I’ve had a pretty depressing morning, scrolling through my Subscribed feed and realising that 90% of new posts were from the same two bot accounts (bagel and somethingmelon, can’t be remeber exactly and I’ve blocked them.)
Thankfully, a few people had made “ai slop” comments under one, so I checked the post history and, sure, a new account posting at a implausible rate. And once you started looking at the posts they were kinda samey, generic or a bit off. But I think that if the bot had been programmed to post at a slower rate, I don’t think I’d have really noticed.
So my question is, should people be allowed to report bot accounts? And can/should mods be expected at assess someone’s humanity? The very idea is gross, but so is the thought that lemmy would be very easily swamped by a small number of more careful written bots.
Thanks for the thread. I’ve been noticing those accounts and have been trying to figure out what action I should take as a mod.
What’s really fucked up about it is that the content is actually pretty coherent and on-topic, and it seems clear that at least some of the comments are human – like it’s more “tool-assisted” than fully “bot.” So it feels like it’s almost valuable but also kinda ‘cheating,’ which (from a mod perspective) makes it hard to decide what to do about it.
What I’d really like to know is what techniques these accounts are using and what they’re actually up to. The other day I gave one a warning and demanded an explanation, but I only got an angry reply and then the account was nuked by an admin before I had the chance to do anything else.