Comment on A Flood of Green Tech From China Is Upending Global Climate Politics
queerlilhayseed@piefed.blahaj.zone 7 hours agoWho knows what scale they’re operating at. The problem with this kind of bot is that you only really notice if they’re doing a bad job (theoretically). This might be someone who wrote an LLM bot for a lark, a small-time social media botter testing a variant for fedi deployment, or an established bot trainer with dozens or hundreds of accounts that’s field-testing a more aggressive new model. I doubt you could get away with hundreds of bots like this on lemmy, I think the actual user pool is small enough that we’d notice hundreds of bots posting at this volume. but again, I don’t really know how I’d detect it if it were less “obviously smells like LLM slop” than this one. In bot detection, as in so many fields, false negatives are a real bitch to account for.
Alphane_Moon@lemmy.world 6 hours ago
I don’t doubt such approaches are used. They almost certainly are. I ma just wondering if Threadi is large enough for anyone to bother (be it oligarch backed groups or independent conmen).
queerlilhayseed@piefed.blahaj.zone 6 hours ago
Dunno. Where there are some eyeballs, there’s some market for influence. Obviously someone is bothering, but as for how much money is being thrown at the fediverse at this moment, I would guess somewhere between “peanuts” and “small potatoes”. On the other hand I imagine a bot trained here could be deployed elsewhere with little effort, similar to how a reddit bot can be deployed to lemmy with a little bit of rework, so maybe it’s seen as a low-risk training ground. In any case I don’t see it being a problem that gets less salient as the fediverse grows.