Secret? As opposed to all the blatant AI bot accounts?
this post was submitted on 29 Apr 2025
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Probably ended with bots fighting bots.
Indeed and it's exactly what we did in r/BotDefense before greedy piggy spez shut down the API/communities some built.
I used to watch in amazement at some of the guys who set up bots, to report the bots to us.
You were on the mod side of r/BotDefense? I was a very avid reporter to it (so much so that people thought that I was a bot) and I was eventually added to the secret Bot Defense subreddit that automatically flagged our reports as bots. I jumped ship when the API change came since I saw how deeply vital access to that info was.
Do you know of any active analogous systems for Lemmy? Or do you have any ideas as to what we could implement here to abate bad actors?
I had mentioned this idea some time ago but it’s way beyond me to know how to set something like it up. Would you be willing and/or able to help out? What are your suggestions?
Yeah like you I was an avid reporter to r/BotBust which when its owner went off the rails one of the team members then setup BotDefense, and I got recruited to resolve the reports from peeps like yourself and our little counterpart bot that flagged them at a fair old rate.
I ain't seen nothing like BD over here on Lemmy and some of the bot accounts here are at least listed as such but I have seen numerous ones that aren't "self labelled". It'd take a fair amount of effort but if you've got enough people to review reports (especially the ones from humans) I can't see why not as it's basically looking for common markers / traits / flags.
How does Lemmy differ? Are we architectually bot/AI resistant?
Nope. It's just so small it doesn't make sense to do it more than they already do. Lots of bots around already.
Read the article instead of responding to the title. It was a university conducting formal research, which created AI bots that impersonated different identities. "As a black man..." style posts in ChangeMyView.
The subreddit mods issued a formal complaint to the university when they learned of it, but the university is choosing not to block its publishing on the grounds of lack of harm.
Yeah how do they know they were interacting with real users and not another researcher/troll bot?
Ummm. They knew, guys.
Also this is extremely violating. And this bullshit,
. “We believe the potential benefits of this research substantially outweigh its risks"
What kind of psychotic sssholes run an experiment on an unsuspecting public because they believed that it's ok to fraudulently engage with others without theirspotential subjects being aware of it
This is something trump would do
It's Switzerland. Morality there is measured in $ (the same goes for their "neutrality")
The American government already did it, MK ultra
Smh. Sigh
Why did you need to do a whataboutism?
I said the act was wrong.
Want right in Tuskegee , wasn't right in auschwitz, wasn't right with MK ULTRA and it wasn't right here.
No matter the severity of the act, it's goddamn wrong
Ok?
You immediately assume I disagree with you, all I meant was that they did it before and nobody should be suprised if it happens again, either the government or a corperation.
Ok?
Well, i apologize. Not used to people being civil.. you have a good one,
It's ok I get it, I hope you have a nice day/evening/night
Wow. There's no way this was actually greenlit by an ethics committee unless they're all corrupt. This is so blatantly wrong and manipulative.
There are no ethics in the game of human life. The world is far worse than this.
Just so you know, this is called Moral Nihilism, and it seems to me about as useful as a physicist saying, "none of our models are 100% accurate, therefore they are all completely useless".
Like, yeah we agree that ethics is a construct we've invented, and no ethical system is perfect, and none of them ever will be. But that doesn't translate to them all being useless. I know we're living in a stressful time, and I understand the feeling of wanting to just flip the table and give up, but please recognize that as a purely emotional response, not a rational one.
It was reviewed by an ethics board, but they changed the parameters of their study (shifting more towards using personal info against commenters/making up personal info to use in arguments) without it being approved by the ethics board. Essentially their study wasn’t going anywhere so they made it more unethical in order to have more data to work with. They’re on Reddit trying to defend themselves but no one is having it
So they figured it was a good idea to use a racially-charged fake profile to provoke online users for an ‘experiment’? And one would assume these responses were subsequently studied without the poster’s consent?
That’s going to run afoul of a few European privacy rules I imagine. Someone definitely needs to get fired, blackballed and sued for this. At the very least.
Saying this like reddit hasn't been bot infested for a decade.
I mean there were some genuine looking bots well before LLMs and AI, and even then you could just be lazy and make a copy post bot that would repost old content for karma farming while the terminally online userbaae would upvote your slop for you.
The bots would pretend to be black in order to say “as a black man, I don’t like BLM” or pretend to be a male rape victim so they could say “the experience wasn’t as traumatic as some would say”. How the fuck do they reconcile this as ethical? They’re actively arguing with real people and acting like it’s all just random data. Social scientists once again de-humanizing their subjects, I guess
The experiment is bad, they've not controlled for anything. Their bots are most likely arguing with other bots.
My assumption is that a majority of the content we see on all "social" platforms these days is AI.
We are all AI on this blessed day
Reddit sold user content so it could be used for AI training! If they're mad or take legal action, it's only because they didn't get a piece of the action...
Well, it USED to be a good place to ask a question because there were so many people on it, there was likely to be several experts on _______ at any given time. Then it got more and more left, then more and more right, and after a while it felt like being on twitter again. What I'm saying is that their value and name became pretty worthless, this just makes it 0.