#AI#GenerativeAI#GeneratedImages#DevianArt#Bots#SocialMedia: "On March 27, a large group of artists and creators from across the web noticed the frightening extent to which a once-beloved, highly influential community platform of theirs had, like so many others, fallen prey to the artificial intelligence juggernauts plundering the internet.
As VFX animator Romain Revert (Minions, The Lorax) pointed out on X, the bots had come for his old home base of DeviantArt. Its social accounts were promoting “top sellers” on the platform, with usernames like “Isaris-AI” and “Mikonotai,” who reportedly made tens of thousands of dollars through bulk sales of autogenerated, dead-eyed 3D avatars. The sales weren’t exactly legit—an online artist known as WyerframeZ looked at those users’ followers and found pages of profiles with repeated names, overlapping biographies and account-creation dates, and zero creations of their own, making it apparent that various bots were involved in these “purchases.”
It’s not unlikely, as WyerframeZ surmised, that someone constructed a low-effort bot network that could hold up a self-perpetuating money-embezzlement scheme: Generate a bunch of free images and accounts, have them buy and boost one another in perpetuity, inflate metrics so that the “art” gets boosted by DeviantArt and reaches real humans, then watch the money pile up from DeviantArt revenue-sharing programs. Rinse, repeat.
After Revert declared this bot-on-bot fest to be “the downfall of DeviantArt,” myriad other artists and longtime users of the platform chimed in to share in the outrage that these artificial accounts were monopolizing DeviantArt’s promotional and revenue apparatuses. Several mentioned that they’d abandoned their DeviantArt accounts—all appearing to prove his dramatic point."
does anyone know of a good #python api wrapper for creating #mastodon#bots? looking to create something similar to reddit's u/cahbot for the fun of it (if it doesn't exist already)
A really interesting update on bots behaviour. I used to be able to spot bots on twitter. I can't spot them on Mastodon and maybe this 👇 is why.
I'll bear this in mind when I see suspicious answering patterns. The last thing I want to do is amplify bots on the Palestine issue ... er, No.
I just recently abandoned by Lemmy.ml account and also I've stopped doom scrolling #instagram.
I'm one of those "meme friends", you know, someone who does the #doomscrolling for you, and I just stopped one day and released an IG story saying "do your own damned doomscrolling".
This is because Instagram is now filled up with #bots and #contentfarms. For every 30-40 of useless garbage and mindrot, I got maybe 1-2 good videos/reels.
The internet, including social media, is filling with #spam.
Added a few more little widgets to finish the model.
I think this time I'm going to export the model to Blender for rendering with Cycles. MagicaCSG includes a great path tracing renderer, but it lacks textures.
#Amazon#AntiWork#Bots: "Amazon warehouse workers are using bots to automatically and instantly claim precious time off slots before their coworkers, according to multiple Reddit posts by Amazon workers and Github pages for two of these bots viewed by 404 Media.
The Amazon workers are trying to claim voluntary time off, or VTO. VTO is separate from Amazon’s other version of time off of work, known as unpaid time or UPT, which is what makes it so valuable. Workers have a set amount of UPT, which they can use at their own discretion—but once it runs out, they can be disciplined or even lose their jobs. UPT is precious to workers, and VTO does not deduct from UPT reserves.
“VTO is valuable because unlike UPT, we actually accumulate towards getting more UPT as opposed to using UPT and wasting it,” said one worker at a sortation warehouse in California, who asked to remain anonymous to prevent potential corporate backlash."
Nice to see that @himawari_wpac has been back up and posting for a while with no crashes. Not sure what caused the last crash exactly, but hope the error reporting is robust enough now that I'll be able to figure it out. #bots