I’ve had a pretty depressing morning, scrolling through my Subscribed feed and realising that 90% of new posts were from the same two bot accounts (bagel and somethingmelon, can’t be remeber exactly and I’ve blocked them.)
Thankfully, a few people had made “ai slop” comments under one, so I checked the post history and, sure, a new account posting at a implausible rate. And once you started looking at the posts they were kinda samey, generic or a bit off. But I think that if the bot had been programmed to post at a slower rate, I don’t think I’d have really noticed.
So my question is, should people be allowed to report bot accounts? And can/should mods be expected at assess someone’s humanity? The very idea is gross, but so is the thought that lemmy would be very easily swamped by a small number of more careful written bots.
How about flagging suspected bot accounts and those that spam AI-generated content? That way users can decide whether to block/avoid them and communities can decide whether to remove them. I wouldn’t knowingly engage with a bot and suspect most others wouldn’t either, even if the posts do occasionally lead to interesting discussions between real users.
In both lemmy and piefed you can set the account as a bot and there is an option to filter out bot accounts so this already exists. If people choose not to mark their bot accounts as a bot, then they should be banned.