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.
There are some bots that just automate something, like reposting something regular from elsewhere to the fediverse instead of doing it manually. A bot that reposts old comics that are finally being online makes sense instead of having a person go and post each one individually.
Like if the accounts that post old Far Side and Calvin and Hobbes comics is a bot I would be fine with that. It is just automation.
A bot account pretending to be a person by posting complex discussion topics and doing fake replies goes against the purpose of the fediverse.