I built this tool primarily to identify AI writing in articles and posts but it's proven useful for comments/responses too: https://tropes.fyi/vetter
"Respond within 4-12 hours."
"Do not respond between midnight and 6am EST." (Or CET, whatever makes sense.)
Right now the most obvious traits are the well-known ones that are hard for most LLMs to shake off. Em-dashes, word choices, and the very limited ways in which they structure sentences. Terseness and conciseness is also a tell, which sucks.
They don't do that because spams are their means to achieve something else, specifically to get rid of left wing tech anime porn otakus. The comedy of that is that they've been attempting this by complicating the system, which is like reverse chemotherapy that are nicer to cancer tissues than to the body so that cancer grows faster. I guess they take that as a win as it's a positive action with positive reaction albeit with negative amounts in lieu of negative action with negative reaction with a positive amount.
What's really going to be nice is Twitter transferred to someone else. That will at least stop the stupidity of reverse chemotherapy.
https://devcommunity.x.com/t/update-to-reply-behavior-in-x-a...
> Moving forward, replies via the API will only be permitted if the replier has been explicitly summoned by the original post’s author. This means: The original author @mentions the replying user/account in their post, or The original author quotes a post from the replying user/account.
Google has spent billions trying to distinguish bots from users. And has been largely unsuccessful n
I've noticed that I've recently (had the urge to and) spent a lot more time with people in real life, not sure if there is a causative effect. The illusion of social interaction on the internet is fading.
When I look at sites like Reddit I have a strong feeling, at least with some of the bigger subs, that there's definitely a substantial percentage of bots talking to each other there. More on some subs, less on others. Definitely on the political ones.
> AI-generated replies really are the scourge of Twitter these days. Anyone know if it's from packaged solutions being sold as a product or if it's people mainly rolling their own custom reply-bots
> ... and I just found out the category name for this is "reply guy" tools which is so on the nose it hurts
(You can confirm this by Google searching "reply guy service".)
I read the whole thread and there's no joke here.
AI-generated replies from bots really are the scourge of HN these days.
Anyone know if it's from packaged solutions being sold as a product or if it's people mainly running their own custom Claws?
https://amp.knowyourmeme.com/memes/reply-guy
The joke is that the people selling this software picked that as the name for what whey are selling, either missing or leaning into the negative connotations that are attached to that term.
1. Get more followers. A lot of people see follower count as a goal that matters to them. Replying to high follower counts may earn you a follow from them or from someone reading their replies who doesn't catch that you are a bot.
2. Establish account credibility. Does Twitter's algorithm rank posts higher from accounts that have a long history of engaging with other accounts? I don't know for sure, neither do they but they may believe it's worth trying anyway.
3. Accounts for sale. There's a market for used Twitter accounts with plenty of realistic looking activity. Maybe these spammers are building inventory.
I still don't understand why people use his platform and give him power he has, and we have seen that he is using that to reduce children's access to food, promote people who are examples of no ethics whatsoever and is actively working on destroying numerous democracies by spreading propaganda from right wing.
One thing giving him power to do this are users of his platforms, and anyone still on Twitter is contributing to this.
The problem is that he doesn't care about the money, so he can fuel his rage bait machine as long as he wants which would be normally not possible.
FML we better develop social norms around this asap because this fuckin blows
AI in the middle makes colleagues more tolerable if you didn't really get along with them well originally.
If I wanted to read chatbot output I can do that. We both have the same enterprise chatbot…
The more determined salesmen last for 3-4 emails, but most drop off after 2 or so.
Especially for my parents who are getting targeted like crazy by telemarketers
Basically a way to see on every web page whether an actual human (or more) in your network has vouched for the content to be written by a person.
This raises a rats nest of issues, but will we be able to avoid this necessity?
So... you can't win.
I wonder if it is possible at all to have anonymity without admitting bots.
The reasons why Youtube and Discord are so gung ho on age verification might be because these companies that sell ads and data have a monetary incentive for distinguishing humans from bots for their investors and shareholders.
If I were to chose I'd rather have a bot infested internet than a mass surveillance dystopia.
Those are probably replies crafted by non-English speaking scammers from India / Russia / China.
There's probably a whole sea of undetectable replies from people who know how to prompt the models properly.
a great link to share around !
now ive been wondering - what is the polite way to exit a conversation when it becomes obvious that your fellow interlocutor is merely a chunk of electric meat redirecting the output of sam altman? im talking blatantly obvious eg. 'its not x, its y' multiple times in the same paragraph.
But personally, if I get value out of a conversation, I will continue. If I don't, I'll stop responding. Whether or not the other side is an AI is only relevant if I think I'm building some kind of rapport or friendship with someone. Otherwise what matters is if the comments makes me think, or makes me want to write something. If only AI bots were reading the comments, that would be a bigger issue than if the specific comment I'm replying to is AI-written.
> a great link to share around !
I find it odd that, when it comes to natural language, we all agree that the LLM is stuck in an uncanny valley, yet no one is acknowledging that the code it generates has a similar alien feel to it.
The bots are going to win this war. I'm not sure of the implications of what this means though.
- "control plane", a media ecosystem where everything could be fake
- "ground plane", in-person gatherings and demonstrations, which are much harder to fake but have extremely limited access to information and are easily suppressed
Kinda similar to the ye olde newsgroup custom of replying "plonk" when you add someone to your killfile.
There was a really interesting talk given by Mathias Shindler (long time editor of German Wikipedia) at the 39C3 conference about this topic a few months back that is worth a watch for anyone interested in the issue: https://youtu.be/fKU0V9hQMnY
This is a complex problem. But the first step of that problem is Twitter/X
Avoid it, and the next step toward a solution may be easier.
What is the key combo to make an emdash?
On a phone keyboard, sure, it's as hard as an accent sign (á, for example), difficult but not twrrible. But on a keyboard? Yeah, no one is typing in Alt combos when literally any other construction will do.
If you made 50.000 AI slop comments then it would be possible to prosecute and PROVE it in court.
Just because it's hard doesn't mean that we should accept it.
The same goes with CHEATERS using AI at universities.
If caught with solid evidence: it should be like 5 years in jail. That would stop 90% of CHEATERS.
