this post was submitted on 03 Aug 2023
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What does everyone think of bots on Beehaw? (beehaw.org)
submitted 1 year ago by Gaywallet@beehaw.org to c/chat@beehaw.org
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How do you all feel about bots?

I've seen a gpt powered summarization bot pop up recently. Do you find this useful? Do you hate this?

Do you think bots serve any useful purposes on this website or do you think we should ban all bots? Should we have a set of rules for how bots should interact - only when called, needing to explicitly call out they are a bot on their profile, etc?

I'd love to hear your thoughts

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[–] th3raid0r@tucson.social 14 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I'm of the opinion that bots are okay if:

  1. They provide value to the community - A news-bot seems to be well received at tucson.social and it helps people get all their Tucson updates in one place without having to share it themselves.

  2. They assist with moderation. Auto responding to new posts that reminds thread participants of the rules could be one use-case.

  3. They enhance the dialogue of the thread or provide useful and important corrections. Perhaps there's a bot that looks up species names and provides useful links in a reply of a zoological based post? I say that's great and what we want!

As for ChatGPT bots:

  1. All bots must disclose they are a bot.
  2. All bots must not fake engagement. As in, it's okay to be other bots because of their relatively strict use-cases and minimal ability to hallucinate and no ability to respond to further queries. ChatGPT makes it appear as if it's a person at times and can be subtly wrong - we have people that do that just fine.
  3. ChatGPT content should go into their own relevant subs. A MachineLearning community might be good at first, but perhaps eventually a dedicated LLM/ChatGPT Writes type community would eventually be needed for peoples more creative impulses. It's not exactly relevant for someplace like tucson.social, but might be for a place like BeeHaw.
[–] jarfil@beehaw.org 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Auto responding to new posts that reminds thread participants of the rules could be one use-case.

IMHO those pinned top messages in Reddit were a stopgap for dealing with highly diverse communities and moderation styles "on a single instance".

Again in my opinion, the Fediverse would benefit more from having consistent rules per-instance, with only sub-rules on a community level. Both of these should be made easily discoverable to all participants of a "community@instance" directly through their interface (web or app), making the pinned top messages unnecessary.

Communities with "highly diverse moderation styles", should rather stay on separate instances with similar moderation styles, making it easier for mods to apply a consistent ruleset, for users to decide which instances to follow, and admins whether to federate or not. There already exist interfaces (both web and app) to merge communities from multiple instances if the user so wishes to (at their own risk, but again IMHO the rule differences should be handled by the user's interface).

Ideally, I think that users should be able to use an interface of their own choice to merge comments on a matching post from multiple instances or groups of instances (federated), interacting in whatever style they choose without interfering with users who didn't choose that style.

Particularly in the case of Beehaw, which has a consistent set of "rules but not rules" for all communities, I think those messages would only add clutter.

[–] TheRtRevKaiser@beehaw.org 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

This makes sense, but I think that Lemmy just has this same problem on a different scale (between instances rather than between communities). The problem we have seen sometimes is folks seeing Beehaw posts in the All feed of their home instance and coming in and commenting/posting without knowing what/who we are and without engaging with the sidebar or any of our docs. And some federated sites make it difficult to even tell that you are seeing a post from another instance (I'm looking at you, Kbin). The vast majority of the time it isn't a huge problem, but it does mean that the mods are having the same conversation over and over because some folks aren't aware of the vibe of the place where they're posting.

Now obviously an automatic bot comment would be a band-aid, and I suspect not a particularly effective one (Lemmy doesn't provide the ability to sticky comments). It would be ideal if there was some functionality built into Lemmy itself to remind users of the instance they are about to post in, and the rules of that instance.

[–] Gaywallet@beehaw.org 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

an automatic bot comment would be a band-aid

I'd kind of rather they get this as a direct message or even better a warning on the UI they interact with our site on (we cannot enforce the latter).

[–] TheRtRevKaiser@beehaw.org 3 points 1 year ago

Yeah, I had been thinking that a better solution would be some built in Lemmy functionality - I think Reddit actually had a reminder like this on posts, but not comments - but between apps, third-party front ends, and federation with other services like Mastodon and Kbin it probably wouldn't reach the folks that would most need to be reminded of the rules of the place they're posting in.