I'm getting burnt out on all my moderation actions being against fucking AI.
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@alice - I have no experience in this and so I'm asking very sincerely and am very curious, is there any meaningful CAPTCHA you could put up (or conversely, are you seeing these bot applications bypassing various CAPTCHA?)?
@tinker yes, and yes.
Bots are getting better at bypassing CAPTCHAs, but it still stops a lot of them.
Typically, bots farm out advanced CAPTCHAs to Amazon Turk-style services where they pay like a penny for each solved CAPTCHA.
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@tinker yes, and yes.
Bots are getting better at bypassing CAPTCHAs, but it still stops a lot of them.
Typically, bots farm out advanced CAPTCHAs to Amazon Turk-style services where they pay like a penny for each solved CAPTCHA.
@alice - Ah, that makes a lot of sense. Dang. Wow. Cheers for the insight!
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@alice would it be possible to crowd source sign up approval?
I.e. I don't think I'd be an effective moderator, but I do think I could scan a clump of sign up requests periodically.
I'm not familiar with the process, could that piece be split off?
@furicle if we had a huge volume, that might be a solution, but moderation is a learned skill that takes experience to be good at.
I've been doing it for years, and I still mess up sometimes.
The real goal is to make it take more resources to be a dick than it does to suspend a dick. As long as the balance is in the mods' favor, we'll keep a good community.
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I'm getting burnt out on all my moderation actions being against fucking AI. Like, I never thought I'd say it, but I miss suspending Nazis and bigots—at least they were real people who would give up after a while—these LLMs just go on and on, and they don't give a shit if they're suspended or rejected.
#FuckLLMs (but also #FuckNazis and #FuckBigots)
@alice our Prime admin here had to close registration for a time
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@alice thanks for all the hard work you put in. This instance feels safe, thanks to you. It’s a lot.
@adriano you're totally welcome, and I'm so glad to hear that you feel safe here
We try hard to keep things nice over here in our little queer slice of Fedi.
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@alice I just read "suspending" and was all in with ropes and crossbeams and whatnot...
@undefined_variable I'd like to suspend some of these bot owners by the ankles until they decide to do something less gross with their lives.
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@alice I’ve got an idea. Make a special AI specific signup page. Streamlined and optimized for AI agents. SEO it up. Then send that entire signup section straight to junk and never check it.
@BabblingGeek but how do we send AI agents there and humans to the human one?
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It's getting bad. Like 80+% of our instance applications are AI-generated now, and it's a huge waste of time to action them.
There seem to be several different models, and they all use throwaway email providers and VPNs.
We have one model that just "wants community" in a couple sentences, one that is looking for "tech-minded, open source friends", one that just spews word-salad, one that copies and pastes other people's bios, and at least a couple that try various plausible messages.
The better they get, the more resources it takes us to identify and reject them.
They're like fucking fruit flies.
@alice 90%+ applicants for my research study were AI bots.
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I'm getting burnt out on all my moderation actions being against fucking AI. Like, I never thought I'd say it, but I miss suspending Nazis and bigots—at least they were real people who would give up after a while—these LLMs just go on and on, and they don't give a shit if they're suspended or rejected.
#FuckLLMs (but also #FuckNazis and #FuckBigots)
@alice I recently recommended lgbtqia.space for a friend because I trust your moderating implicitly. I'm sorry it's become so frustrating, so let me take the opportunity to thank you for setting such a great example and creating a safe environment
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@ricci @floe @alice my wild speculation could also be wrong! there's weird bot behaviour on the steam workshop too. I've been making mods for Paralives and bot accounts are stealing people's mods and reposting them. They don't change the description or thumbnail. There's no money, clout, or ad revenue to be found there. I don't understand it unless the goal is to just make the internet an awful place.
It's the same as the accounts that steal content from adult creators and repost it as their own (or as "appreciators of the female body").
They're just there to feel special on the back of someone else's work.
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It's getting bad. Like 80+% of our instance applications are AI-generated now, and it's a huge waste of time to action them.
There seem to be several different models, and they all use throwaway email providers and VPNs.
We have one model that just "wants community" in a couple sentences, one that is looking for "tech-minded, open source friends", one that just spews word-salad, one that copies and pastes other people's bios, and at least a couple that try various plausible messages.
The better they get, the more resources it takes us to identify and reject them.
They're like fucking fruit flies.
@alice
It seems like the one thing LLMs do well is create aggravation. The big, innovative technology for the decade is just an automated way to make everything worse. -
It's getting bad. Like 80+% of our instance applications are AI-generated now, and it's a huge waste of time to action them.
There seem to be several different models, and they all use throwaway email providers and VPNs.
We have one model that just "wants community" in a couple sentences, one that is looking for "tech-minded, open source friends", one that just spews word-salad, one that copies and pastes other people's bios, and at least a couple that try various plausible messages.
The better they get, the more resources it takes us to identify and reject them.
They're like fucking fruit flies.
@alice this is the future techbros want
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It's getting bad. Like 80+% of our instance applications are AI-generated now, and it's a huge waste of time to action them.
There seem to be several different models, and they all use throwaway email providers and VPNs.
We have one model that just "wants community" in a couple sentences, one that is looking for "tech-minded, open source friends", one that just spews word-salad, one that copies and pastes other people's bios, and at least a couple that try various plausible messages.
The better they get, the more resources it takes us to identify and reject them.
They're like fucking fruit flies.
@alice ...I feel like, if we could distill a lot of the "bot" tells into flags and score based on how many / how serious those flags are, most mastodon admins could probably pare down a lot of the spam and AI submissions.
I know there's a lot where one could say "oh they mentioned community, but everyone does that", but in combination with other potential tells, it should only add confidence to the determination that "X user is a bot".
By the way, does Mastodon show on the backend/admin plane how long it took a user to fill out the signup form? I'm unfamiliar with that side - it used to be a good tell back in the internet spam age from a decade-ish ago.
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@alice 90%+ applicants for my research study were AI bots.
@matthew 🫂
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@alice I recently recommended lgbtqia.space for a friend because I trust your moderating implicitly. I'm sorry it's become so frustrating, so let me take the opportunity to thank you for setting such a great example and creating a safe environment
@cargot_robbie aww, thank you 🥰
I hope we keep doing our jobs to a standard that makes our community feel loved and safe
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@alice our Prime admin here had to close registration for a time
@MedeaVanamonde yeah. It comes in waves, and it's obnoxious as hell.
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@alice ...I feel like, if we could distill a lot of the "bot" tells into flags and score based on how many / how serious those flags are, most mastodon admins could probably pare down a lot of the spam and AI submissions.
I know there's a lot where one could say "oh they mentioned community, but everyone does that", but in combination with other potential tells, it should only add confidence to the determination that "X user is a bot".
By the way, does Mastodon show on the backend/admin plane how long it took a user to fill out the signup form? I'm unfamiliar with that side - it used to be a good tell back in the internet spam age from a decade-ish ago.
@katana I don't see that signal, but you're right—when I used to do fraud detection for companies, response latency was a good tell.
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@MedeaVanamonde yeah. It comes in waves, and it's obnoxious as hell.
@alice is it traceable via IP?
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It's getting bad. Like 80+% of our instance applications are AI-generated now, and it's a huge waste of time to action them.
There seem to be several different models, and they all use throwaway email providers and VPNs.
We have one model that just "wants community" in a couple sentences, one that is looking for "tech-minded, open source friends", one that just spews word-salad, one that copies and pastes other people's bios, and at least a couple that try various plausible messages.
The better they get, the more resources it takes us to identify and reject them.
They're like fucking fruit flies.
