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.
As long as all it is is something like a bot that checks a website and posts the latest links in it’s own sealed off community ( just the bot allowed to post and maybe comments off to keep discussion on posts done by actual people ), I don’t have much of a problem with it as long as it doesn’t interact with others in the comments, real or bot. And as long as there’s something like an icon to clearly show it’s something like an RSS bot, I don’t mind. Reporting them, I’d say they’re fine not to be as long as they don’t interact with people.
But other types of bots? Spam posting bots? Yeah, maybe we shouldn’t have them and they should be reported, after actually assessing whether or not they’re an actual bot account and not just someone without a life. I don’t care how much lower it makes the daily post count and such drops, I’d rather see less things that are posted by a human than more things posted by bots.
Also, this comment has made me a little annoyed because with how I have my phones keyboard set up, every time I type “bot” it wants so badly to autocorrect to “not” instead.