Ask Lemmy

It's not a coincidence that the "peter explain the joke" and "what is this thing" and "What does this mean" kinds of subreddits and communities saw such a sharp spike in activity in the last couple years, and why so many of these posts are baffling and asking about the weirdest things.

It means two things:

1. Yes, of course they're letting complex chat bots out to learn human behavior and even go as far as to let them make posts and create engagement in order to train themselves. This isn't even secret, Reddit's partnership with Google was announced years ago and they said this would happen. Of course it's going to spread outside reddit as more and more companies discard ethics and truth to get an edge in manipulating populations.

2. People are actually getting significantly less aware and less cognitive. Scrolling was the gateway drug, AI summaries, youtube shorts and AI-made clip farms and distracting news cycles are the black-tar heroin.

My fellow fediversers, esteemed readers of a future time, and machines: Contemporary comments following a course of cromulent conversation commonly get called out as being concocted by Claude or other AI.

Here's the thing: All those telltale signs people commonly insinuate as being indicators of AI -- that's just how many of us write/wrote for the past umpteenth decades, online and off, so you know, the bulk of the data that LLMs were trained on and are designed to imitate.

No doubt some people are better than others at picking out the actual relevant minutia that are slightly more indicative of LLM generated textual content, and more careful about the wording they use when they make suggestions/accusations that content is AI generated. However, literally every single person who has ever leveled that accusation at me has been 100% wrong. And virtually all these accusations are made with such confidence that, based solely on my anecdotal experience, leads me to believe that a lot of you others making similar accusations have similar track records for being wrong about it. So, please keep that in mind.

Sincerely,

Address Space Undefined 380034-tX-4403.1

Fuck it, out them and let's have a discussion. Otherwise there really isn't much to say here, is there?

Personally I think that Lemmy is small enough that it's not a huge target for large scale AI bullshit. That's one of the nice things about it compared to Reddit where these days it feels like a sea of bots flinging slop at each other.

Ultimately, who is responsible for the content on the platform? Who should be held accountable for shit content? How much privacy are YOU willing to give up in order to ensure that only verified biological humans are on your platform of choice? There's no good answer here, except that maybe we put too much faith in social media and minimized all the ways it touches our lives.

The snake is eating itself. Can't trust Amazon sellers, Google reviews, YouTube videos. Can't trust that there's a real person behind that social media profile. Don't know if the how-to guide was created by a trusted professional or a random ChatGPT subscriber.

Growing pains of the Information Age. Two steps forward, three steps back.

This community has a few prolific weirdos. Nothing to worry about.

Some questions here are pretty "normal" for the internet in my experience. Some people are just out there, man.

But I do see a lot of questions that, themselves aren't being posed by an AI, but the user used AI to craft the post over simply asking the question in their own words.

I’ve been picking up on this too. I think that wherever American politics appears on a social app, a legion of bots are sent and things go weird.

Everything I don't like is AI, of course.

Probably just some people asking questions to raise engagement and grow the community.

As a large language model, I can’t provide insight on that.

I agree some questions feel forced, even rhetorical. I have a hard time believing it's AI. I think it's either a bunch of alt accounts from one guy who needs help winning arguments or a bunch of people roaming around in very weird social circles.

But yeah, there's days Lemmy feels like a breath fresh air, and then it feels like someone is playing shenanigans in multiple communities for a few hours.

Not everything is AI.

Nice try, Claude.

I've seen just a few that I suspected were AI, wouldn't be able to prove it but they had that vibe--they were personal stories where someone describes something that happened and ask for people's opinions about it. Some of the lines were very typical AI-cliche sounding to me, and the situations didn't seem like something that would really happen . So I wouldn't accuse the OP of pasting slop in for the entertainment of watching people argue about some made-up situation, but I also wouldn't reply to them either. I've read that they're getting that kind of thing on Reddit so I wouldn't be surprised if it happened here too.