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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I say no to bots. I see the utility in some of them, but beehaw is only one instance, and I’d love to keep it an instance that I know is full of actual people. Makes me want to engage in conversation much more. Besides, if you want a bot filled experience you can engage in one of the instances that allow bots. If bots are allowed, I want them to be very clearly labeled. I want to know in one glance if I’m speaking to a bot.
Agreed. I find a lot of them to be irritating and the rest of them pretty useless and annoying.
beehaw is only one instance, and I’d love to keep it an instance that I know is full of actual people.
That’s an insightful way of putting it that didn’t come to mind.
I think part of what Beehaw uniquely offers is the drive for its own kind of instance and user culture and a closer and more organic community. Bots, save for moderator tools, admittedly detract from that kind of vibe. I could imagine that sacrificing less necessary bots, either partially or entirely, could be an important measure toward securing those aforementioned values. Federation with more Reddit-esque instances still allows us to scratch Reddit sort of itch when it comes up.
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.
98% of bots are crap. The problem is that people have different opinions as to which 98% of them is the crap portion.
Absolutely any bot needs to self-identify.
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.
I think some comment bots are nice, like the TLDR / summarization bot, reminder bot, youtube piped links, maybe one that replaces an amp link with the original? But these bots should be labeled as bots in settings so users have the option to toggle off seeing them.
I don’t like having bots post posts though, I’ve seen some in other instances and there’s not much discussion happening in the comments a lot of the time.
I just saw a summarization bot on here make a summary that was longer than the post. Kind of silly.
I saw one that pretty much missed the point of the article. Pre-digested pabulum. We should be reading the frickin’ article ourselves before we comment.
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.
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.
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 can be summoned (e.g. !savevideo, or whatever the command format would be) could be useful. Otherwise, bots can sod off.
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.
I also vote for these rules!
I agree - these seem to me like very common-sense rules.
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.
spoiler
sdfsaf
While I understand the use cases of bots that provide some sort of utility or post helpful information, I lean towards having no bots. Reddit was festering with bots of all stripes - mostly memes - and it was kind of unbearable.
I personally long for a community that features strictly human-to-human conversation and interaction.
I’m aware that this opinion will likely be in the minority, given how tech-centric the fediverse in general is, but that’s my thought on the matter.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.
bots are kinda boring
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.
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.
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
