The purpose could be testing what passes for human or warming up accounts for later propaganda use or who knows what else.

  • Apepollo11@lemmy.world
    22·
    9 hours ago

    Honestly, with the state of many questions posted here, I’d be surprised if there wasn’t a fair number of bots posting here.

    One user in particular, has a posting history that is highly sus.

    • FinjaminPoach@lemmy.world
      5·
      9 hours ago

      One user in particular, has a posting history that is highly sus.

      When i see the sus posting history people i assume they’re just trolls though, or engaging in a roleplaying fetish.

      Is there a specific reason why someone would choose to target this site with fake engagement bots? The most obvious types of bots are the ones that come on here directly advertising something, e.g “this person writes great CVs / Code! Reach out to Botted Name at linkedin or BottedName@gmail.com to learn more! Buzzword Buzzword Buzzword.” They get quickly removed and don’t come often, so you might not have seen them.

      But I just don’t see what value is made from bots that pretend to be people. Is it because they’re researching how to imitate human posters? Or do they just gather data based on how people respond? Sorry I’m kind of uncreative when it comes to this stuff.

      • BougieBirdie@piefed.blahaj.zoneEnglish
        4·
        6 hours ago

        I see basically two nefarious reasons for bots to pretend to be people on lemmy. I can’t think of a good reason why you’d want them.

        A company shilling it’s product by appearing like a regular person. Bots have already ruined user reviews for products in basically every consumer industry. The best way to discover decent products now is word-of-mouth, so I could see a bot that pretends to be a user so it can show up in recommendation threads, like in Ask Lemmy or Buy It For Life.

        The propaganda potential for bot users is tremendous. Kind of like the company shilling its product but on a grander scale. This could be orchestrated by those with economic interests, like promoting car-centric culture or climate change denialism which is of great interest to the oil industry. Or it could be as grand as foreign or domestic influence interfering with elections.

        The fediverse isn’t a huge place, but it’s not nothing either. Operating costs are technically lower because you wouldn’t need to use as many bots to infiltrate communities. You could even spin up your own instances so that your own bots don’t get banned. I’m not really sure how you’d go about countering this sort of problem.

  • BassTurd@lemmy.world
    8·
    7 hours ago

    Yes. They provide no value and often times trained off if stolen data. Even the “good” bots that inline convert imperial to metric or fahrenheit to Celsius or similar, I think are annoying. I think all bots should be banned, zero tolerance.

  • TrackinDaKraken@lemmy.worldEnglish
    11·
    9 hours ago

    I don’t want to talk to a machine. I might as well be talking to a wall, or a cloud.

    Also, all the resources the literally stupid things use to generate one idiotic response is just disgusting.

  • Dookieman12@piefed.socialEnglish
    9·
    9 hours ago

    As someone who takes the time to answer questions they know, yes. It takes time and effort for a human to formulate and write a response.

    If im going to invest suitable effort into an answer, you better damn well be willing to put suitable effort into the question. Anything else is an attack on my time.

    • Jimbabwe@lemmy.world
      3·
      7 hours ago

      Isn’t there value in the discussion? If the question was worth responding to, I’d argue it’s a net benefit.

      I’m playing devil’s advocate. I’m not sure what I think.

      • Dookieman12@piefed.socialEnglish
        4·
        6 hours ago

        Perhaps there could be value in some kind of discussion, but I don’t consider a human interacting with an LLM to be a “discussion” any more than a human interacting with a magic eight ball.

  • CerebralHawks@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    2·
    9 hours ago

    On its face, no. Change venue to a writing forum, would a bot posting writing prompts be bad? Maybe, but I think it would be worse if it were bots answering.

    For the long term, Lemmy karma doesn’t work like Reddit karma. The up and down votes are tracked, but it’s not like Reddit where you could farm karma and then sell it to a company that would use your karmic rating to boost past commoners to get their ads more prominently displayed. That system had its benefits, but it wasn’t all good. Over here, all you can really hope for is a catchy username that people mentally associate with good posts going to an advertiser, who is then banking off the goodwill established by the original owner.

    At the end of the day, bots should be declared as such. I have no problem interacting with a bot as long as I know it’s a bot. But this begs the question — how do you know I’m not a bot? I use em dashes and I use the markdown formatting. I also use good grammar and the King’s English for the most part (I’m with the yanks on “maneuver,” fuck whoever made that word what it is) but I may or may not be one of the King’s own subjects. Maybe I’m a bot and I don’t know it. There are a few movies about that, maybe some games too. Then again, I accidentally cut myself shaving last week, so who knows. I’ve never heard of a bot doing that. Now if bots start acting like Millennials with their slang and their bad grammar and their wanton disregard of the English language, how fucked are we? Because right now a lot of people think I’m a bot because I have a high command of the language. I feel like in a few years, most of your bots will better integrate with how most people communicate online, not necessarily the best writers online.