Poll: Do you think there are bots on Sanctioned Suicide that actually post on here?

[noname223]

I read Slavoj Zizek and his dead internet theory. I really like him. And he is very thoughtful.

There are crawler bots on here. Most of them as guests. But are there actually bots with accounts? Maybe bots that post on here? What do you think is the motive of the people behind the bots?

Personally, I am not sure. Maybe this all too much of a conspiracy theory. But that there are bots behind some accounts doesn't seem fully impossible. I am not sure whether they would actually post on here. How could one spot them?

I really like this forum. And the discussions on here. It is a unique place. Maybe it is this unique because in contrast to social media and other forums there are less bots on here?

 

[sakakap]

I'm not sure whether there's a big enough incentive on sasu but larger social media sites (e.g. youtube, twitter, instagram, reddit and especially facebook) are absolutely rife with them. Nowadays it's ridiculously inexpensive to operate a swarm of accounts and the possible monetary gain or cultural influence is enormous. It was already worth it for nation states in the past and now with AI being good enough to be able to impersonate a real person it has only gotten cheaper and more effective.

 

[Wrath]

Forums with user accounts that you can click on and see what they've posted in the past are usually better for figuring out bots. It definitely makes the forum feel more alive. I've been on other forums too where they ban bots on sight and have good moderation and the feeling is similar to here too. The relatively small userbase makes it easy to weed out bots, and given the nature of the forum most users don't really stick around more than a few months or at most a handful of years.

I don't really have a concrete methodology on bot-finding or whatever, but usually inconsistencies between posts would be a decent indicator. Though on this forum I wouldn't use that metric, because some users will purposefully mix up their posts/life stories just a little bit so that even if someone who knows us reads the post they won't be able to notice that it is us because there will be too many differing details. Since the poster is the only one who knows what parts of what they choose to share are real.

 

[RosebyAnyName]

Yes there's scraping bots, but I haven't really seen anyone here who posts like an AI. I've seen people make posts where they clearly indicate that they used AI to write about a certain topic, but I haven't seen accounts that are themselves entirely run by AI. I think the screening process for sasu has helped prevent AI posters.

I recall one specific user here has been accused of being an AI due to their repetitive posts, but it was disproven since they've been here for longer than generative AI got popular, and upon further inspection their posts aren't really like what an AI would write.

Usually when I look for AI posts, they share the following features: 1. generic account name, 2. very wordy and long posts, especially if it's broken into multiple long paragraphs (AIs are usually discouraged from being vague, so they tend to over-correct and be wordy) 3. very repetitive content, both within the same paragraph and even across different threads (because of point 2), 4. odd vocabulary, usually overtly formal or combines formal and informal vocab in a way that doesn't make sense for a human (again because of point 2). 5. ok this will sound stupid in this context, but AI also likes to write lists and use bullet points, but usually it will be formatted properly instead of what I'm doing right now. Most real posters online rarely use bullet points or numbered lists unless it makes sense, Chat GPT I find especially loves its bullet point lists.

If anyone wants to learn how to identify AI, check out Reddit. That website is swarming with bots.

 

[MyShadow]

It was already worth it for nation states in the past and now with AI being good enough to be able to impersonate a real person it has only gotten cheaper and more effective.

This one statement scares me to my guts

 

[Ilovemycats]

Personally I didn't see any bots on here- though I did make a account here recently so perhaps that's why.

But I agree with other people here that bigger sites have a lot more of those bots. Look at Facebook for example, it's almost entirely made out of bots who talk to each other.