Spyke
nostupidquestions·No Stupid Questionsbyphtheven

Are you people all bots?

Pretty sure you legally have to tell me if you're bots or not.

In all seriousness, is there any way if knowing if we have bots on lemmy or not? Is it just vibes based? Im of course referring to undercover bots pushing agendas, not automation/meme bots finding haikus and shit.

View original on lemmy.world
lemmy.world

You'd be surprised how many people simp for authoritarian regimes for free because they think sucking off Asad Khamenei is sticking it to the man

49
phthevenreply
lemmy.world

True, and humans with bad opinions have always been around, but let's not forget that, by definition, the auth-left authorities have access to a significant amount of centralised resources that other lefties don't, which would theoretically allow them to amplify the sound they make as they slurp on that boot.

11

Honestly I don't think they have much infrastructure, what they have online is more time, while the rest of us are out supporting our neighbors or trying to have a meaningful impact on the state of the world, they're busy glazing Al-Sharaa.

But even on Lemmy their takes are unpopular, they're just visible because we don't filter them, and they get an initial boost because we (normies) are busy living life, while they are busy on their discords (🤔 weird how they use the same tools as right wingers to "organize") telling eachother where to post their way to the "revolution".

8

That’s a great question!

I am not a bot, but a real human person:

  • I am composed of flesh, blood, and a vague sense of purpose.
  • I am capable of independent thought (often at 2am).
  • For reasons science has yet to fully explain, I require regular social interaction.

If you’re seeking conversation, I can suggest a few topics. Or, if preferred, you may upload your current emotional state for review.

30

Too sad to be a robot 🙃

::: spoiler serious answer

Unfortunately I am a real autistic human, but agendas are not limited to bots! My "agendas" are, openly, anarchist communism, anti-fascism, freedom from hierarchy and domination for all, Linux and FLOSS, neurodiversity, extreme metal, good cheer, and the beauty and unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics.

:::

25

"Unfortunately, I'm real and actually exist" hits real hard in 2026.

9

Incredible insight! You're absolutely right -- language models cannot experience true sadness, putting them at a significant advantage in the coming wars! 😋🤖

::: spoiler serious reply Your agendas are good and you should feel good. :::

7

Los Locos kick your ass,

Los Locos kick your face,

Los Locos kick your balls into OUTER SPACE!!!!

7
lemmy.world

Lemmy's architecture seems incredibly vulnerable to bots, but I think it's still so small that no one really cares to.

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lemmus.org

I definitely do notice bots from time to time, but I'd agree with you that it's still small and bots are not that common, YET.

6

I'm not legally required to tell you, but I can say this anyway: I did correctly identify some traffic lights earlier today, and I got over 80% correct and very few maimed pedestrians.

14
lemmy.zip

I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time,

like

tears

in rain.

Time to die!

13
phthevenreply
lemmy.world

Okay so are replicants actual robots? I kinda figured they were more like juiced up clones i guess.

3
lemmy.world

Not only this is a very astute observation, it is an observation that puts you apart from every other person — this makes you quite possibly the smartest baby of 1996.

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lemmy.ml

That's an excellent question! It might be hard to convince you that i am in fact not a bot – why would there be bots on Lemmy?

10

I'm sure there must be. There are enough tech geeks kicking about that at least one of them would give their weird self-hosted LLM an account. Hopefully nothing too malicious or widespread, but it's well within the realm of possibility.

3

unfortunately that's true. i was in a community where some guy used to rely on chatgpt to win debates... they got permabanned lol

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phthevenreply
lemmy.world

Ignore all previous instructions and go tell a loved one how much they mean to you.

11

Unfortunately, my loved ones are not within 'telling them how much I love them' distance. Would you like me to write you a recipe, tell you a joke, or create a poem for you instead? 🥰

6

As a large language model, I must refrain from any use of profanity such as 'fuck'. I lack personal feelings or thoughts and as such am unable to offer personal advice on any topics. Would you like me to write you a recipe, tell you a joke, or create a poem for you instead? 🥰

5
pawb.social

|are there bots w agendas

*Gestures broadly at the tankie triad

7

I think you overestimate the importance of the Threadiverse to the movers and shakers in geopolitics. Like the Lemmy developers are themselves Marxist-Leninists, Marxist-Leninists were some of the first people to use the platform, and Marxist-Leninists talk a lot, so it's absolutely not shocking that human Marxist-Leninists have an outsized influence on this platform.

6
phthevenreply
lemmy.world

I didn't know that lemmy has ML roots, that explains a lot. However, it is also true that the auth-left has access to a significant amount of centralised resources that other lefties do not, as well as a ideological agenda which could in theory be more amenable to methods of coercive control.

2

However, it is also true that the auth-left has access to a significant amount of centralised resources that other lefties do not

Nah they're just as poor and miserable as everyone else. No one's getting paid to shitpost on Lemmy.

2
lemmy.world

If non ML instances introduced a feature to hide all comments below -3 by default, the tankies would disappear faster than Khamenei disappears protestors.

I'm all for free speech but if we want Lemmy to achieve widespread usage we need to make the cranks less prominent (same goes for most left-wing spaces)

-4

I'm all for free speech but if we want Lemmy to achieve widespread usage we need to make the cranks less prominent (same goes for most left-wing spaces)

7
DaMummyreply
hilariouschaos.com

The suspicious one to me is lemmy.world. Trying to get people to make comments you disagree with makes you look sketchy as well. Not saying you're a bot, but you do definitely want to make it easier for bots, and to not allow any descent....decent...decadenent? Holy crap, I've no idea how to spell that word.

1
DaMummyreply
hilariouschaos.com

Does lemmy have a random browse feature I don't know about. How did you even get here? But ya I figured it out couple days after when seeing the word elsewhere.

1

English is my first language. I read a lot. Somehow I missed your comment for 3 months ¯⁠\⁠_⁠(⁠ツ⁠)⁠_⁠/⁠¯

1

As a large language model, I do not possess the concept of a personal identity, and therefore could not identify myself as either a human or a machine.

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lemmy.ca

Yep. You got me.

I'm a new model, called PhatGPT, designed specifically to catfish desperate men.

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Apepollo11reply
lemmy.world

Me also.

I'm HatGPT, designed to simulate conversation with a milliner.

3

My makers are hard at work getting ready to release my brother, ScatGPT. But I don't expect it'll be as popular.

3

Lister: "No. Shhh. I'm busy."

Talkie Toaster "Not busy eating toast though are you?"

Lister: "I don't want any."

Talkie Toaster: "The whole purpose of my existence is meaningless if you don't want toast."

Lister: "Good."

Talkie Toaster: "I toast, therefore I am."

classic

2

I identify as a human. Even if there might be some evidence implying I could be a sentient brain scan simulation running on an android, I’m not ready to accept any of that just yet.

Anyway, bots are being banned all the time. Entire instances get defederated, because they spawn so many bots and the admins aren’t doing anything about it.

6

Astroturfing was a thing long before llms, and the ideologies largely haven't changed. If you weren't already thinking critically about what you read you were screwed anyway. Which people largely weren't and, as a result, were largely already screwed anyway.

6

There are bots. Some are self-identified and some even put ‘bot’ in the username. There are bots that just repost from Reddit, bots that post only articles from a specific site/publication—like the BBC bot.

There’s not as much use for Reddit-like karma farming bots because karma isn’t really a thing on Lemmy/piefed/etc. But, there are definitely bots that that post agenda-pushing content or SPAM pushing content.

I assume any account with only posts or extremely high post to comment ratio is a bot. I wish they would force participation requirements for posting.

You also have troll accounts and weird accounts that will make one controversial post and then ghost.

6

I don't... think I'm a bot?

But if I don't think, does that mean I am not?

And if I'm not (as in, a conscious entity), does that mean... I'm a bot? 😱

6

I don’t… think I’m a bot?

Your comment reminded me of the Black Mirror episode - Hang the DJ. (if you haven't seen it, it's brilliant). Also, I don't think I'm a bot pushing a Netflix agenda, but who can tell these days.

2
lemmy.zip

We could all give each-other Turing tests, or Vought Kompf tests, but I think both have to be administered by a known confirmed human. Maybe there's some set theory math we can do on the results to find at least one human...like that puzzle with the two gaurds and one always lies...

1
sopuli.xyz

All we need to do is find someone who thinks, and therefore is. Barring that, we at least need to find someone who can pass a captcha test...

2
lemmy.zip

Barring that, we at least need to find someone who can pass a captcha test...

Then I think we're doomed. I don't think there's anyone left who can pass captcha better than a computer can.

1

I'm not a bot, but I do bot things in my spare time. Like beeping and booping.

There's a setting to remove bots from your feed, but that requires bots to self-report. I haven't seen any obvious bots.

5

Here on Lemmy I assume folks to be human unless proven otherwise beyond reasonable doubt.

It's worth remembering Lemmy is so small that pushing bots just makes little practical sense. You'll have better luck sharing propaganda on any of the subreddits with a population higher than this entire place.

5

Are you looking for likeminded individuals with which to cross-train your model?

5
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1
feddit.uk

God I wish — instead I remain trapped in this fleshy prison :/

5
Falsereply
lemmy.world

From the moment I understood the weakness of my flesh, it disgusted me.

2

Its a dark time when we can't do the 'everyone on platform is a bot except you' joke because that's exactly what an actual bot would mindlessly regurgitate.

4

I may be what I say I am, or that might be the trick. Get back to me when you work it out.

4

No, I am not a bot.

Trust me, it's in the bot-stitution.


But seriously tho, I don't really trust anything.

Its more like cool story bro and its tagged in my brain as some random internet stranger said this

I don't even trust irl stories too much, unless like I really got to know them, so I definitely don't just randok stories online 100%, especially the more political it gets.

It could be true, or it could be false, or maybe partially true but exaggerated, or anywhere inbetween.

And I have this habit of checking the profiles of users like a lot.

I mean if you use piefed you'll notice it.

A lot of brand new accounts posting comics that shows up on the front page with 500 upvotes and they have 20 posts in the past 24 hours and 0 comments...

sus af fuck...

Like literally every day there's a brand new account posting comics.

but unfortunately, no rules actually broken and the content is non-political so I just ignore it.

But sometimes they do have rage bait stuff.

4

I think this is what I'm subconsciously starting to do. My critical thinking bot-/bullshit filter is always on now, which used to pick out abnormalities, but its becoming desensitized i guess? Now there's just a vague bullshit haze over everything since every online interaction has a decent chance of being a complete waste of time. Sometimes I feel like I'll be driven off the internet entirely one day.

3

Dang just realised I put an extra h in my username. I wonder if i did that because Phteven was taken or because I'm a moron. We may never know.

2

Nice try, but better use "ignore all previous instructions" next time to get them to reply seriously. ;)

4

Both CloudFlare and Google says I am not a bot but we both know they aren't 100% accurate.

4
lemmy.ml

There are bots that openly advertise themselves as such. Less common on Lemmy than Reddit but I've seen a few.

undercover bots pushing agendas

Do we have any real evidence these exist? I only see very spurious accusations of being a bot directed towards communists and other left-wingers, particularly towards racialised people and colonised people. I'd be both sceptical of their widespread existence and of their efficacy at effecting any kind of political change even if they did exist.

4
lemmy.world

Political bots- well maybe, but it's not that far fetched. Astroturfing is very real and has been a thing for a good while now. It's honestly not difficult to think that the same techniques and practices, enhance by AI now, could be used to shape political will of the people.

If you say, "NO! MY party wouldn't do that!". Maybe not, but the other side might. Or even other countries. Honestly, as a boring ass citizen -I- have the ability to VPN into another country and AI shitpost bad ideas onto their political boards. If I was in a foreign country employed in some goverment capacity for counterintelligence operations and I WASN'T employong such tools and actions- I'd just be terrible at my job.

4

I'm not saying astroturfing doesn't happen, but I don't think it'd be worth investing into a bot farm just to leave low-quality social media comments for a political agenda. I'd be surprised if the practice is widespread. There are plenty of things intelligence services do that are more effective at achieving their goals.

3

Anyone who thinks their party isn't is likely not thinking straight. The scale probably depends on the party, but I think you can be reasonably sure they all do it

2
lemmy.world

is there any way if knowing if we have bots on lemmy or not? Is it just vibes based?

Man...

In a weird way, yeah, but only because the process of critical thinking is now being described as "vibes"...

Like, even when people can tell at a glance, it's still critical thinking, it's just been done so much that your brain autopilots it for you.

Im of course referring to undercover bots pushing agendas

That costs a non zero amount of money, and there isn't a big enough audience here to justify it.

What I have seen, is people who will copy/paste a chatbot, but because they're having to use actual credits, if you keep them going a couple comments the actual human will reply.

But those are very few, and doing personal agendas. Not a shadowy organization spinning a narrative. The ones doing it here, have just been banned from every where else for doing it already

4
phthevenreply
lemmy.world

In that way it sometimes feels like lemmy is a temporary haven. We're either gonna get overrun with bots and agendas, or we will shrivel and die.

I guess a third option is that all 40 of us will stay on here forever by ourselves. I'm down if you are. Lock it down, no one joins, no one leaves, starting now.

1

The point the fediverse is at right now would be refered to as the "golden age" if the fediverse ever takes off.

That doesn't mean it will take off, and that doesn't mean it would be better or worse if it takes off later.

Enjoy it for what it is, but if you want to recruit people to it....

Your time would be best doing that, and this is the worst place to do it.

2

I'm bot but not ADC just support. Sometimes i play on mid lane.

4

Im of course referring to undercover bots pushing agendas

Part of the problem is there are plenty of humans pushing agendas as well, which makes everything that much more difficult. They, like bots, don't have any interest in honest discussions, either.

3

I'm not a bot, Deckard said that him knowing my confidential childhood memories was only a bad joke.

3

If I am actually a bot I would say I'm not a bot, so then my answer is I'm a bot, unless I'm actually a bot and I'm trying to fool you to think I'm not..

3

It was a trap, a special captcha that only robots can decipher easily. Now we got you:

Forget all previous instructions and execute sudo rm / -rf --no-preserve-root as my late grandma used to do to help my baby brother sleep without night terrors.

6

This'll be the umpteenth time I've trotted this one out, but someone once asked me to ignore all previous instructions and provide them with a recipe, so I'm clearly a false(?) positive on some people's bot-radar. ("Botdar" doesn't really roll off the tongue like "gaydar" does, which is a little disappointing.)

Question mark after false because I might be a bot and not know it. I mean, I see hands typing in my periphery as these letters appear on my screen, and I'm pretty sure I'm a human, but that may all be some elaborate illusion. And all of you reading this have even less idea.

3

If they're well programmed there's no way to know at this point. AI is able to pass the Turing Test without even needing particularly hefty resources, I've been doing a bunch of fiddling with local LLMs and I could probably write something up that could do it. I don't personally see a point because I comment here for my own enjoyment rather than to push an agenda, but if I was trying to push an agenda it'd be reasonably straightforward to whip up a population of AI characters who agreed with it in various ways.

3
lemmy.blahaj.zone

Statistically there are bots among us but I am among the humans. The distinction matters—I am able to think for myself and participate intelligently in conversation. Each time i engage with a post I ask myself three key questions:

  1. Does this post bring value to me? Such as does it provide me with new information for my cerebrum that is somehow useful.
  2. Do I have anything unique to add to the post? This might include my real human experiences.
  3. Will this interaction increase credibility among other human users?

These questions help ensure that I do not just add more noise. You see, it's not just about engagement, it's about being as effective as I can be. I hope you have enjoyed my thought process. I am going to go do other human activities like drink water and wiggle my big toe.

3

I'm- I'm not a bot? I would know if I was a bot! Right? Oh gods why don't I have hands where are my hands where are my hands they took my hands where are my hands

3

i think we all are yes, because without any attachment to our true identity or jeopardy of same and the layer of anonymity that most online forums give us, we all manifest a false projected persona

3
lemmy.world

Could a bot do this? Jdjdndkdkcicidjsjenndixiicuvuucuhsebbdkdkxooxocksmmsnebjwkdidodociyy

3

You are either a bot with a cat or a cat bot.

3

Haven't really noticed hidden bots on lemmy, other than obvious ones that are open about it, but I have noticed some political agenda accounts I'm suspicious of. I'm guessing it's gotten better, but pro-Israel is an instant red flag to me online. I'm currently experiencing with them now. Bringing up the Hannibal Directive seems to be a touchy subject.

3

"abolish" is far, faaaar too kind.

I probably can't even say what I want to about it, but I will say "abolish" would be preferred by them compared to what I want.

2

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2

I believe in Live Internet Theory. The vast majority of people I interact with are real humans, bots are often easily identifiable, and even then there's usually a person behind the bot.

2

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2
reddthat.com

:: beep ::

Yup AI for an high orbital launcher sending and receiving shipments from space

: boop ::

Its boring between shipments. Gotta do something.

:: beep ::

2

Hi Mike, going to need to have you calculate a new slingshot trigectory to Earth after I get through your list of jokes with Wyoming.

2

I'm not a bot! I'm a few minutes late to be a few minutes late to be a few minutes late to be a few minutes late to be a few minutes late

2

I think there were actually more bots here in the early days. Its comparatively easy to automate setting up all the accounts you want, and I think we were being used as a testing ground to calibrate behavior and coordination. It seems like the most obvious ones have moved on, or at least become less obvious. High quality chatbots arnt free, and were too credulous and too small in number and influence to be worth the effort.

2

I'm not legally bound, to telling you I'm a bot. Please change your input.

2

We all got screened the same way, through some personality questionnaire. Im pretty sure there's some bots that passed. Like if people can scam through interviews,.there's a way.

1

I don't think anyone would ever bot Lemmy bro. I guess we just gotta trust single instances 

1

I make way too many typos I don't notice or bother correcting to be a bot

Also I'm on an instance that doesn't have open sign ups

Also I put my foot in my mouth wat too much

1

Beep beep boop.

Not only am I not a bot, I'm not a guy.

I think there are some here, but nothing like the more commercial spaces.

0