AI-generated replies are a scourge these days
twitter.com
twitter.com
I built this tool primarily to identify AI writing in articles and posts but it's proven useful for comments/responses too: https://tropes.fyi/vetter
That won't entirely weed out these tropes, but it will massively change the style.
Then add a few specific rules and make it review its writing, instead of expecting it to get it right while writing.
To weed out the tropes is largely a question of enforcing good writing through rules.
A whole lot of the tropes are present because a lot of people write that way. It may have been amplified by RLHF etc., but in that case it's been amplified because people have judged those responses to be better - after all that is what RLHF is.
Not least because a lot of these things are things that novice writers will have had drummed into them. E.g. clearly signposting a conclusion is not uncommon advice.
Not because it isn't hamfisted but because they're not yet good enough that the links advice ("Competent writing doesn't need to tell you it's concluding. The reader can feel it") applies, and it's better than it not being clear to the reader at all. And for more formal writing people will also be told to even more explicitly signpost it with headings.
The post says "AI signals its structural moves because it's following a template, not writing organically. But guess what? So do most human writers. Sometimes far more directly and explicitly than an AI.
To be clear, I don't think the advice is bad given to a sufficiently strong model - e.g. Opus is definitely capable of taking on writing rules with some coaxing (and a review pass), but I could imagine my teachers at school presenting this - stripped of the AI references - to get us to write better.
If anything, I suspect AI writes like this because it gets rewarded in RLHF because it reads like good writing to a lot of people on the surface.
EDIT: Funnily, enough https://tropes.fyi/vetter thinks the above is AI assisted. It absolutely is not. No AI has gone near this comment. That says it all about the trouble with these detectors.
I completely understand - and do not intend to disparage - the use of these tropes. With the vetter and aidr tools I try to focus more on frequency analysis. I've tried to minimise false positives by tuning detection thresholds to match density rather than individual occurrences e.g. "it's not X, it's Y" is fine but 3x in one paragraph and suspicions flare.
But other tropes like lack of specificity and ESPECIALLY AIs tendency to converge to the mean (less risk, less emotion, FALSE vulnerability) are blatantly anti-human imo.
"Respond within 4-12 hours."
"Do not respond between midnight and 6am EST." (Or CET, whatever makes sense.)
Right now the most obvious traits are the well-known ones that are hard for most LLMs to shake off. Em-dashes, word choices, and the very limited ways in which they structure sentences. Terseness and conciseness is also a tell, which sucks.
They don't do that because spams are their means to achieve something else, specifically to get rid of left wing tech anime porn otakus. The comedy of that is that they've been attempting this by complicating the system, which is like reverse chemotherapy that are nicer to cancer tissues than to the body so that cancer grows faster. I guess they take that as a win as it's a positive action with positive reaction albeit with negative amounts in lieu of negative action with negative reaction with a positive amount.
What's really going to be nice is Twitter transferred to someone else. That will at least stop the stupidity of reverse chemotherapy.
https://devcommunity.x.com/t/update-to-reply-behavior-in-x-a...
> Moving forward, replies via the API will only be permitted if the replier has been explicitly summoned by the original post’s author. This means: The original author @mentions the replying user/account in their post, or The original author quotes a post from the replying user/account.
So you are saying the bots go to sleep? Not a very smart allegation.
They've upgraded to AI's recently though, usually the first response is a canned AI thing but if you keep arguing you'll get an actual human.
Google has spent billions trying to distinguish bots from users. And has been largely unsuccessful n
The reason some of those just have a checkbox without a challenge is that they already are sure enough so how you move to click the box is enough then.
I've noticed that I've recently (had the urge to and) spent a lot more time with people in real life, not sure if there is a causative effect. The illusion of social interaction on the internet is fading.
When I look at sites like Reddit I have a strong feeling, at least with some of the bigger subs, that there's definitely a substantial percentage of bots talking to each other there. More on some subs, less on others. Definitely on the political ones.
> AI-generated replies really are the scourge of Twitter these days. Anyone know if it's from packaged solutions being sold as a product or if it's people mainly rolling their own custom reply-bots
> ... and I just found out the category name for this is "reply guy" tools which is so on the nose it hurts
(You can confirm this by Google searching "reply guy service".)
https://amp.knowyourmeme.com/memes/reply-guy
The joke is that the people selling this software picked that as the name for what whey are selling, either missing or leaning into the negative connotations that are attached to that term.
I read the whole thread and there's no joke here.
AI-generated replies from bots really are the scourge of HN these days.
Anyone know if it's from packaged solutions being sold as a product or if it's people mainly running their own custom Claws?
1. Get more followers. A lot of people see follower count as a goal that matters to them. Replying to high follower counts may earn you a follow from them or from someone reading their replies who doesn't catch that you are a bot.
2. Establish account credibility. Does Twitter's algorithm rank posts higher from accounts that have a long history of engaging with other accounts? I don't know for sure, neither do they but they may believe it's worth trying anyway.
3. Accounts for sale. There's a market for used Twitter accounts with plenty of realistic looking activity. Maybe these spammers are building inventory.
I still don't understand why people use his platform and give him power he has, and we have seen that he is using that to reduce children's access to food, promote people who are examples of no ethics whatsoever and is actively working on destroying numerous democracies by spreading propaganda from right wing.
One thing giving him power to do this are users of his platforms, and anyone still on Twitter is contributing to this.
The problem is that he doesn't care about the money, so he can fuel his rage bait machine as long as he wants which would be normally not possible.
FML we better develop social norms around this asap because this fuckin blows
AI in the middle makes colleagues more tolerable if you didn't really get along with them well originally.
If I wanted to read chatbot output I can do that. We both have the same enterprise chatbot…
The more determined salesmen last for 3-4 emails, but most drop off after 2 or so.
Especially for my parents who are getting targeted like crazy by telemarketers
This raises a rats nest of issues, but will we be able to avoid this necessity?
So... you can't win.
Example that seems like it should be required for all age verification systems, if linkability is addressed:
https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/technology/safety-secu...
Trust not to misuse my data intentionally?
Trust to not lose my data due to incompetence?
Trust to not subcontract this service to some spying company like Google?
> couldn't zero-knowledge proofs be used to allow such a system?
They could, but will they really be zero knowledge or there will be some intermediary leftovers that aren't zero knowledge? See trust in competence above.
I wonder if it is possible at all to have anonymity without admitting bots.
The reasons why Youtube and Discord are so gung ho on age verification might be because these companies that sell ads and data have a monetary incentive for distinguishing humans from bots for their investors and shareholders.
If I were to chose I'd rather have a bot infested internet than a mass surveillance dystopia.
Basically a way to see on every web page whether an actual human (or more) in your network has vouched for the content to be written by a person.
Those are probably replies crafted by non-English speaking scammers from India / Russia / China.
There's probably a whole sea of undetectable replies from people who know how to prompt the models properly.
a great link to share around !
now ive been wondering - what is the polite way to exit a conversation when it becomes obvious that your fellow interlocutor is merely a chunk of electric meat redirecting the output of sam altman? im talking blatantly obvious eg. 'its not x, its y' multiple times in the same paragraph.
Kinda similar to the ye olde newsgroup custom of replying "plonk" when you add someone to your killfile.
Nah, that's not natural even if a living person does it without the help of a LLM.
newcorpospeak, perhaps. Not natural.
That's the part i disagree with. I'm thinking they are the ones who trained the LLMs.
The bots are going to win this war. I'm not sure of the implications of what this means though.
- "control plane", a media ecosystem where everything could be fake
- "ground plane", in-person gatherings and demonstrations, which are much harder to fake but have extremely limited access to information and are easily suppressed
I think the general outcome is simply a devaluing of open online chatter as a whole, which I definitely don't see as a bad thing.
There was a really interesting talk given by Mathias Shindler (long time editor of German Wikipedia) at the 39C3 conference about this topic a few months back that is worth a watch for anyone interested in the issue: https://youtu.be/fKU0V9hQMnY
But personally, if I get value out of a conversation, I will continue. If I don't, I'll stop responding. Whether or not the other side is an AI is only relevant if I think I'm building some kind of rapport or friendship with someone. Otherwise what matters is if the comments makes me think, or makes me want to write something. If only AI bots were reading the comments, that would be a bigger issue than if the specific comment I'm replying to is AI-written.
> a great link to share around !
I find it odd that, when it comes to natural language, we all agree that the LLM is stuck in an uncanny valley, yet no one is acknowledging that the code it generates has a similar alien feel to it.
I'm afraid that's not the kind of entertainment I'm looking for.
I trust you'll not have difficulty finding said content. I am not misinformed, and you stating that I am won't make it so.
I find it creepy af. Perhaps the "pedo guy" episode was projection. And that's one of the least creepy things I find about him. What I find creepier is the propensity of apparently right-minded people to defend him. It's, frankly, cultish.
If you want to go searching for waifus, the algorithm will provide you with that going forward, much like if you wanted to go search flat earth stuff or whatever conspiracy you subscribe to (perhaps your above mentioned topic). The new algorithm is very sensitive to your viewing habits.
I was talking about harmless AI cat and dog videos being surprisingly enjoyable to watch.
Hardly a cultish defense of anyone, have you considered what flipping the tables and imaging what a cultish attack on anyone or anything with an entirely circumstantial link to Mr Musk may look like?
To each their own I guess, but please don't be so quick to judge.
Edit: I can't reply to your comment. My point on those above mention of conspiracy and waifus is that that is not the case. It may have been the case but the algorithm has changed and it is moot.
It is not being shoved in your face unless you search for it or engage with the random one someone in your feed shares.
As said, I didn’t say you were projecting.
As said, I don’t have to go searching for waifus and other questionable content as Mr Musk is freely posting said content.
Regarding your mention of AI cats and dogs and conspiracies, if you’re unable to hold the thrust and facts of a conversation in mind, again, perhaps better to not to respond.
This is a complex problem. But the first step of that problem is Twitter/X
Avoid it, and the next step toward a solution may be easier.
It makes me think if people en masse realize most of their online interactions are with LLMs, they might as well stop using these social platforms for engagement and just switch to totally passive consumption, which gives even less satisfaction and more frustration IMO.
I agree, but I’ll add if it’s people you’re never going to meet, also who cares…
What is the key combo to make an emdash?
On a phone keyboard, sure, it's as hard as an accent sign (á, for example), difficult but not twrrible. But on a keyboard? Yeah, no one is typing in Alt combos when literally any other construction will do.
For me, --- gets converted to an em-dash (—) while typing, if I have my input method (ELatin) enabled. I'm so used to typing in while working in LaTeX I can easily slip it in elsewhere.
On macOS (and iPadOS if used with certain external keyboards), it has long been `Option` + `Shift` + `-`. Desktop publishing folks memorized this, and other, typographically helpful key combos many years ago.
If you made 50.000 AI slop comments then it would be possible to prosecute and PROVE it in court.
Just because it's hard doesn't mean that we should accept it.
The same goes with CHEATERS using AI at universities.
If caught with solid evidence: it should be like 5 years in jail. That would stop 90% of CHEATERS.