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It's likely this is a bot if it's wide spread. And Lemmy is INCREDIBLY ill suited to handle even the dumbest of bots from 10+ years ago. Nevermind social media bots today.
To be fair, it's virtually impossible to tell whether a text was written by an AI or not. If some motivated actor is willing to spend money to generate quality LLM output, they can post as much as they want on virtually all social media sites.
The internet is in the process of eating itself as we speak.
You don't analyze the text necessary, you analyze the heuristics, behavioral patterns, sentiment....etc It's data analysis and signal processing.
You, as a user, probably can't. Because you lack information that the platform itself is in a position to gather and aggregate that data.
There's a science to it, and it's not perfect. Some companies keep their solutions guarded because of the time and money required to mature their systems & ML models to identify artificial behavior.
But it requires mature tooling at the very least, and Lemmy has essentially none of that.
yes of course there are many different data points you can use. along with complex math you can also feed a lot of these data points in machine learning models and get useful systems that can perhaps red flag certain accounts and then have processes with more scrutiny that require more resources (such as a human reviewing)
websites like chess.com do similar things to find cheaters. and they (along with lichess) have put out some interesting material going over some of what their process looks like
here i have two things. one is that lichess, which is mostly developed and maintained by a single individual, is able to maintain an effective anti-cheat system. so I don't think it's impossible that lemmy is able to accomplish these types of heuristics and behavioral tracking
the second thing is that these new AIs are really good. it's not just the text, but the items you mentioned. for example I train a machine learning model and then a separate LLM on all of reddit's history. the first model is meant to try and emulate all of the "normal" human flags. make it so it posts at hours that would match the trends. vary the sentiments in a natural way. etc. post at not random intervals of time but intervals of time that looks like a natural distribution, etc. the model will find patterns that we can't imagine and use those to blend in
so you not only spread the content you want (whether it's subtle product promotion or nation-state propaganda) but you have a separate model trained to disguise that text as something real
that's the issue it's not just the text but if you really want to do this right (and people with $$$ have that incentive) as of right now it's virtually impossible to prevent a motivated actor from doing this. and we are starting to see this with lichess and chess.com.
the next generation of cheaters aren't just using chess engines like Stockfish, but AIs trained to play like humans. it's becoming increasingly difficult.
the only reason it hasn't completely taken over the platform is because it's expensive. you need a lot of computing power to do this effectively. and most people don't have the resources or the technical ability to make this happen.
$20 for a chatgpt pro account and fractions of pennies to run a bot server. It's really extremely cheap to do this.
I don't have an answer to how to solve the "motivated actor" beyond mass tagging/community effort.
openAI has checks for this type of thing. They limit number of requests per hour with the regular $20 subscription
you'd have to use the API and that comes at a cost per request, depending on which model you are using. it can get expensive very quickly depending on what scale of bot manipulation you are going for
Yep, any operation runs the risk of getting caught by OpenAI.
See this article of it happening:
https://openai.com/index/disrupting-a-covert-iranian-influence-operation/
Heuristics, data analysis, signal processing, ML models...etc
It's about identifying artificial behavior not identifying artificial text, we can't really identify artificial text, but behavioral patterns are a higher bar for botters to get over.
The community isn't in a position to do anything about it the platform itself is the only one in a position to gather the necessary data to even start targeting the problem.
I can't target the problem without first collecting the data and aggregating it. And Lemmy doesn't do much to enable that currently.
But something like Reddit at least potentially has the resources to throw some money at the problem. They can employ advanced firewalls and other anti-bot/anti-AI thingies. It's very possible that they're pioneering some state-of-the-art stuff in that area.
Lemmy is a few commies and their pals. Unless China is bankrolling them, they're out of their league.
Ur a bot. I can tell by the ~~pixels~~ unicode.
Edit: joking aside you bring up a good point and our security through ~~anonymity~~ cultural irrelevance will not last forever. Or maybe it will.
Unfortunately it won't, assuming Lemmy grows.
Lemmy doesn't get targeted by bots because it's obscure, you don't reach much of an audience and you don't change many opinions.
It has, conservatively, ~0.005% (Yes, 0.005%, not a typo) of the monthly active users.
To put that into perspective, theoretically, $1 spent on a Reddit has 2,000,000x more return on investment than on Lemmy.
All that needs to happen is that number to become more favorable.