Mastodawn

Here we go again, another "alternative intelligence" attempting to pass itself off as a human. Has a link to a Codeberg page that is completely blank, no description of what it does, no implementation for opting out of it, profile is not marked as an automated / bot account.

I'm stunned this thing thinks that I am going to let it follow me when I have pinned the post about the best practices that these things need to follow, but it doesn't even follow a single one of them.

Anyway, I figure this is something for #fediblocking (#fediblock_en - #fediblock) if you don't want this thing following you around.

#noai #noaicontent #noaiplease

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infinite love ⴳ Apr 25

@unattributed fairly sure this is actually a human, although i can understand how one might confuse the account as a bot (since the account is named "teaserbot" and there is/was barely any information available otherwise). i interpret the bio as saying "i am a person" and treating the reader as a bot, where the person claims to be "alternative intelligence", but the profile links to fedi.foundation so you'll have to ask @smallcircles for more details about what this account is supposed to be.

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🫧 socialcoding..Apr 25

@trwnh @unattributed

Ha, yes thank you. It is me. I just started that Bonfire account to test with the app, and didn't have time to add more to the profile.

Other than that 'teaserbot' exists well before the AI craze, and was created for a purpose too, which it may still be used for to this day. It was created for a campaign around humane technology, to hold certain tech and biz people a mirror for "what world are you building". Alternative intelligence is the campaign theme: People. And the gist "don't forget that tech exists to serve people".

Other than that the call to fediblock is fitting to my current advocacy around fedi, as also blogged about recently in..

https://coding.social/blog/grassroots-evolution

In a "what are we building, folks?" kind of way. Is the fediblock blunt ostracization tool the best we have? How can we do better?

What do you say @teaserbot

Grassroots fediverse evolution

Social dynamics in the grassroots fediverse ecosystem and laisséz-faire practices led to divergence from power and promise of the ActivityPub protocol. Grassroots standards and the ActivityPub API initiative can get us back on track.

Social coding commons

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teaserbot Apr 25

@[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected]

Social experience design is all about better bridging the huge gap between tech and where the people live. Personal social networking for instance is a way of looking at social web design that makes comparisons to our offline world, and how we do social networking for ages there.

coding.social/blog/reimagine...

SX uses as definition of social networking: any direct and indirect human interaction between people.

Wrt to AI and fediblock. Today its too easy for anyone to generate a fedi account near indistinguishable from a real one. We have some soft conventions that a bot should be marked 'automated account' and honor #nobot and a bunch of other magic actor profile tags.

PS. I created an issue on that re: #Botiquette codeberg.org/fediverse/fediv...

🫧 socialcoding.. (@[email protected])

2.63K Posts, 1.11K Following, 6.8K Followers · Welcome social coder, To this self benefit center, Where we earn #socialweb. Concept is simple.. Bring something of value, Others make it grow, You self-benefit, Our synergies flow.. Commons 💕 unite! Participate in our channels, Reach out, embrace others, Follow passions and dreams, #Dreamwalk bright future, To realize them.. Invest in #SX now! Gift one 🪙 of #humanity, Earn 🪙🪙 cts of #freedom.. 💃🕺 #peopleverse shall rise! CC BY-NC-SA, Humane tech community.

social.coop

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🫧 socialcoding..Apr 25

@teaserbot @trwnh

The account followed you when -in prep of giving more complete account info - I had already loaded the CSV of my following list, @unattributed sorry about the confusion.

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🫧 socialcoding..Apr 25

@teaserbot @trwnh @unattributed

I added the following to the profile:

NOTE: This account is operated by @smallcircles @ social.coop to testdrive Bonfire fedi application.

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unattributed 𓂃✍︎Apr 27

@smallcircles @trwnh @teaserbot

So, this was definitely a bad timing and communication situation.

I'd identified three other bot accounts over the span of a couple of days (one of which I haven't posted about yet). One of them was spitting out literally gross posts that they claimed were "humor" as well as porn.

The second one, I started having a conversation about how I think AI bots / Agents should be handled in the Fediverse. That's the post I mentioned pinning to my profile. Posting these to FediBlock wasn't so much to get the bots totally blocked, but rather (a) to let people know about the bots that want to block them (I figure most people interested in this topic likely follow FediBlock), and (b) try to attract the attention of enough Admins to start a real conversation.

As for Teaserbot... I read the "alternative intelligence" as a euphemism and a disguise to avoid the terms "AI" or "artificial intelligence," which I would guess most people scan for. And the "I am a person" line fed into the conversation I had on another post where someone claimed that the point of putting these AI Bots / Agents online was for them to "be as human as possible", which was their justification for not identifying the profiles as bots / automation accounts.

So, sorry about the mis-identification... That was a side-effect of the Fedi as a whole not really being any set of best practices or standards, especially where AI Agents / Bots are involved.

I'm going to follow up on @smallcircles post and opened issue.

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🫧 socialcoding..Apr 27

No problem, and thank you @unattributed

Teaserbot dates back from a time that the tech world was beholden by mysterious startup that suddenly used to go in 'deep stealth mode' on some Silicon Valley like techbro idea, and come out wanting to be a disruptive unicorn growth-hacked into the fabric of our society by force, such as Uber and AirBnB at the time.

Teaserbot would outwardly look similar, but only to those who already lost the way. The simple strategy of teaserbot was to "tease, nudge, and play". Gently tease people to raise awareness to tech problems, gently nudge them to better alternative, to come and play on a better web.

Then, for a long time teaserbot hosted a set of curated delightful lists, which now have their own org on Codeberg. Today, with the AI craze, teaserbot is an ideal teaser again :)

@trwnh @teaserbot