AI summaries of people have landed on Reddit.
Stumbled across this screenshot. Now, instead of judging people for yourself, the computer can do it for you!!! This will in no way be used negatively by Reddit nor people who are arguing with each other. Original post is here, if anyone still has Reddit maybe go spread the good word of Lemmy and Piefed to these users :P
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Sounds an awful lot like the social credit score China was working on a few years back. Wouldn't be surprised if mods start preemptively banning users based on their AI summaries.
The "social credit score" in China was blown out of proportion too. It probably changed since I last looked into it. But when that shit was all over American media it was literally the equivalent of a background check or credit score in the US. Work history, loan and credit history, etc.
Like, it's funny how we can have essentially the same exact thing but only critize China's version of it. Make it scary by adding "social" to the name. People ate that shit up.
Edit: to be clear I think both should be critized. Especially related to criminal history bias on race. But we spend more time talking about the Chinese version that doesn't actually effect anyone's lives in the US.
It was blown out of proportion by american media but its still used to levy economic punishment and blacklist people from using basic features of society like riding a train or catching a flight.
I'm not sure thats accurate, most descriptions I see from chinese people indicate it varies by province, but none of them mention being banned from catching trains or planes. Tons of clickbaity youtubers clai.ing they were, including a mma dude who went China to challenge wushu practitioners to actual fights, but its never someone who lives in China, and when I asked people they had no idea wtf I was talking about.
Also, its weird for any American to criticize a system that bans people from flying when we have the no-fly list.
And, you know, credit scores actually get people denied housing or jobs or loans
The difference is that China is using the government to put these restrictions across all its platforms for unrelated behavior. In America its private companies banning people from their own airlines and the government only gets involved when there is crime.
The no-fly list doesnt require you committed any crime. Literal children are on it.
Its worrying that you confidently repeat that without considering if its actually true. There are no kids on the no fly list, you've probably read the headline of people claiming there were kids on it. What happened was name overlaps both the kid and the terrorist had the same name and it drew some confusion when the kid went through airport security but he was passed through once they saw it was a 4 year old. There have been a few cases like that.
The city of Suining reportedly deducted points for government petitions and online comments, Suzhou planned penalties for reservation no-shows or cheating in online games, and Rongcheng for littering or jaywalking.
But in 2020 policy changed to a positive only points system, more like a loyalty scheme.
Next time I meet someone from Shanghai or Chongqing, I will ask them if they'd ever heard of someone from Suzhou or Suining being restricted from using public transit. But I'm incredibly skeptical that missing an appointment or cheating in online games results in someone being unable to scan a bus or book a train.
And the US border control can look through your social media accounts. People have reported being quizzed about their opinions on the president.
Mods already use bots to preemptively ban you based on what subreddits you have left comments on regardless of context.
And Black Mirror was before that with the idea.
And Corey Doctorow did it before that in Down And Out In The Magic Kingdom.
i'll tip $5 to the first person who makes the ai say a slur
If I get it to call itself a clanker does that count?
it would need to get censored on network tv
That means that even the N word wouldn't count... 🤔
Get it to draw an ascii art nipple?
The way we'll know of its a male or female nipple is if it is censored.
"The user is a frequent poster to 'ebony' porn subreddits..."
This clearly shows that such implementation of AI is a solution that still seeks for the problem. Such summary doesn't add anything helpful. On top of this, since AI is known to hallucinate, one has to check the comments for themselves, making a summary obsolete.
If I was still posting on Reddit, shit like this would immediately prompt me to delete all my stuff
Just deleted my account. This was the final straw.
It's helpful in the nominal sense of allowing mods to dismiss people without having to do any work themselves. Which is precisely the problem AI is designed to solve... human beings have to do work and make judgemental calls. People generally do not like doing work if it can be avoided.
Outside of medicine or other data analysis, AI doesn't have much of a use.
Generating bland corporate copy/logos?
I am thankful for the fediverse and hope this never finds its way over here.
Unfortunately, you know it will. If it can be done, someone will do it.
Sure, but one instance making something stupid doesn't mean all or most will. The decentralizing part has its advantages and disadvantages. Not being owned by a single corporation with stock holders is definitely the main advantage.
Honestly the fediverse is already a bit of a privacy nightmare, and people refuse to take it seriously. Our version of this horror will include your comments and voting activity and likely a bunch of other telemetry which isn't public on reddit. Oh and it won't just be a single "official" AI agent, it will be dozens of them from every corporate or government which wants to build a user database and keep it around forever.
We could bake real privacy protection into our fediverse apps, but the admins and devs seem to have completely punted on this.
it's not a "privacy nightmare" as much as just entirely public and transparent. As long as you're aware of this when posting, then I don't really have a problem with it.
It would be literally about 3 hours of coding for someone to make one of those, and another few days to feed the fediverse into it.
Jokes on you I vibe coded this and it took me 5m /s
Fuck Reddit and Fuck Spez.
What they're talking about here is a blueprint for stamping out individuality.
Omg, you are such a Monica.
Human personalities can be clustered into which member of the cast of Friends they most resemble.
Fortunately, Friends is so brilliantly written that they managed to capture the entire spectrum of human diversity.
(this is snark. I am totally a Chandler.)
Could you be any more Chandler?
it will be nothing more than grok and FB combined soon enough. the only reason reddit has completely astroturfed left leaning content, is because it allows right wingers to drive up engagement in those subs.
Can we get some more titties on Lemmy so I have zero reasons to go to that crappy site?
https://lemmynsfw.com/c/boobs
https://lemmynsfw.com/ exists, so..
jinx, 4 seconds apart in our reply LOL
you win though, i was too lazy to look for the boobs category :D
I noticed that there's virtually zero women asking for naked men. I kind of hope this means they are done with men, and will finally allow the population to collapse.
Well, fuck, I would sure hope so.
Holy fuck!
did you guys not use reddit detective back in the day?
also..
you get what you get in that shit show anyway.
I did, but the key difference is that it didn’t make an evaluation for you. It just gave you a collection of facts with some hard-coded things to look out for.
The new thing is way worse. It’s just skipping the facts part entirely.
Whoa, whoa, whoa. Vibe facts are just as valid as normal facts. ChatGPT told me so. /s
I felt gross typing that.
Alternative facts.
No no no, we keep that name, vibe fact, it sounds more accurate.
Alternative Intelligence facts.
Fuck reddit. Corporations ruined it.
it generally only rewards group think and rage bait. like every other algorithmically driven social media platform.
and trolls will report/ban anything that deviates from that as controversial or harmful.
Hahaha holy shit, Reddit's become worse than I thought. AI being added to something is how you know it's truly turned to shite.
its called crossbanning, it been in the works for many years already. most of them would ban you if you were very controversial political subs, like joe roegan, or another.
This really makes me think the Amish were right after all with regards to modern tech.
I personally wouldn't go that far. But, yeah, we need to de-tech-ify a bit. And I am all for steal the control of the internet back from giant corporations.
it's not tech that is the problem. it's predictive algorithms that push users to passive consumption of media.
The internet was interesting when it was random. algorithms remove randomness. corporations loathe randomness. in the 2000s everyone was going on about how tech/internet was going to allow us this international cultural renaissance by making everything everywhere accessible to everyone...
Remember when netflix and spotify algorithms actually helped you find interesting and new content? I do. But those algorithms didn't promote the right content... so they were changed to promote the 'right' content that benefited their owners most, not the users. Now if i want to find random/new/interesting stuff... I have to manually search for it and know exactly what I'm trying to find... because that type of content is actively suppressed.
the algo driven internet has only been predominantly since the 2010s
Agreed. Engagement driven algorithms are the worst.
Reddit won't ban the shitheads but they will summarize their post history so you can better determine who the shitheads are! ....thanks?
Narrator : "they were all shit heads"
my fav is people who harass you via messaging about some random comment you left months/years ago about how deeply hurt and offended they are.
I'm fascinated by the level of egotistical delusion it takes to be offended by random internet comments, let alone ones from old threads.
nothing shows up for profiles viewed on old.reddit.com.
huzzah!
Old Reddit is the only reason why I visit it sporadically. Combined with RES, I still have the same basic keybindings to browse I had multiple years ago. The new UI of Reddit is a waste of space.
Lol that is some dystopian shit right there.
Ooo found a scary Reddit poster who might upset me. Thank Odin AI is here to save me like this /s
I wonder what it would do on my empty reddit account that I cleared all the comments on before coming here
I'm curious how stuff like this works. Surely, many people's post histories can't fit into context. So, maybe the LLM keeps some sort of "blackboard" of summaries of posts, and edits it as it goes along? Would be pretty computationally expensive. I suppose another way would be to create embeddings of each post, and do some sort of clustering or something.
The same way that you can look at someone's post history, skim it, and more or less understand what their deal is.
Most users on reddit don't have this diverse set of interests or posts. Most of them post on the same subs and repeat the same types of posts... ad nauseam. Most people, online, aren't much more sophisticated in their language use or POV or anything... than a bot.
Sure, 10 years ago you'd look at someone's post history and it would be all over the place, and they'd be writing detailed and nuaced paragraphics in lots of detail... but that's not what reddit is like anymore, or most of the internet really. God I remember when libertarians actually had decent theoretical argumentation to defend their viewpoints... and now it's just memes and cliche phrases repeated over and over.
Pretty easy for any LLM to parse a person who just incessantly posts about the same stuff over and over. And if it came across someone doing long-form explanatory stuff... it would just ignore that data since that doesn't fit the task LLM is designed to process.
If you want to relive the old times there's a few of us minarchists libertarians that migrated over here. But yeah most of us got banned from /r/libertarian back in 2014. I'm still pretty sure it was a Russian govt backed op. Whole mod team was purged twice. Once all of us troublesome posters who would point out that all the new talking points were antherical to personal liberteries and freedom we were muted it devolved rapidly.
It's all about controlling the narrative.
Anyone who doesn't comply with whatever the narrative is gets banned. Whatever the political ideology is, it devolves into 'true believers' vs everyone else, and the true believers are the ones who have no idea what their ideology really is other than shouting slogans and issuing purity tests on their fellow members.
The thing is the sub used to be a anti echo chamber. Open to all debate daily there would be questions and open discussion about policy and global politics. It was literally a free and open forum. Anyone could post and all were encouraged to debate in a atmosphere similar to a change my view type setup.
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2018/12/reddit-libertarian-takeover-far-right/
Yeah but that type of environment requites people who aren't believers, but who are thinkers. Who don't think belief is merely a set of dogma that must be protect and proselytized.
I was part of the community for multiple years it did work fine until it was forced into the echo chamber
Amazon uses something similar to summarize product reviews, and it seems fine... But who knows how accurate it is.
(considering amazon reviews are completely dogshit and mostly bought off I'd imagine not very)
Could one make a bot that automatically blocks people for you based on these descriptions. See how the admins like that.
Time to find out what my profiles look like... so I can post differently on purpose.
edit: That third party site doesn't know what to make of me, so reddit might be equally confused.
That summary doesn't say anything. It's just the most neutral statements.
Agreed that it doesn't say anything because 'strong' and 'provocative' mean different things in different contexts such as subs with very different users.
A fediverse example is saying 'AI sucks' isn't provocative in c/Fuck_AI but is on the dbzer0 instance if provocative is based on votes or replies. Strong can just mean direct and clear. Sure, they might comment a lot about Palestine but the rest doesn't indicate whether they support Palestine or Israel because there is no context for what subs they post in.
Just worthless word salad.
I read about a political polling company that will begin creating AI bot versions of the people that they poll. And they will use those AI bots to ask additional questions in the future. Questions that may not exist at the time of the poll.
Imagine what companies like Reddit will be able to do with their user data and advertisers.
reddit already gave it to GOOGLEs ai, and Open AI as well.
I looked at my account to see if I'd have one, nope.
It looks like a thing only mods can see
Just wait til they do that using tracking cookies and IP addresses across every site you visit, and sending the results to President Trump.
Jeez, at least make the fascists wait for the language model to spit out ideas for them to steal.
It's a sure thing they are already doing that. Think Facebook and "superintelligence".
Fuck AI, but this is probably the most apt utilization of AI I have ever seen.
Yeah, AI is so reliable that this is totally helpful and nuanced. Probably counts down votes on comments about how Israel is committing genocide in conservative subs when determining if their comments are 'provocative'.
or when discussing the epstein files. the mods was able to completely quash the discussing by tricking them into only discussing it on a megathread then deleting it or banning anyone sitll taking about it. the mods are backed by russia too.
considered who the mods are im not surprised.
insane
i wonder what my old Reddit account is.
I edited all my comments to be generic observations, so the only really useful metrics would be where and what I commented on
i couldn't even find the shit feature anyway
That sounds like a pretty good feature if you ignore the lies AI might produce
It’s not just Reddit, anything public is being scraped by AI and all anyone has to do is just ask any of the LLMs and they can provide the same kind of summary…
I tried this recently with my name and it couldn't find anything. Using RNG usernames may be the play because they're so generic :P
I was actually able to run it on a couple different users and it was very in-depth. On your username in particular it showed this thread so they must be searching the web for the username. It could be that newer models are searching more instances than they were before as well.
This is the first post I've had that's had a notable number of votes so maybe if I delete it in a month it won't show up anymore if its just searching the web.
That actually seems like a good feature. If I open someones profile and thats the description I can instantly save myself time and energy by not replying and blocking.
What if the summary is wrong or misleading?
It probably is
Huh. That's actually not a terrible idea.
I wouldn't automate moderation attached to that (yet), but to give people a tool to gauge if a responder is just disagreeing or is a frequent troll? Yeah, that could work. Better than having to dig through the literary works of some rando stuck in an argument with you when deciding whether to block or report them.
Worst case the summary isn't particularly accurate, but for the reasons you'd be digging through someone's post backlog that's not that big of a deal anyway.
Are moderators this lazy?
I was a moderator once. I didn't want to be, but was asked to help. It's incredibly boring, unfulfilling, and a chore. You are the supervisor of the playground during recess and there's always some moron eating sand or a fight breaking out over which dinosaur is best.
Though, if there's concise rules, job's easier.
"Miiiiiss! Daniels being mean again!"
"I don't care you little shits." Taps rule board and sips more wine from a World's Best Teacher mug
and there is always someone who is pissing off other users and tip toeing on the edge of the rules. Then if you ban them they get mega mad and start a campaign against the mods.
I banned someone for using automated software to flood a group on Gab once. Apart from that we don't have rules in the New Zealand Gab group. Nobody can tip toe on the edge of rules when there are only about three rules: don't doxx, don't threaten violence and don't post pornography. Someone either does these things or they don't, there's really no toe tipping here. The guy we banned did complain - his bot software must have warned him that the posts were failing. He didn't start a campaign against us.
ban evaders on reddit some of accounts, and people who post links will do this, but reddit filters them out quite fast, so they dont do it often.
Sounds like the sewer of the internet. If there's so much trouble then people need to make private clubs where users have to apply to join and only a handful get in per week. I moderate a couple of groups on Gab and I've never banned anyone except people who used automated software to flood the groups. Arguments are actually funny and we don't stop them. Just because someone's "hot take" offends someone it doesn't mean we ban. Even if half the users were offended we wouldn't ban. We are adults on Gab unlike reddit. I don't log into Gab looking to moderate and patrol for trouble because it'd make the website less fun for everyone. We aren't a bunch of sissies but neither are we an image board for pornographers and freaks. I think the problem is reddit and the idiots it attracts. Once people get out of their twenties they will discover other websites and stop using reddit. The problem is that there are always new children being born, then they're allowed to post online and suddenly the problems you describe appear.
Yeah, that's the attitude I took. If I don't care, it can't be that bad.
Honestly, the vast majority of reports come from one's ego going "tink" because someone tossed a pebble at it. Rarely did a report actually have serious merit to it.
I've always been of the opinion that if you need a mod to sort something out for you, it's not the nook and cranny of the internet for you and just move onto one of the infinite more. The only things that should be reported and actioned on are those that threaten the nook and/or cranny itself—malicious shit against it's integrity, basically.
Regardless, I never want to mod an online social space ever again. Oh! I did two, but the other one was just a forum and it too had it's 1 in 200 bad eggs.
I don't know that you can accuse a volunteer of laziness, just on principle.
I'll say that moderation is the single hardest problem of the Internet. Corporations being lazy and cheap about it, plus deliberately neglecting it because lack of moderation drives engagement, has led to... let me check my notes... ah, yes, the end of democracy and civil society as we understand it.
So... you know. There's that part.
I don't know that AI is a silver bullet for it, you get lots of problems if you cut humans off that loop, and a lot of the issues are deliberate corporate choices. But, you know, we hadn't already messed this up beyond repair, any tool in that toolbox would have been welcomed.
I have an account on Gab and when the website was new, they created a New Zealand group. It had no moderation from about 2019 until 2024. The only problem we had was this one guy who was using software to automate posts all the time. He flooded the group for months (years maybe) until my friend paid for a Pro account and was allowed to become the administrator. We banned the bots and that was it.
We've never had to delete anyone's posts because we aren't trying to artificially steer conversations or ban people for having the wrong opinion. If someone posted a couple of times a day, strongly disagreeing with us and calling us names, we wouldn't even bother to ban them. Maybe block on our individual accounts but we can still click to read their posts even if we're blocking them. Surprisingly, our group is public but we don't need to moderate it. Not with humans or automation. After the CEO of Gab banned "third world" IP addresses from the website, it pretty much stopped spam. Reddit uses all of this tracking technology to give people a social credit score but Gab just bans third world countries and has people who can take a joke.
The image of the hard-working, burnt-out reddit moderator is a joke to me. If there's too much moderation needed, it's probably a control-freak issue or maybe they need to ban certain countries where a significant amount of spam comes from.
See? It took me two posts and a depressing dive into this guy's posts this time.
There's definitely room for tool assistance here.
Or you could have thicker skin and get away with basically zero moderation.
Nah.