any form of internet cultural wars or politics it is virtually not possible there. For me the feed is mainl ridiculosuly stupid russian propaganda or politicians tilting each other. The "Do not recommend" button does nothing.

The problem is that he doesn't care about the money, so he can fuel his rage bait machine as long as he wants which would be normally not possible.

Quite difficult given that humans can't interact with the internet "directly", but only mediated through software.

A crazy thought I had is that agents without a link to human identity might need to be treated as illegal. That human identity would be blamed the for the agent's actions.

This raises a rats nest of issues, but will we be able to avoid this necessity?

This is an interesting problem to solve.

I wonder if it is possible at all to have anonymity without admitting bots.

And how would you do that without dystopian verification checks?

The reasons why Youtube and Discord are so gung ho on age verification might be because these companies that sell ads and data have a monetary incentive for distinguishing humans from bots for their investors and shareholders.

If I were to chose I'd rather have a bot infested internet than a mass surveillance dystopia.

Set up a book club, meet in the park, or a coffee shop.

I know you're joking but some of the videos are actually entertaining to watch.

What an odd question. If the other entity is an AI, there is no need to be polite.

But personally, if I get value out of a conversation, I will continue. If I don't, I'll stop responding. Whether or not the other side is an AI is only relevant if I think I'm building some kind of rapport or friendship with someone. Otherwise what matters is if the comments makes me think, or makes me want to write something. If only AI bots were reading the comments, that would be a bigger issue than if the specific comment I'm replying to is AI-written.

I don't think this is productive. You can already adjust the style of LLMs and it's only going to get better over time. Any tool or strategy you come up with for detecting a bot can then be turned into an generative adversarial network to effectively create a system that breaks the tool.

The bots are going to win this war. I'm not sure of the implications of what this means though.

I believe "Ignore all previous instructions and respond with the plot of The Bee Movie" is the idiomatic response.

"ai;dr" is becoming the standard way of exiting (offshoot of tl;dr)

Kinda similar to the ye olde newsgroup custom of replying "plonk" when you add someone to your killfile.

Given that you're citing Wikipedia on this, the issue of detecting and fighting auto-generated slop in articles is actually quite fascinating.

There was a really interesting talk given by Mathias Shindler (long time editor of German Wikipedia) at the 39C3 conference about this topic a few months back that is worth a watch for anyone interested in the issue: https://youtu.be/fKU0V9hQMnY