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Okay okay I wasn’t going to post this on HN yet but… If you own a Discourse forum then you can visit https://engageusers.ai https://engageusers.ai and generate

• metry 4y ago
  The point of creating a forum is to socialize with others, right?
• nvy 4y ago
  So is this, like, astroturfing as a service? >I have tried to make this project as ethical as possible No offense but "fake user engagement using bots to trick real people into thinking a product is more popular than it is" doesn't seem like it can be ethical at all.
  • EGreg 4y ago
    Yes and no. The bots are CLEARLY LABELED AS BOTS, for anyone who cares to look, and invite you to https://engageusers.ai https://engageusers.ai to get a bot / forum of your own. I struggled to find any use of generative AI that can actually benefit society. Most AI seems to simply make things worse the more widely it is deployed. It simply makes fake stuff cheap to do at scale — meaning it wasn’t done with intent by its author, but you are meant to think it was. In the wrong hands, AI can even design super-viruses that kill most of humanity. Less apocalyptically, can lead to botswarms of GPT-4-powered bots creating a ton of fake content everywhere, secretly and surreptitiously, and then deployed to destroy reputations or promote fake news or an agenda. The least harmful use of AI that I could think is this. People already pay their teams to hang out on their own forums and astroturf, not because they organically want to engage so much bcut because they are paid to welcome users, moderate forums etc. Club event organizers pay promoters and attractive ladies to come get free drinks and make it seem that the club is full of attractive and well-to-do people, then sell bottle service. Dating sites prepopulate their site with fake profiles to boostrap their initial customer base, because when each person comes and sees no one, they leave. Everyone already did this, they just begged their team to astroturf. Now it can be done with bots. You can’t have usernames like “KKK”. You can’t write your own prompts. The bots goal is just to kickstart discussion and explore a topic so when a person comes, they see content they might want to respond to, rather than a sad lonely forum with no participation. MOREOVER, we do not support infiltrating other people’s platforms with bots. We instead make it so the OWNER of the forum welcomes the bots AND chooses what they post.
    • LastTrain 4y ago
      I believe that you believe… [Edit no I take that back if you are clever enough to do this you sure as hell understand the ethical issues involved] but the owner of the forum is not the one subject to the unethical scam that is being run, it is the users of the forum.
      • EGreg 4y ago
        Look I am sure you are clever too. Which is why I am surprised how you could have ignored literally every point I wrote! Let me try again — address every point below please… 1) Scams involve deception. If the bots are labeled as bots, what is the deception? 2) What you describe as a scam has been done by nearly EVERY SINGLE FORUM since forums began. The owner simply begged soem friends or paid some group of workers to “man the forum”. It wasn’t organic except in extremely rare circumstances, because the Nth person encountering a ghost town would bounce, and by induction the N+1st person. No forum owner would want to burn through many users for nothing. They have been doing this “scam” with practically every forum, now they can do it with bots. 3) Ethics can be expressed in various systems. I would like for you to suggest a single use of Generative AI that would be more ethical by Kant’s Categorical Imperative … ie if everyone used it at scale, would the world be better off? I think for the vast majority of uses of Generative AI, the answer is NO. It generates fake content at scale, to fool people into feeling that someone put effort into creating it organically. I think if you stop to seriously consider this point, you’ll realize that Generative AI is a net negative for the world in almost ALL its applications and mine just happens to be one of the least bad ones.
    • hutzlibu 4y ago
      "The bots are CLEARLY LABELED AS BOTS" "https://community.intercoin.app/t/jack-dorseys-tbd-reverses- https://community.intercoin.app/t/jack-dorseys-tbd-reverses-..." In your own example they are not. You have them pose as real humans to deceive people. So you are lying and deceiving as well and I am not aware of any ethical framework, that considers methodical lying as ethical. "Everyone already did this, they just begged their team to astroturf." And no, not everyone did this and even those who did - it is still a BIG difference if real people pose as real people, or if fake bots pose as real people. You know, the difference between truth and lie. edit: I see now, that some of the bots are marked as bots, if you click their profile. But no one does that, when skimming a blog post. Clearly labeling would have been putting "BOT" in the name, but that would defeat the purpose: to deceive people. So please take your fake bots and your fake ethics to somewhere else and stop polluting the internet with even more garbage.
• mncharity 4y ago
  With MOOCs, learning outcomes are highly sensitive to the collaborative discourse culture which develops. And to student experiences early in the course. But time is short. If setting up culture, modeling and correcting and tuning, takes you a week or few, you've lost scarce time and had suboptimal onboarding. So one strategy is to seed course discussion forums with exemplar content, rather than starting them empty. So there's an existing "established" culture and norms to be read and adapted to. LLMs might help with such. Also more generally - discourse ecology gardening. Moderation, and extrapolations of current bots, but also peer-ish roles, and neighbor-norming, and "avoid things falling through the cracks due to limited available human attention" caretaking.