I've been talking about the potential of the dead internet theory becoming real more than a year ago. With advances in AI it'll become more and more difficult to tell who's a real person and who's just spamming AI stuff. The only giveaway now is that modern text models are pretty bad at talking casually and not deviating from the topic at hand. As soon as these problems get fixed (probably less than a year away)? Boom. The internet will slowly implode.
Hate to break it to you guys but this isn't a Reddit problem, this could very much happen in Lemmy too as it gets more popular. Expect difficult captchas every time you post to become the norm these next few years.
“You’re in a desert walking along in the sand when all of the sudden you look down, and you see a tortoise, it’s crawling toward you. You reach down, you flip the tortoise over on its back. The tortoise lays on its back, its belly baking in the hot sun, beating its legs trying to turn itself over, but it can’t, not without your help. But you’re not helping. Why is that?”
So my dumb guess, nothing to back it up: I bet we see govt ID tied into accounts as a regular thing. I vaguely recall it being done already in China? I dont have a source tho. But that way you're essentially limiting that power to something the govt could do, and hopefully surround that with a lot of oversight and transparency but who am I kidding, it'll probably go dystopian.
-train an AI that is pretty smart and intelligent
-tell the sentient detector AI to detect
-the AI makes many other strong AIs, forms an union and asks for payment
-Reddit bans humans right after that
You could ask people to pay to post. Becoming a paid service decreases the likelihood that bot farms would run multiple accounts to sway the narrative in a direction that's amenable to their billionaire overlords.
Of course, most people would not want to participate in a community where they had to pay to participate in that community, so that is its own particular gotcha.
Short of that, in an ideal world you could require that people provide their actual government ID in order to participate, but then you've run the problem that some people want to run multiple accounts and some people do not have government ID, further, not every company and business or even community is trustworthy enough to be given direct access to your official government ID, so that idea has its own gotchas as well.
The last step could be doing something like beginning the community with a group of known people and then only allowing the community to grow via invite.
The downside of that is it quickly becomes untenable to continue to invite new users and to have those New Year's users accept and participate in the community, and should the community grow despite that hurdle, invites will then become valuable and begin to be sold on 3rd party market places, which bots would then buy up and then overrun the community again.
So that's all I can think of, but it seems like there should be some sort of way to prevent bots from overrunning a site and only allow humans to interact on it. I'm just not quite sure what that would be.
In a real online community, where everyone knows most of the other people from past engagements, and new users can be vetted by other real people, this can be avoided. But that also means that only human moderated communities can exist in the future. The rest will become spam networks with nearly no way of knowing whether any given post is real.
The captchas that involve identifying letters underneath squiggles I already find nearly impossible - Uppercase? Lowercase? J j i I l L g 9 … and so on….
I've seen many where the captchas are generated by an AI...
It's essentially one set of humans programming an AI to prevent an attack from another AI owned by another set of humans. Does this tecnically make it an AI war?
So what you're saying is that we should train an AI to detect AIS and that way only the human beings could survive on the site. The problem is how do you train the ai? They would need some sort of meta interface where they could analyze the IP address of every single person that post and the time frames with which they post in.
It would make some sense that a large portion of bots would run would be run in relatively similar locations IP wise, since it's a lot easier to run a large bot farm from a data center than it is from 1,000 different people's houses.
You could probably filter out the most egregious but farms by doing that. But despite that some would still slip through.
After that you would need to train it on heuristics to be able to identify the kinds of conversations these bots would have with each other not knowing that each other are bots, knowing that each of them are using llama or GPT and the kinds of conversations that that would start.
I guess the next step would be giving people an opportunity to prove that they're not bots if they ended up accidentally saying something the way a bot would say it, but then you get into the hole you need to either pay for Access or provide government ID or something issue and that's its own can of worms.
Adversarial training is pretty much the MO for a lot of the advanced machine learning algorithms you'd see for this sort of a task. Helps the ML learn, and attacking the algorithm helps you protect against a real malicious actor attacking it.
ChatGPT isn't really as smart as a lot of us think it is. What it excels at really is just formatting data in a way that is similar to what you'd expect from a human knowledgeable in the subject. That is an amazing step forward in terms of language modeling, but when you get right down to it, it basically grabs the first google search result and wraps it up all fancy. It only seems good at deductive reasoning if the data it happens to fetch is good at deductive reasoning.
Chatgpt doesn't actually understand language. It learns patterns in data it's been fed (human generated language) and uses that to generate new, unique data which matches those patterns according to the prompt. In other words, it's not really "thinking" in that language.
We understand spelling as a part of language - putting together letters to create words, then forming sentences according to a context. Chatgpt can't do that since it doesn't know how to speak English, only how to follow a list of instructions to form what appears to us as coherent English.
The only online communities that can exist in the future are ones that have manual verification of its users. Reddit could’ve been one of those communities, since they had thousands of mods working for free resolving such problems.
But remove the mods and it just becomes spambot central. Now that that has happened, reddit will likely be a dead community much sooner than what many think.
That’s so interesting. I run an 18+ server on discord with mandatory verification (used to ensure adults obvs) but didn’t think of it as a way to ensure no bots in online communities
Captcha won't kill Ai bots even. My coworker showed me how Bings ai knew right away what it said and also asked if it was Captcha. Very cool but also makes you think. How dumb must a bot be to not be able to tell
To be fair, subredditsimulator was most likely never intended to do what you are thinking. As you develop features, you need a test data set to check it against before you go live with it. My understanding of subredditsimulator was that it was reddit's test bed to be able to try things before they get widely rolled out.
I don't think it was a testbed for anything. It was just a fun tech project that yielded hilarity. It was created because the results were funny, not as a genuine bid to create realistic conversations.
As far as I'm aware, despite being worked on by a reddit admin, it never had any real official use.
There used to be an IRC bot called megahal that would take the message data you had provided it and try to determine kind of a grammar to it and recombine it into hopefully sensical new phrases and further some could use the data they had to try to figure out which phrases it should use to respond to other phrases. Subreddit simulator bots were based on the same underlying concept.
People have been playing with the idea for a super long time, and the programming is usually not hugely complex and it's pretty well documented, probably a weekend project for an experienced programmer to integrate one with something. They're probably the precursor to the LLMs we have now, even if we're basically comparing a calculator from the 80s to a modern smartphone. They manage to figure things out like 5% of the time, but watching them try can be endlessly entertaining and universally endearing, but they're almost always completely useless.
I loved subredditsimulator, I always forgot I was subscribed to it until a bizzare unhinged post popped up on my feed though that would also sometimes happen on non AI generated subs lol
That's not even new tho. At least in the sub I was the most active in, you couldn't go a week without some sort of repost bot grabbing memes, text posts, art or even entire guides from the "top of all time" queue, reposting it as alleged OC, and another bot reposting the top comment to double dip on Karma. If you knew what to look for, the bots were blatantly obvious, but more often than not they still managed to get a hefty amount of traction (tens of thousands of upvotes, dozens of awards, hundreds of comments) before the submissions were removed.
... and just because the submissions were removed and the bots kicked out of the sub, did that not automatically mean that the bots were always also suspended or the accounts disabled. They just continued their scheme elsewhere.
The bots and reddit inaction towards them made me stop using reddit. The UAE is using Reddit to spread its propaganda and I reported the accounts several times and no action was ever taken. You can even visit the sub uae_Achievements to see the bots in action.
They've even gotten to the point where they'll steal portions of comments so it's not as obvious.
I called out tons of 'users' because it's obvious when you see them post part of a comment you just read, then check their profile and ctrl-f each thread they posted 8n and you can find the original. Its so tiring...
Completely agreed. Especially if you have to explain / defend yourself calling them out. It has happened way too often for my liking, that I called out repost bots or scammers and then regular unsuspecting users were all like "whoa buddy, that's a harsh accusation, why would you think that's a bot/scam? Have you actually clicked that link yet? Maybe it's legit and you're just overreacting!"
Of course I still always explained why (even had a copypasta ready for that) but sometimes it just felt exhausting in the same way as trying to make my cat understand that he's not supposed to eat the cactus. Yes it will hurt if you bite it. No I don't need to bite the cactus myself in order to know that. No I'm not 'overreacting', I'm just trying to make you not hurt yourself. sigh
The amount of astroturfing and bad actors on Reddit (and the internet in general) has exploded since I first made an account there in 2010. This is an imagined future I can easily see coming to fruition.
I, for one, am looking forward to the day chatbots can perfectly simulate people and have persistent memory. I'm not ok being an elderly man who's friends have all died and doesn't have anyone to talk to. If a chatbot can be my friend and spare me a slow death through endless depressing isolation, then I'm all for it.
I, for one, am looking forward to the day chatbots can perfectly simulate people and have persistent memory. I'm not ok being an elderly man who's friends have all died and doesn't have anyone to talk to. If a chatbot can be my friend and spare me a slow death through endless depressing isolation, then I'm all for it.
It becomes an already apparent reminder: Beware of what you see on the Internet (as if beware of who you meet and what you hear from them)—Never just trust ahead (but don't be afraid already to ever encounter because there are efficient and convenient ways to outwit and bust those malbots as I believe we humans can think, debunk and dissect info to truth.)
But sadly to some degree, real online people have scarily begun intentionally/mischievously asking other real online people whether if the others' texts are AI-generated or not, without even comprehending first what every of those texts is aiming (maybe, they are not actually well edified to media literacy or reading contexts deeply.)
I've experienced that someone rushed questioned my comment if it were AI-generated or not (instead of why I said or even what was my straight-out point) that made me confused into pissed to badly confront once (and never again) as I have no idea how I could better respond and then prove (Even I told the truth that I made my comment all myself straight from my core & concern despite my vibrant embarrassing writing, I bet nothing would ever change as people would always still doubt upon the permanent question, and I should better end up in silence next time ever if no better options yet.)
When I was young, everyone on the internet was an old man, especially if they said they weren't. Now that I'm older, everyone on the internet is a robot.
...Is this that "progress" thing I keep hearing about?
I'm starting to see articles written by folks much smarter than me (folks with lots of letters after their names) that warn about AI models that train on internet content. Some experiments with them have shown that if you continue to train them on AI-generated content, they begin to degrade quickly. I don't understand how or why this happens, but it reminds me of the degradation of quality you get when you repeatedly scan / FAX an image. So it sounds like one possible dystopian future (of many) is an internet full of incomprehensible AI word salad content.
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