We Tried to Detect Bots in 500 Comments. We Found a More Interesting Problem.

[usonian]

https://www.musubilabs.ai/post/ai-comment-detection-what-we-found

Thoughtful.

I'll just quote this observation.

My first realization that things were about to get really weird was last year, when a Reddit user blogged about reading a Reddit post lamenting the death of authentic online interaction – only to discover it was written by a bot selling AI-generated books through an affiliate link. Hundreds of commenters engaged with it sincerely. The author couldn't tell which of them were real either.

We're seeing this trend in every online space with user generated content - contributions became cheap, and the cost is moving downstream onto the people trying to read, review, and maintain.

Many platforms have built ranking systems that reward engagement. A bot comment that says "Spot on, couldn't agree more" counts as engagement and boosts the post. The poster benefits from visibility and has little reason to report it. The platform benefits because it looks like activity. In the short term, the reader is mainly the one who loses – but as the integrity and quality of the platform starts to fail, everyone does.

The model that incentivizes platforms to produce empty engagement at scale isn't sustainable. A feed full of plausible-sounding noise trains readers to skim, mute, or leave. The scarce resource online is no longer content. Platforms succeed by building trust through consistent judgement, curation, and protecting attention.

Mods!

[Attilatheblond]

1. Vapid R US*

*New motto of the United States?

[erronis]

13. It's infecting the rest of the world, too.

Perhaps less so for regimes with tight internet security/firewalls.

[Flo Mingo]

2. Guess that explains why.....

Ads on social media with super generic top comments like: I tried this and it was great. Or Just got mine and I love it.

[usonian]

4. Bot or not? Hard to tell when people act like bots.

[AZJonnie]

3. The ones that are likely to put their foot down on something like this will be advertisers

Advertisers expect to pay rates based on actual eyeballs/real people with money to spend. As non-human, BS bot posts on a platform rise as a % of total, it will lead to the advertiser's conversion rates on these ads falling lower and lower. This will lead to them be less willing to pay what the website is asking to advertise on them.

On today's internet, there's so much end-to-end tracking of the whole advertising/engagement/conversion process that the advertisers have means by which to determine whether it's likely a particular provider has an inordinate amount of bot-posts simply because their ads there are underperforming (not leading to conversions). So the people who run the sites DO have an incentive to cut back on the BS level because they're not going to get away with misrepresenting their 'traffic' (which bots contribute to) forever.

[CrispyQ]

5. Am I the only one who would like to know exactly what a bot is?

Is there a real human at the end, somewhere? How many accounts do they manage? Do they have to type each response in manually, or is there a program to do it?

Or, are these accounts run by a computer or AI, & how exactly does that work?

[usonian]

8. Let me count the ways! There are so many.

Here, we are talking about social bots.

Short (from WIkipedia)

An Internet bot (also called a web robot or robot), or simply bot, is a software application that runs automated tasks (scripts) on the Internet, usually with the intent to imitate human activity, such as messaging, on a large scale

Many just go out and grab content for AI (large language models)

And there are auction bots (which is why I avoid auctions like the plague.) and trading bots, and attack bots (that clobber websites) and so on and so on.

More here

Lots more.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_bot

It's estimated that half the internet traffic at this point is bots, software agents, not humans (though humans initially program those agents/programs).

Some call the internet "dead" already on account of them.
https://builtin.com/articles/the-dead-internet-theory

[erronis]

14. Useful info. To add to the original question:

Is there a real human?
Not in the operation of the bot. It is usually totally automated by computer programs. These programs can interact with thousands of businesses (web sites such as DU) at the same time. The typing of information is done at computer speed - 100s of characters almost instantly.

Sometimes a human will augment the bot to supply information needed for the interaction.

The programs are initially written by human beings (and more recently by AI programming) but once they are unleashed they pretty much have full control.

[usonian]

16. On my university sysadmin job, I noticed that some systems timed you out quickly if you dawdled typing a password.

So I bitched to central services that it should be the opposite.

They should be rejecting FAST password entry, because an attacker (bot) often just repeatedly tries to log in to accounts using the most common "don't make me think" passwords (1) and slowing them down raises the cost of the attack versus the benefits.

Like these






(1) Here are some of the top 10
123456
admin
12345678
123456789
12345
password
1234567890
1234567
123123
111111

[erronis]

17. When I wrote web scrapers/spiders/whatever, I usually added random pauses

between interactions. And would try not to overload the host with my queries. Nowadays, I think all of this is passe.

Of course a lot of form filling on the web is now being done by password managers and browser remembered fields as well as control-paste operations. No delays in the inter-character typing there.

[usonian]

18. Some websites disable pasting passwords.

Which, of course, totally discourages long passwords, such as good practice demands and which password manager apps facilitate.

The internet is a soccer match where own goals predominate.

That part never changes.

[erronis]

19. You can get around that disabling pasting if you really want.

Usually it's enforced via JS on an enclosing element. Most times I can temporarily disable JS (Firefox extension), paste in the password, and then re-enable JS. I think there are extensions that specifically do this but I'm leery of adding a bunch of unknowns.

Sounds like you have quite a background in IT. Wanna exchange notes? (Mine goes back to to 60s.)

[usonian]

20. I did electronic and optical engineering to start. Built my own S-100 systems back in the day.

Engineering was on and off (aerospace) so I got into IT, running the Sun network at Berkeley Physics (a blast) but of course, money got tight, so I wandered off into finance (working in San Francisco "before" was another blast) and then to Sun Microsystems and then a nutball startup and later some consulting. A real mixed bag, usually the one person with all the responsibility and no budget.

I ran Sun and Macs at Berkeley, and those were my mainstays. Picked up on linux with the mac G3 laptop (Yellow Dog ran on it) and finally got into PC hardware, linux only. Windows at gunpoint for the startup though I ran the "real" computers there, a Sun rack for corporate services and developers.

I run a ton of Firefox extensions. The most fun is one or two or three Captcha solvers. When they work, fun to watch.

A small bit of programming, mostly scripting in various languages.

A Hypercard fanatic, I wrote scientific applications, complete with graphing and EPS output for Tech Pubs for bosses at the Big L. Have not revisited that though there are very capable clones out there and I have a MacOS9 emulator running with Hypercard inside. Just low priority right now. Hypercard preceded the internet with its linking mechanisms (and message passing) and if Steve had let it live and go cross-platform (he vetoed both) the internet would be a different place. It WAS Vibe Coding way back then, and with an instant GUI and built-in persistent database.

I was doing DTP on Atari's and Macs, while kicking out lab reports with grap, pic and troff for work.

Just missed a job at a small company that soon thereafter was acquired by Google. I look back at that miss as fortunate. I had many interviews at Apple and failed the age test.

[erronis]

21. Sounds a bit like my history --- I'll DM you so I won't clutter these airwaves.

[flvegan]

6. One nation controlled by the media

Information age of hysteria
It's calling out to idiot America

[usonian]

9. Orwell explained newspeak and why Big Brother has to rewrite history.

– George Orwell

1984. Part 2, Chapter 9. Winston reading from Emmanuel Goldstein’s book The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism.

------
The book within a book, "The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism" by the fictional Emmanuel Goldstein is available from the Internet Archive. (PDF)

https://dn721904.ca.archive.org/0/items/the-theory-and-practice-of-oligarchical-collectivism_202408/THE%20THEORY%20AND%20PRACTICE%20OF%20OLIGARCHICAL%20COLLECTIVISM.pdf

[muriel_volestrangler]

7. Seems worth pointing out who "Musabi Labs" are:

The leader in AI content moderation. Musubi upholds your community values with holistic, AI-enabled moderation, designed for social platforms and marketplaces.

I hope the OP article was human-written, but it does seem that their personal solution will be AI-based, whether or not it really helps.

[blubunyip]

12. sorry but

"holistic, AI-enabled moderation" ....

hmmm

[erronis]

15. Yup. "holistic" just raised another huge red flag.

[GreatGazoo]

10. the role of Bots and AI have set off a big debate around Reddit stock and earnings

User growth has been flat for a long time. CW is that their karma system is both gamed by AI and hostile to real users who can't compete with "karma farming" and fake posts that leverage LLMs and machine learning to generate high engagement fictions on subs like AITAH and AIO.

[Melon]

11. This is Reddit. Made up stories and fake emotion's

It such garbage. I have walked away from all of my accounts. It’s just all made up bs. Real users get banned frivolously for not having group think while bots post the same questions repeatedly to generate engagement. Reddit is horrible.