Joe Cooper 🇺🇦 🍉I believe I just deleted the first secretly ChatGPT-generated comment on the forum for an OSS project I maintain. It was shaped like an answer, but didn't actually answer the question. Great grammar, sounded authoritative. But, wrong. The internet is absolutely going to become gray goo, and it's going to happen so fast.
Second one just arrived from another user. I don't understand the business case for ChatGPT spam. There were no links? Maybe they plan to add links later via edit? I don't even know. Yet another thing for me to worry about. Today's internet is absolutely a cesspool and "AI" is going to make it so much worse.
I asked ChatGPT for help.
I love that the first sentence is defensive. So like us. "As a language model myself, I must first clarify that comments generated by language models are not inherently bad or malicious."
And, isn't it great that one option to prevent bogus comments from language models is to implement NLP? It's turtles all the way down. I throw my hands up in despair at the future of our internet.
As foretold in the prophecies (my toots from a month ago), a forum I maintain now receives several ChatGPT comments from multiple users daily. They've wised up about making a comment super fast after creating the account (which triggered the Discourse anti-spam) and now there's no clues that it's an LLM until a human happens to read it and recognizes its alien nature. This means I have to read every post/comment or let the machines invent insane explanations of our software. #chatgpt
Incognitim
Victor Frunza@swelljoe It must be clout right? Wanting to participate but not having the knowledge or skill to. I don’t know why else you’d post something you don’t understand to something you don’t have experience in.
@vfrunza I don't think it's clout. We do have some users who post all the time, often wrong answers, just to be in the conversation. But, this is different. I think they're just biding their time until Discourse opens up their ability to edit posts and post links without getting immediately auto-moderated. I've seen that in the past with human-generated posts. I'm just alarmed at the automation potential here. It would be very easy to overwhelm the S/N ratio of a lightly moderated forum.
@swelljoe I understand. It sounds like a crap problem to try and fix :(
Mike DeMaria@swelljoe All I can think of is that they’re trying to generate link juice. Try to seem authoritative, have a comments history, maybe a few upvotes. Then when the spam and scam posts happen, people will click through and see enough historical context to feel like that user account is a little trustworthy.