4 ms·
I can understand what the bots posting this stuff on reddit are after, but what puzzles me a bit are the posters here who clearly are LLM-backed bots that post
by marcusb 1y ago
I can understand what the bots posting this stuff on reddit are after, but what puzzles me a bit are the posters here who clearly are LLM-backed bots that post once or twice without any affiliate links or other visible scams, then disappear. Maybe they are getting banned but it isn't obvious? (If so, good job dang and team!)
For an example mixed with a bit of irony, a few months ago, I submitted a link to a content obfuscator (meant to target site scraping bots) that I wrote. One of the replies was from a brand new account, that hasn't posted before or since, with a fairly obvious LLM take:
From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42517774 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42517774:
If your content got ingested by scrapers that don't respect the robots.txt, but that it was copied to another domain with a more lenient robots.txt, you could poison legitimate datasets.
It seems wasteful to actively try to sabotage humankind's technological progress.
- brookst 1y agoThat doesn’t seem like LLM writing? “But that it was copied” looks like a typo for “but then it was copied”, and that is a pretty human mistake.
- marcusb 1y agoI took it as a poor-quality local model. I suppose it is possible, but it seems...unlikely... that one of the three responses to that post was a person who was so upset by the idea of serving junk content to scraper bots that they registered for an account, wrote their criticism, and then disappeared from the site. At that time, there were a whole bunch of flagged-dead comments from newly-created accounts that had compound-word usernames (such as the text I linked to above from 'earlydeveloper'.) So, if these are people manually writing those posts, I understand the behavior even less than the bot hypothesis.
- yorwba 1y agoThere are people who make a new account for every comment they post. To avoid getting tracked, or something like that.
- dmortin 1y agoUnless that typo was inserted intentionally to make it look like it was written by a fallible human.
- brookst 1y agoFOLLOWERS: Hail Messiah! BRIAN: I'm not the Messiah! Will you please listen? I am not the Messiah, do you understand?! Honestly! GIRL: Only the true Messiah denies His divinity. BRIAN: What?! Well, what sort of chance does that give me? All right! I am the Messiah! FOLLOWERS: He is! He is the Messiah! s/messiah/LLM/ig