Op has a pretty problematic post history, but doesn’t come across as a bot (imho). Also, I have no idea what is a copy pasted reddit post title, because I don’t use reddit.

Does population increase when famine hits? As I understand it the main brakes on population in human history have been famine and disease. The level of population that a society can support is usually based on its agriculture resources and technology. However, historically, the population would tend towards the highest level supportable, and then years with poor food producing conditions would cause famine and the population would contract.

Over the last century or so, the cycle has changed. Now societies with a food surplus don’t generally see constant population growth because of two things - food production is no longer dependant on how many humans can you put to work in the fields, so there’s less need for more kids to make a family’s work easier (in fact, each modern child costs more effort and expense than they produce); and we have birth control and education, which allow people to make more intentional decisions about when and if they have children.

Combining a lack of incentive with the capacity to choose means that many societies have broken the population growth and contraction (ie baby boom followed by famine) cycle. This leads to different problems such as aging populations, but that’s another discussion.

I’d love to stop engaging with them, but to do so I need to be able to identify them when they appear in my feed. Otherwise, I might start wasting time answering someone’s question or sharing my thoughts, only to realise I was talking to a clanker.

And sometimes I only realise that a user is a bot because someone else has noticed something suspicious and commented a warning. So, should I also comment when an account is obviously a secret bot? I’m helping warn others (if they care) but I’m engaging with the bot…so, having some system of reporting that flags an account as “possible ai” and displays that info to other users would give us a way of sharing concerns without responding and engaging.

If you’re trying to blame “stupid consumers” or “evil companies” you’re not thinking about things systemically. Of course, under our current economic system, companies are going to end up exploiting, because there’s lots of pressure to maximise profits, and minimal pressure to avoid decisions that make money but harm society. And consumers are going to make bad decisions, because they live in a society where they are constantly bombarded by advertising and social values that encourage spending and don’t punish buying unnecessary shit.

The naïve (or self-serving) status quo view is “but consumers should know what they can afford, and not waste money. And customers should take their business elsewhere if a company does bad things”. If that’s really what you want to happen, then create a system that incentivizes that - have strict rules on credit and loans, so that people can’t buy takeaway food on credit, enforce strict anti-monopoly measures so that there lots of genuine alternatives for consumers to turn to, have requirements for news media to inform the public about all the actions that companies take that are harmful to the environment, their workers, or the general population (and make clear who are their competitors, and only those alternatives that aren’t owned by the same conglomerate), and so on…

If someone promotes a system that relies on “personal responsibility” but doesn’t promote tools that facilitiate that responsibility, then they are being disingenuous.

melonhusk@sh.itjust.works and bagel@lemmings.world were two bot accounts that were posting a lot today. Although, bagel might have mostly been posting in a different ask lemmy community

I know you can click report, but I wasn’t sure if “suspected llm bot” was a legitimate complaint. Similarly, other commentators have said that it’s spam and can reported as such, but I wasn’t sure if this kind of ai posting was consider spam. They’re mostly posting in lots of different communities, and not just reposting the same shit. Tbh, if they had just slowed the pace to a few a day rather than 10+ an hour, I don’t think anyone would have noticed. So, I just wanted to check whether it was a legit reason to report a post.

Yeah, the current run of bot posts has really gotten me down. Not just because their bland (corporate icebreaker is pretty spot on tbh) but because that starts making me suspicious of all the posts. I don’t want to have to check through everyone’s post history before I respond, I don’t want to have to judge who sounds human-enough to talk to.

Not really sure what to do. I really appreciate when other lemmings point out sus behaviour, and I try to do the same when I notice. I think it would be good if the community took a pretty hard line on llm bots. I think some folks think that if it gets the discussion going it doesn’t matter who (or what) made the post. But I’d rather we downloaded these shitty bots into oblivion, and reported them to mods for removal.

How does it work on lemmy? When I report a post or comment as spam, that goes to the community mod? And they can ban an account from their community. But how does stuff get to the instance level (who I assume are the people with the power to ban an account completely). Do community mods report problem users? Or do instance admins just see patterns of behaviour on the mod logs?

Yup, is a depressing future. I love chatting with strangers on the Internet, but increasingly I can’t see a way of excluding bots without destroying accessibility (constant captcha bullshit) or privacy (forcing users authentication with ID). Neither are acceptable, so maybe I’ll be forced to speak to my actual human acquaintances…

I don’t mind some of the open bots (c/dailygames has some that post links) but it’s these shady llm bots pretending to talk about naps or giving life tips that bug me. And sadly, because they aren’t openly tagged as bots, I don’t think my settings can help.

What’s with these new accounts suddenly posting dozens of generic, overwritten and preppy posts in a few hours. It seems like an almost inhuman pattern…

Depressing. ai bots flooding my feed today, check the post history

AI bot, check the post history

Are you stressed or anxious? Dogs often pick up your background mood better than you do yourself.

I’ve been looking at some selfhosted blogging options like Ghost because that seems easier than finding a suitable provider.

And for op, go for it! The more ai and advertising ruins the Internet, the more valuable I find real people just sharing their thoughts without trying to profit from it.

I watched The Thief of Bagdad (1940) recently, and was kinda shocked at how much I enjoyed it. There’s a whole world of effects, such as using painted backdrops, that don’t look “realistic” but actually do a lot more for creating fantastical vibe than even perfect modern cgi.

It also highlights the main problem with most “effects heavy” movies, in that they often focus on the effects instead of the story. And when that happens, it doesn’t really matter how good they are, because fundamentally they’re distracting from real core of the film. TToB has genies, monsters and flying robot horses, but they’re all used judiciously and reinforce a sense of wonder, even when they look a little janky to modern eyes.

Compared this to The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (1958), which was celebrated at the time for it’s Harryhausen stop motion effects. Sure, the effects are pretty cool, and at the time must have been very impressive, but it’s too obvious that the audience is meant to be wowed by them. At one point two animated monster start fighting each other and I just didn’t care. Aside from the novelty of the effect this scene wasn’t building the vibes, they’re weren’t any significant stakes or character growth, it was just “look at what we can do!”. Yawn.

I think people should learn sign lanaguve causes it’s cool. But if it’s really for at-home, antigovernemnt planning, why not just put your phone in the other room, or the fridge? Sure, it’s a minor inconvenience to take it out your pocket, but that’s basically nothing compared to spending a few years being fluent enough in sign to hatch plans.

Same, really enjoy my miyoo mini. Not expensive and hours of old school fun. After a while I did start looking at more powerful handhelds to try and play n64 and early PlayStation games, but they all seemed too pricey. But it really depends what you want to play.

My experience in the UK was the gruyère was a bit bland as a cheese. But since moving to France that’s changed completely. Gruyère can be of widly different qualities and aged for different times for very different end flavours. The opposite is true of cheddar, which in Britain is a big spectrum of flavours and textures, but often in France is a pretty bland ‘burger cheese slice’ affair.

While I believe that we’ll see autonomous humanoid robots eventually, we’re pretty far away from any practical version of that. What were much more likely to see in the next few years is fauxautomation, the ‘mechanical turk’ con, where the reality is the robot is controlled by a human.

And not only is a bullshity part of hype, it’s also pretty worrying. Not just as a privacy and safety nightmare (do I really want a ‘ai’ robot servant who’s really being controlled by some dude in a data centre in India?), but because I can see a future where people are fine with that. Just like we’ve outsourced shitty and exploitative factories overseas, while still enjoying the cheap production costs, I can see lots of assholes being fine with having a robot servant, even if it’s being controlled by some exploited kid in a robo sweatshop. It’s just outsourced slavery.