this post was submitted on 16 Oct 2024
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I saw a comment the other day saying that "the line between the most advanced bot and the least talkative human is getting more and more thinner"
Which made me think: what if bots are setup to pretend to be actual users? With a fake life that they could talk about, fake anecdotes, fake hobbies, fake jokes but everything would seem legit and consistent. That would be pretty weird, but probably impossible to detect.
And then when that roleplaying bot once in a while recommends a product, you would probably trust them, after all they gave you advice for your cat last week.
Not sure what to do in that scenario, really
I've just accepted that if a bot interaction has the same impact on me as someone who is making up a fictional backstory, I'm not really worried wheter it is a bot or not. A bot shilling for Musk or a person shilling for Musk because they bought the hype are basically the same thing.
In my opinion the main problem with bots is not individual acccounts pretending to be people, but the damage they can do en masse through a firehose of spam posts, comments, and manipulating engagement mechanics like up/down votes. At that point there is no need for an individual account to be convincing because it is lost in the sea of trash.
You're missing the big impact here which is that bots can shift public opinion in mass which affects you directly.
Gone are the days where individuals have their own opinions instead today opinions are just osmosised through social media.
And if social media is essentially just a message bought by whoever can pay for the biggest bot farm, then anyone who thinks for themselves and wants to push back immediately becomes the enemy of everyone else.
This is not a future that you want.
I didn't miss it, since my entire post is about manipulation and the second paragraph is about scale.
Even more problematic are entire communities made out of astroturfing bots. This kind of stuff is increasingly easy and cheap to set up and will fool most people looking for advise online.
Maybe we should look for ways of tracking coordinated behaviour. Like a definition I've heard for social media propaganda is "coordinated inauthentic behaviour" and while I don't think it's possible to determine if a user is being authentic or not, it should be possible to see if there is consistent behaviour between different kind of users and what they are coordinating on.
Edit: Because all bots do have purpose eventually and that should be visible.
Edit2: Eww realized the term came from Meta. If someone has a better term I will use that instead.
~Anti~ ~Commercial-AI~ ~license~ ~(CC~ ~BY-NC-SA~ ~4.0)~
I am convinced that the bidet shills on reddit are bots. There's just no way that hundreds of thousands of people are suddenly interested in shitting appliances.
There's an easy way to tell.
If they're talking about a bidet without a heater, they're a bot because no human on earth wants an ass spraying of cold water.
Big Bidet at it again
You might consider me an independent thinker (I shit in the woods)
It's the scale that changes. One bot can be replicated much easier than a human shill.
So my second paragraph...