How do you all feel about bots?
I’ve seen a gpt powered summarization bot pop up recently. Do you find this useful? Do you hate this?
Do you think bots serve any useful purposes on this website or do you think we should ban all bots? Should we have a set of rules for how bots should interact - only when called, needing to explicitly call out they are a bot on their profile, etc?
I’d love to hear your thoughts
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There are most definitely some useful bots, like the recent tldr that I’ve encountered. I find them incredibly valuable. They should be used sparingly though.
“Fun” joke or game bots could be okay with if they were in specific communities that wanted them (which would be communities I’m not a part of, 😁), but not in general. I tend to be a purist and like to keep things as vanilla as possible.
The tldr bot has now been disabled as per the decision of Beehaw. Contact your favorite community mods if you’d like to change that.
Personally - I think any bot that could be straight Lemmy functionality shouldn’t exist but that said, I think good ground rules would be :
- Bots should be clearly prompted by a command
- Bots should not act in a community without mods from that community being contacted first
- Bots should minimize the space they take with their messages (Example: Info on how to contact its creator should be in the bot bio rather than in every message)
- Bots should say who made/hosts it
These rules seem great honestly. The main bot that comes to mind is the TL;DR bot, which one could easily prompt for in a post if they want a TL;DR, if those communities want to enable it for that specific community. Eventually, a list of promptable bots could pop up in one of the instances so that people know which bots are available to be prompted. Alternatively, someone could make a website to list them or something. I can see there being a healthy bot ecosystem forming based on people’s needs.
Since we have more control over the source code, I think eventually what would be nice are community plugins to replace some of the functionality of these bots. For example, a plugin could de-AMP a link, or could provide a banner indicating the rules on a post. If someone really wanted to, they could make a plugin to auto-generate summaries of articles too and include it somewhere in the UI. Since these rules are for Beehaw specifically, I don’t think bots which create new posts are that relevant, since there aren’t really any niche-specific communities (like a bot which posts changelogs for a game or something), just broad communities.
Any bots not clearly labelled as bots should be given a warning, then banned from the instance in my opinion. The bot setting exists for a reason, bypassing it indicates that the bot author is not willing to respect the rules of the communities the bot is posting in.
Do spoiler foldouts maintain their functionality across UIs, either directly or in essence (eg. popup instead)?
Part of me wishes that Lemmy also had spoilers that reveal in place, but foldout spoilers have some functionality that makes me appreciate having both on hand. I’d bet bots could benefit from using that to minimize visual space if we go through with it.
I also vote for these rules!
I agree - these seem to me like very common-sense rules.
I can see value in a summarization bot or an auto moderator so long as allowing some didn’t turn into a burden on the admin team on which ones to allow.
I think their value can easily be outweighed if there are too many bots providing no value.
If they’re informative and/or helpful, I don’t mind bots. If they’re those stupid pointless novelty bots that were plaguing Reddit, they can go away.
The grammar bots were so annoying! I love good grammar as much as anyone, but really, what help are we actually adding to the world with the they’re/their/there bots, the your/you’re bots, the payed/paid bots, etc. I really can’t imagine those changed anyone’s behavior or spelling.
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I’m not completely against those, they sometimes made me edit a comment, and can be educational to both native speakers and those learning the language.
However, it’s not nice to force them upon people, it should be each user’s choice whether they want those tips or not, so I’d say: maybe, but not for Beehaw (unless maybe for some “learn-[some_language]” community).
I like the bot that provides a piped link for YouTube.
I feel similarly for that Reddit bot that strips Amp links and posts a link explaining why Google’s amp links are terrible for the Internet.
I actually kinda really dislike that one, I don’t understand why it would be used rather than a link redirector extension in your browser.
It’s useful for mobile.
LibreTube, the client for Piped can also handle youtube links though
I still like it when viewing it on iOS. Link is there for those who need it.
It’s really useful. Especially for resharing with others outside of Lemmy.
Bots can be extremely useful and the flexibility of where and how bots could work was one of the things that made Reddit popular. Before, well, y’know.
Bespoke bots can also allow particular communities to develop local features or functionality. I assume Lemmy’s mod tools are fair bare bones right now too, so I suspect someone, somewhere is probably working on an automod toolkit.
Bots should be allowed, but must be flagged. I don’t know if it’s a default lemmy option, but the app I use has a toggle to hide bot accounts if you don’t want to see them.
That said, I would very much prefer if bots were restricted to just making comments rather than posts. Certain communities have bots that automatically post article links and they completely blanket feeds sorted by new until you block the account.
😅😅
I kinda wish the ALL feed could be a bit more intelligent. Also, sorry for gunking up your feed!
I’ve started an account on Mastodon recently, and really noticed the bot accounts. If you accidentally follow one of the extremely active bots, all your feed becomes their posts. I don’t think there’s enough people on the Fediverse just yet to be able to drown those bots out when they show up.
I think bots can have a place, but I prefer ones that have to be intentionally invoked. I’m thinking of ones like MTGCardFetcher on the Magic the Gathering subreddit, which would post links to the card on Scryfall if you formatted the card name in double brackets in your comment.
In my opinion, such bots indicate more of a need for some kind of easy “pipe” feature to integrate tools to transform a post before publishing, so that all of the tweaks can be done within the post instead of as a bot reply. For example, there could be a “MTG-ify” button that takes the text in the input box, turns the double bracketed names into CommonMark links, and then puts the modified text back into the input box.
Yeah I don’t disagree at all that it would be ideal if some of this kind of functionality could be built into the platform, but obviously that didn’t really happen at Reddit - which is why there were so many similar bots to allow subreddits to create extended functionality - and Lemmy is still new enough that contributors are still trying to fix major issues and get basic functionality working properly. In the meantime bots could fill some gaps, although I lean toward using them very sparingly.
Comment bots are mostly fine so long as they are clearly labelled, don’t take up unnecessary amounts of space, have clear purpose and add value to an article or discussion. So stuff like TLDR, Piped, Wiki bots are fine. Stuff like GROND, GPT (even though it’s cool we have a Masto feature that does that), Anakin, Musk bots aren’t useful here imo.
Post bots, I’m kind of on the side of I’d rather not see them, I like talking about articles with the user who posted it. I won’t be too upset if they end up allowed, though. A whitelist, or a strictly enforced guideline would be acceptable for me.
The TLDR bot has now been disabled as per the decision of Beehaw. Contact your favorite community mods if you’d like to change that.
Thanks, but “I’m fine with it” doesn’t necessarily mean I would miss it if it’s gone.
I like summary bots, summoned bots that serve a purpose, and meme bots if they stay in specific communities where they are expected to be. All bots should self identify.
I could be mistaken but doesn’t Lemmy just have a setting for the user to not see bot posts?
I also figure users can block specific bots if they don’t like them.
The summary bot has now been disabled as per the decision of Beehaw. Contact your favorite community mods if you’d like to change that.
Disappointing. There’s a number of reasonable bots and auto-tl;dr can be extremely useful for avoiding tracking and shady sites.
If we accept bots, I prefer those that can be summoned by the user, as it happens on Discord. If we accept bots either summoned or not by the user, they must be identified as such on their profiles.
But in no way I’ll accept bots that pretend to be a human user or that can interact in the same way a human user can, neither commenting nor posting nor voting.
I dislike content that has been auto-posted by bots. I treat it like spam instead of genuine content.
I would love to see a “bot” flag and a parameter on your profile to not show any “bot” content.
I guess people who make bots are scared that the Lemmy platforms would eventually stop seeing activity because of a lack of content. But I think that if there were little to no activity, perhaps people would be posting more. I doubt that flooding the platform with auto-generated content or auto-forwarded content actually helps with encouraging people to stay.
IIRC there is already a bot flag on profiles, though it relies on bot-makers manually setting it and as far as I’m aware you can’t automatically block all bot users (though I haven’t tried every single Lemmy app).
Bots like gramma and spelling bots should just gtfo. Every bot should be a genuine postitive improvement to a community or otherwise they shouldn’t exist.
I see corrections to my grammar or spelling as positive ;-;
I think a lot of how I interpret them is how they are written. On Reddit there’s a lot of GOTCHA style bots which insult the user for not knowing “perfect” grammar. However, I’ve seen some bots which actually try to explain and help out the user and couch their language in a way where it’s clearly meant to be helpful, especially to English as a second language learners, and I think there’s a huge gulf of acceptability between the two.
I tend to agree but that doesn’t mean we should see bots analysing every post and comment looking for these things either. Lemmy isn’t a school essay or a formal letter where these thing truly matter.
Personally, I come here to relax and discuss topics of interest, not be nitpicked over the posts and comments I make.
A platform like Lemmy is about communicating in a relaxed non-formal way with others. How you achieve that is fine and spelling mistakes etc don’t really matter. At the very least, such a bot should only be opt-in if you like it. Otherwise, leave the nitpicking to the teachers.
Realistically, spell-checking should happen at the comment authoring stage anyway. Given I don’t know how the Lemmy code works at all, I imagine checking for “they’re/their”, “would of/could of” &c. could be an optional UI feature rather than a bot.
I don’t think I have a strong opinion toward bots. They could get gimmicky and unnecessary, but I never felt like they detracted from my experience to a noteworthy degree. I don’t think I ever disliked bots too much on Reddit? But then again, I rarely liked or wanted bots, either. I have a loose leaning toward letting people reasonably experiment with how they interact with a platform online, but “bots” as in the kind of stuff I remember from Reddit seem like a relatively weak expression of that. If I had to put an opinion down, I’d say that I’m in favor of their continued presence with the caveat of some guidelines and defined best-practices. Otherwise, if I wake up one day to learn that bots are banned on Beehaw, admittedly I wouldn’t be all that bummed about it.
th3raid0r and Lionir seem to get pretty well at the kind of recommendations I’d like to see. Bots ideally should provide a meaningful contribution to communities. Bots should be clearly labelled and identifiable as such. Bot creators should have consent from the community’s moderators to have a bot interact within the community. The Cardinal Bee Nice applies here, perhaps to a greater degree: bots shouldn’t be used to fake engagement, impersonate people, commit technical attacks on the community, etc.
the_itsb also reminded me of another aspect: we may want to consider how active and populated a community is. Bots take up the attention and visual space of everyone else browsing a community and its discussions. It strikes me as a worst-case scenario, but I could imagine it’s possible for a bot overabundance to choke out legitimate conversation. That’s enough for me to start thinking twice about whether or not I have a loose stance on this.
Is anyone checking the AI “summariser” bot for accuracy? I’d rather not get misleading ideas in my head from a poor summary.
The bot has now been disabled as per the decision of Beehaw. Contact your favorite community mods if you’d like to change that.
To answer your question, yes, I am checking it for accuracy as I’m the author and I’d like it to be as useful as it can be. I’d say its summary is really helpful in 90+% of cases, the rest could be better and only once I’ve seen it post a summary that wasn’t helpful at all.
Thanks for this :)
No problem! Hopefully we’ll come to some agreement with Beehaw mods/admins, you can follow the (hopefully fruitful) discussion here: https://beehaw.org/comment/858784
Is someone checking human summarizers as well? I mean, humans make mistakes but also generally adds flavours, and can focus on things due to inherent bias. In fact, this is actually an area were bots can probably produce more factually correct and unbiased summaries than humans (depends on the quality of course).
The way past both is to actually read the article?
Erm, well, yes. That should happen too. Tends to in a good community with a range of views.
I asked a single question on a single facet of the current internet. For my own information, because I’ve found reading a range of articles about Chat GPT useful for understanding and beginning to form my own opinion on them. And rather than add any helpful information, you’ve gone down this tangent? 🤷♂️
Your “In fact” rebuttal, not needed btw, is technically true. I’m more interested in the current actual state of things with a particular bot, not a hypothetical.
Human-written posts differ in tone from the summary-bot. The bot “writes” more in the tone of an article, which tends to mean a tone of authority. That affects how the “facts” resurface in my memory. Maybe it works differently for the bright young things who’ve grown up with the internet. IDK 🤷♂️
Of course reading the articles is important. I don’t have the spoons to read every article I come across though. I know I don’t have much of a life, but still 😂 Scanning comments is a bit more like human interaction and I find that helpful in deciding whether or not to click through to the article.
And before anyone jumps in with “Then the summary bot will be really helpful to you”, please note that my question was about the accuracy of the bot and if anyone was gathering information. I will make my own observations over time but would also like to learn from others’.
Please keep the bots to a minimum.
Approved bots that the admins manually review the use cases for is absolutely fine.
I just don’t want things to revert back to reddit days where I’m constantly BLOCKING new novelty bots that are absolutely freaking useless and add nothing to a conversation.
Also; PLEASE; implement the following ideas into a(n) agreement/covenant for bot operators; I quote this directly from the Tao of IRC:
The master Nap then said: “Any automata should not speak unless spoken to. Any automata shall only whisper when spoken to.”
This philosophy makes sense for IRC, but how would this work on Beehaw/Lemmy? You have to DM a bot to interact with it? How would people even know it exists? In IRC there is a list of users in the channel you can scan for helpful bots. I’m failing to see the equivalent with Lemmy.
