r/technology • u/Adventurous_Row3305 • 17h ago

Artificial Intelligence People are rejoicing about the removal of Russian bots from social media – but the truth is far more complicated

https://www.the-independent.com/tech/bots-russia-x-facebook-meta-bluesky-twitter-b3065172.html
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u/kristamine14 16h ago

“The truth is more complicated” and then it’s just that hahaha

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u/MultiGeometry 16h ago

I would argue that even if that’s the case we’d do just fine without that. Any bot that doesn’t identify themselves as a bot is a massive problem.

The only bots I see are the ones that convert Celsius to Fahrenheit (or similar). If there are bots injecting good information about vaccine hesitancy, well, cool. But I’m completely blind to that because they don’t identify themselves.

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u/Memerandom_ 15h ago

Same for all AI content. It all needs watermarks and an easy to follow digital trail.

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u/horst555 12h ago

the funny thing, even the AI companys want the watermark. because without it there ai would train on ai slop and would loop into even more slop and don't become better like they want XD

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u/Memerandom_ 12h ago

Ya well, let's see how well they police themselves, now that it's been made a 'moral obligation' by the highest IQ president in the history of the "unites states".

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u/petmama 12h ago

All of this happens through regulations, the thing all republicans and MAGAts are always screaming about how it’ll restrict their freedoms.

Regulations are designed to keep the dumb-dumbs safe but they, lacking the capacity to formulate their own thoughts, fill their heads with the propaganda the right pushes that it’s the liberals trying to take their rights, freedoms, guns, religion, so on and so forth, blah, blah, blah, away. Fear propaganda has worked and I’m tired boss.

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u/Memerandom_ 11h ago

This is absolutely why tRump only recently moved from zero regulations to let them regulate themselves. Disinformation only stands to benefit him as long as he is in control of the rule makers. Tech needs to be resigned in, like yesterday, like 30 years ago. Like back when we went after Microsoft with antitrust suits just for bundling IE with Windows.

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u/Ok-Care-7132 9h ago

waiting for, "ai are people too, my friend" from these scumbags

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u/cognizant-ape 8h ago

I asked a corporation, it said yes.

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u/linerva 5h ago

They've started banning being mean to the AI so we're getting there.

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u/MultiGeometry 8h ago

Also, regulations can grant, restore, or protect free. Right to repair? Thats a huge win for farmers but woe is me, why aren’t we thinking of the C-Suite at John Deere?

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u/GenuinelyBeingNice 8h ago

Won't help. Situation is already fubar. People will parrot LLM/GPT info.

It's a literal cognitohazard. As in, it infects, it spreads.

My prediction is that in the not-so-far future, books that can be trivially proven to be 100% original, unaltered from before 2020, will be more valuable than antimatter.

How do you know what you just read wasn't from a bot? How do you know I haven't been unknowingly influenced by a bot (i am certain i have been)? What is our ground truth, now?

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u/Hardass_McBadCop 7h ago

That's not really good enough. These things can already output any image you want, indistinguishable from reality. Very soon there won't be a way to differentiate between an image that's real and one that's been cooked up by AI, sans watermark.

There's no substitute for proof of humanity. That's what we need to work on: A protocol that proves humanity, while also maintaining user anonymity.

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u/gooblaka1995 13h ago

This is why I like UraharaBot in the Bleach subreddit. At the end of every comment it always says something like, "Beep boop, I'm a bot!"

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u/Inf229 10h ago

Would love to see all bots on here clearly marked as one. Like an icon next to their name. Reckon it'd be enlightening just how many there are

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u/linerva 5h ago

Current estimates were as many as 40-60% of some subs:

https://www.clrn.org/how-much-of-reddit-is-bots/

Makes sense that news and politics has the most, because that's where disinformation has the most effect.

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u/Broadband- 11h ago

It doesn't matter anymore. Broadcasting yourself as a bot and following specific site rules hampers your end goal.

Same way the "do not track" option has been removed from most web browsers because sites didn't honor it whatsoever.

Goes both ways I guess.

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u/RollingMeteors 9h ago

Any bot that doesn’t identify themselves as a bot is a massive problem.

Any human that doesn’t have a public key pinned to their profile and use it to sign comments semi regularly is a solution to that problem.

Bots signing their own keys will leave footsteps to the fact they are a bot, and can be blocked.

I hope this is the incident that causes block lists to not just be a thing but be the default thing.

People claim you’re building an echo chamber by silencing individuals not legitimately contributing to the conversation.

I simply disagree.

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u/kobayashi_maru_fail 10h ago

Haiku bot is kinda nice, too.

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u/MultiGeometry 8h ago

I also like the bot that points out that a post has each word in ascending order in the alphabet.

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u/Fallingdamage 13h ago

Back to early 2000's internet where bots were few and far between. Somehow the internet existed then and was a lot more man-made.

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u/Snoo-76726 10h ago

Agree. Social media sites posts by bots need an api key and should be tagged as bots. Ideally identified by beneficial owner (eg not by an intermediary). Having an option to filter all bot accounts or ones that post more than x messages. Sure there are complications but given the bullshit about verifying normal users no way it can be done for bot users. Oh, other than it might diminish profits

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u/tendingthemild 14h ago

Silent in the thread, one converts degrees for free. The rest wear no name.

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u/facebones0316 12h ago

Well done

I guess no haiku bots here

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u/ptear 14h ago

What temperature do you want to convert?

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u/FunkaholicManiac 8h ago

Disinfo bots should be banned!

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u/enixlinked 5h ago

Rotten apples and such. I don't care how good or neutral these scripts can be. Bad ones do far more damage

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u/robisodd 11h ago

However, bots are used for plenty of good or morally neutral purposes, too. One of the key contributors to such bot traffic is “crawlers”, which scan the internet to gather up data. That can be used to update search engines or to collect data that can be used to train artificial intelligence systems

and that's it. "plenty"

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u/waiting4singularity 9h ago

aka "things wasting yotabytes of bandwith per year to make billionaires more money"

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u/windowpanez 15h ago

Gotta give both side's a fair chance to give their opinion! /s

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u/SweaterSteve1966 15h ago

A bot farm has 10,000 of the same opinion.

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u/CalmButOftenEnraged 12h ago

clearly good and moral bots not allowed to run anywhere other than russian data centers

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u/PurpEL 14h ago

FAR more complicated lol

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u/protipnumerouno 10h ago

For real, web crawlers to index websites for search!?! That used to be important before the tech bros distilled the internet to a dozen websites

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u/bill_klondike 10h ago

It really is so “well, actually”. Web crawlers are bots technically but they’re not what people mean when they complain about bots.