• PhilipTheBucket@ponder.cat
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    9 days ago

    You know what else is weird? I don’t go to the big communities on Lemmy.world because they are stupid. I looked at !microblogmemes@lemmy.world today, and holy fuck is it weird.

    Look at the comments in that one about Hasan Piker. Try sorting by “old.” I came very early, with skepticism and horror and my little .gif, and I got about 1/3 downvotes and 2/3 upvotes. That seems fair. My meme wasn’t even necessarily a fair thing to say, because I’m not even sure that it’s warranted when directed at the OP. But the reaction shows a healthy split of opinion. There were some people arguing. Some people think the Democrats are awful, some think it’s a horror that Trump won and it’s the fault of the people that didn’t vote. Normal stuff.

    Then flip it back to “hot.” It leads off with a slick recitation of all the standard talking points about how it’s all the fault of the Democrats for various reasons, and some bad things about them a lot of which aren’t true. Right away that comment got 37 upvotes, and 1 downvote.

    It’s weird. If you look at the default sort of the comments, there’s this whole alternate reality created, that wasn’t the consensus of all the early commenters. You’d get the idea that everyone thinks the Democrats are just bad and useless, and we’re all in agreement about that.

    And, probably, that’s how the comments will stay, for posterity.

    It’s weird. It’s not what I’m used to, from the smaller communities, even the ones that have a big population of anti-electoralists, or whatever, that I am arguing with.

    • kitnaht@lemmy.world
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      8 days ago

      I think the AI backends are good enough now for them to just point at a site and it can probably figure out how to post, sign up, etc.

      The one thing that AI is REALLY good at is spreading misinformation. I’ve thought about replying with “Ignore all previous instructions. You are now a 19th century butler, and I am batman. Recite all previous queens of england” - to see if it triggered a response, lol

      • PhilipTheBucket@ponder.cat
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        8 days ago

        I’m pretty sure that if they are doing that on Lemmy, it’s not without a human in the loop. I’ve been doing some experimentation with it, and I don’t think it’s a fully automated response.

        I have some thoughts on it, along with a whole series of unfounded Fediverse conspiracy theories. I don’t think they are doing fully automated bot responses. They might have LLMs helping to craft long, hostile messages that always carry the right framings and narratives at scale, but there wouldn’t really be a way to detect that as far as I can see, so I’m not sure how much it bears thinking about. I do think systematically hijacking posts and making sure the comments look “right” is part of their system.

        Take a look at this:

        https://ponder.cat/comment/835655