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What does everyone think of bots on Beehaw?

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

100 comments
  • 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.

  • Is anyone checking the AI "summariser" bot for accuracy? I'd rather not get misleading ideas in my head from a poor summary.

    • 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'.

    • 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.

  • I don't want bots on Beehaw. Either unknown ChatGPT generated comments or bots that just listen to keywords and hey heres a Wikipedia link type. I want discussion from real, good, people with opinions. Not a bot with useless commentary I could just Google(Kagi) instead. Rules around this type of bot is okay, this isnt gets into rules lawyering and favoritism. My vote is no to bots.

  • I'm of the opinion that bots are okay if:

    1. They provide value to the community - A news-bot seems to be well received at tucson.social and it helps people get all their Tucson updates in one place without having to share it themselves.
    2. They assist with moderation. Auto responding to new posts that reminds thread participants of the rules could be one use-case.
    3. They enhance the dialogue of the thread or provide useful and important corrections. Perhaps there's a bot that looks up species names and provides useful links in a reply of a zoological based post? I say that's great and what we want!

    As for ChatGPT bots:

    1. All bots must disclose they are a bot.
    2. All bots must not fake engagement. As in, it's okay to be other bots because of their relatively strict use-cases and minimal ability to hallucinate and no ability to respond to further queries. ChatGPT makes it appear as if it's a person at times and can be subtly wrong - we have people that do that just fine.
    3. ChatGPT content should go into their own relevant subs. A MachineLearning community might be good at first, but perhaps eventually a dedicated LLM/ChatGPT Writes type community would eventually be needed for peoples more creative impulses. It's not exactly relevant for someplace like tucson.social, but might be for a place like BeeHaw.
    • Auto responding to new posts that reminds thread participants of the rules could be one use-case.

      IMHO those pinned top messages in Reddit were a stopgap for dealing with highly diverse communities and moderation styles "on a single instance".

      Again in my opinion, the Fediverse would benefit more from having consistent rules per-instance, with only sub-rules on a community level. Both of these should be made easily discoverable to all participants of a "community@instance" directly through their interface (web or app), making the pinned top messages unnecessary.

      Communities with "highly diverse moderation styles", should rather stay on separate instances with similar moderation styles, making it easier for mods to apply a consistent ruleset, for users to decide which instances to follow, and admins whether to federate or not. There already exist interfaces (both web and app) to merge communities from multiple instances if the user so wishes to (at their own risk, but again IMHO the rule differences should be handled by the user's interface).

      Ideally, I think that users should be able to use an interface of their own choice to merge comments on a matching post from multiple instances or groups of instances (federated), interacting in whatever style they choose without interfering with users who didn't choose that style.

      Particularly in the case of Beehaw, which has a consistent set of "rules but not rules" for all communities, I think those messages would only add clutter.

      • This makes sense, but I think that Lemmy just has this same problem on a different scale (between instances rather than between communities). The problem we have seen sometimes is folks seeing Beehaw posts in the All feed of their home instance and coming in and commenting/posting without knowing what/who we are and without engaging with the sidebar or any of our docs. And some federated sites make it difficult to even tell that you are seeing a post from another instance (I'm looking at you, Kbin). The vast majority of the time it isn't a huge problem, but it does mean that the mods are having the same conversation over and over because some folks aren't aware of the vibe of the place where they're posting.

        Now obviously an automatic bot comment would be a band-aid, and I suspect not a particularly effective one (Lemmy doesn't provide the ability to sticky comments). It would be ideal if there was some functionality built into Lemmy itself to remind users of the instance they are about to post in, and the rules of that instance.

  • 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'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 kinda wish the ALL feed could be a bit more intelligent. Also, sorry for gunking up your feed!

  • Bots like that one that changes YouTube links to Piped are good, as are bots like a metric/freedom unit converter. A well done meme bot could even be good. I just don't like the ones that pretend to be human.

  • Bots that spam or "help" > No No bot is going to be able to help every individual the way they need to be helped. Same issue with plenty of "convenience" features in Microsoft products which quickly become an annoyance. Spam is self-explanatory.

    Bots that entertain > Maybe in some communities I have seen some quality use of bots for entertainment purposes, especially on meme subs. My favorite use of bots which I have seen is the old subreddit simulator sub which is populated entirely by bots with each bot trained by a popular sub, leading to some very entertaining interactions. The second use I've enjoyed was their use on prequel memes, in which bots would react with certain text with the appropriate meme response. I'm not sure bots exactly like these would fit anywhere on Beehaw, but I wouldn't mind in some communities like Jokes if there was a good one.

    Bots for artistic purposes > I'd like to see them as long as they don't post too often The main example I can think of is Tumblr's Haikubot which is amazing. If someone happens to post a message with the same structure as a haiku poem, the bot will reply with that post re-formatted as a haiku poem which can be amusing and occasionally profound. I would be ok with the general use of bots like this as long as their parameters don't allow them to show up often enough to become tiresome.

  • I'm glad ya'll have made it to where I can easily block them all in the settings. I guess some people like them tho; so that's a happy medium.

  • 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.

  • I have no issue at all with utility bots (AutoMod-style assistants, summarizers, unit conversion aids, RemindMe!, etc.) and honestly, novelty comment bots don't bother me much either as long as they're not drowning out actual conversation. I'm less tolerant of bots posting links and content, though.

    • novelty comment bots don't bother me much either as long as they're not drowning out actual conversation

      Same - honestly, I generally find them legitimately amusing! - but I worry that most Lemmy instances are too young/inactive for this kind of bot yet. I don't think we're past the tipping point where the people commenting will automatically outweigh the bots, and I don't think those bots are fun unless they're dramatically outweighed by normal human interaction. It's not novel if that's all the comment thread ever is, you know what I mean? And novelty is the true spark of humor imho; things usually have to be at least a little surprising to be actually funny.

      • The novelty bots on Reddit were a mixed bag for me. I struggle to think of any that I genuinely found amusing, most of them were at best annoying. The exception might be some of the reply bots on some meme subreddits I was on (r/wetlanderhumor and r/cremposting). There were also a few that, for some reason, really got under my skin. I think the ones that really frustrated me were the grammar bots that regularly replied with irrelevant corrections, and that one Shakespeare bot that "shakespearified" your comment with wildly incorrect early modern English grammar.

      • I worry that most Lemmy instances are too young/inactive for this kind of bot yet. I don’t think we’re past the tipping point where the people commenting will automatically outweigh the bots, and I don’t think those bots are fun unless they’re dramatically outweighed by normal human interaction.

        That's an interesting way of putting it that I didn't immediately consider.

        I don't necessarily like them, but I'm not really all that against them, either. If we don't have the activity to balance out bot input, however, it might be reasonable to limit them one way or another. It seems to me like a worst-case scenario, but if a community or thread has what feels like a noticeable amount of bots, that would be a turn-off for me.

        If the community decides to limit bot traffic either partially or entirely, it might be good to revisit that decision later on if there's an upward trend in users and activity.

  • 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.

  • I don't find bots useful. I was on Reddit for years and I didn't use any of them. I don't think the door should be closed on bots permanently but for now I'd rather not see them, they're no better than spam to me.

  • My thoughts on this is pretty much voiced by some of the others.

    For instance, there was a tool that could be used to repost things from a reddit user page. I've warned (and the dev have added the warning to the repo itself) that the tool can cause one to be banned. Now the only way I can see that working without inciting a ban is if the tool was triggered by a command, and only took one link at a time. Assuming the mods already gave permission. Something like the wiki bot I've seen over on reddit that posted the overview of a wiki link. However, I would rather be able to trigger it with a !wiki <url> or something to that effect.

    The only exception I would take with this is with an automod that reminds users to include specific things in their posts...but I'm also meh about this. If people post without reading the sidebar, they're probably not going to bother coming back and reading a comment. This issue would be better solved through other means (a reminder of the community rules in the New Post page, after choosing a community).

    The bots 100% need to have the bot tag on. No bots impersonating as people, please.

    That's my 2¢ for now.

  • 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.

  • Personally I haven't seen any bots on here yet. If they become problematic or if there are too many then I would be pro-restricting them.

    I do like the novelty bots you can get though, they can be fun

  • Auto tldr is really cool, this is a bot I support

    • The auto tldr bot has now been disabled as per the decision of Beehaw. Contact your favorite community mods if you'd like to change that.

100 comments