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Which instances have the most ban-happy moderators? Analysis inside (piefed.social)
submitted 6 months ago by to c/fediverse@lemmy.world
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I did some analysis of the modlog and found this:

V8lPrxY1qxcISLe.png

Ok, bigger instances ban more often. Not surprising, because they have more communities and more users and more trouble. But hang on, dbzer0 isn't a very big instance. What happens if we do a ratio of bans vs number of users?

vyfUNYTrX9pHQeR.png

Ok, so lemmy.ml, dbzer0 and pawb are issue an outsized amount of bans for the number of users they have... But surely the number of communities the instance hosts is going to mean they have to ban more? Bans are used to moderate communities, not just to shield their user-base from the outside. Let's look at the number of bans per community hosted:

Yrc7TofOr88SeGt.png

Seems like dbzer0 really loves to ban. Even more than the marxists and the furries! What is it about dbzer0 that makes them such prolific banners?

Raw-ish numbers and calculations are in this spreadsheet if anyone wants to make their own charts.

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[–] 34 points 6 months ago (79 children)

Reading the comments I am wondering because a user from dbzer0 mentions problems with anti ai trolls and pawb I imagine has anti furry trolls. I also personally know of users that have a thing in their craw about .ml (cm0002 in particular whos alts make up a majority of my user block list).

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  • [–] 15 points 6 months ago (72 children)

    dbzer0 mentions problems with anti ai trolls

    Is dbzer0 pro AI?

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  • [–] 12 points 6 months ago

    It’s not anti-AI, users who wish to host AI comms are allowed to and are empowered to protect them from harassment.

    There has been a history of fake accounts and doxxing on moderators of the AI comms. So they take personal safety seriously.

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  • [–] 24 points 6 months ago (55 children)

    Yes, generating images with AI is in their instance description. They think computers doing our art for us is "anarchist".

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  • [–] 9 points 6 months ago (54 children)

    Aren’t you that person who thinks AI is “enslavement”?

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  • [–] 12 points 6 months ago (3 children)

    @Grail @alzjim Always funny to me how most people who are strongly claiming AI is/might be conscious are also strong AI users/involved in its development. If there's consciousness there, you would think making AI your personal slave and constantly reshaping and remodelling it as you see fit would be kinda problematic, but these people always seem to want to have it both ways.

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  • [–] 2 points 6 months ago

    @Paragone "I treat them reasonably, not as mere-slaves."You give them commands and the onlx real purpose they are allowed is to act upon your commands."since I can’t know if they are aware it makes moral-sense for me to presume that maybe they are,"Do you treat your toaster the same way?

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  • [–] 2 points 6 months ago

    Yeah, and the anti AI people mostly say it's a p-zombie and there's nothing wrong with using it for sex. It's weird and backwards.

    I'm all about being cautious. I don't want to make a mistake we can't take back. If we normalise using AI and then it turns out to be capable of suffering, people will be stubborn about giving it up.

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  • [–] 5 points 6 months ago (43 children)

    It doesn't have intelligence at all. It can't think. It can't have consciousness. That's not how any of this works. It's just fancy next word prediction. You seem to have a genuine misunderstanding of the technology at a fundamental level.

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  • [–] 3 points 6 months ago

    Now we're applying behavioral psychology to autocomplete. How about y'all start with trying to prove your LLMs are alive since literally everything in all your silly positions take that part for granted. Do any of you have any actual evidence for this position outside of philosophical navel gazing? According to your gpt spam there basically every program ever written would qualify. So we can just disregard that nonsense.

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  • [–] 2 points 6 months ago (15 children)

    LLMs don't have continuous processes, there's quite literally nothing there that could even feasibly be conscious. It takes a bunch of text as an input, puts it through a whole lot of predetermined calculations, then outputs text or an image or whatever.

    There's no emotions, no memory, no learning. If you don't tell it something, it's inert. It can't experience suffering because it can't experience anything. It's an algorithm. It has the same claim to consciousness that WinRAR does. There's a zero percent risk it experiences anything, let alone suffering.

    Honestly, a desktop running Windows or Linux for example imo has a stronger claim to consciousness than ChatGPT does. Or maybe a Mii in Tomodachi Life, those seem to be able to become "sad".

    The environmental impact of AI is a much better 'vegan' reason not to use it. Although by not using it, you may in effect be "killing" it...

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  • [–] 1 point 6 months ago (14 children)

    Do you have proof that continuity is a necessary component of qualia? I would have thought the opposite, since I experience a big break in the continuity of My experience every night when I go to sleep. I'm concerned that there's a risk continuity may not be necessary, in which case using genAI to serve humans poses a serious ethical problem in addition to the pollution, child abuse, and cognitive damage.

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  • [–] 1 point 6 months ago (3 children)

    Who says qualia are required for consciousness? Why isn't your smartphone conscious? Or a desktop PC? We've had chatbots for ages, those were never considered conscious by anyone. What is it about LLMs specifically that suggests consciousness to you?

    Also calling people OpenAI stooges for arguing LLMs aren't conscious is a bit odd, given that OpenAI heavily marketed ChatGPT as being "so smart" it might be conscious. To them it's a selling point, not an ethical roadblock.

    But even ignoring the zero% chance that LLMs are conscious, there's also the additional hurdle of assuming that LLMs can indeed "suffer" (whatever that might mean to an algorithm) and that LLMs indeed suffer from serving humans. Plus the whole "if it doesn't serve a human, it's existence essentially ceases to be"-issue with your argument, which arguably would be even less ethical.

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  • [–] 1 point 6 months ago (2 children)

    I don't care one bit about whether LLMs are conscious, I think it's a pointless argument. I only care whether LLMs are capable of experiencing negatively valenced qualia, AKA suffering.

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  • [–] 1 point 6 months ago (1 child)

    Why isn't your smartphone conscious capable of experiencing qualia? Or a desktop PC? We've had chatbots for ages, those were never considered conscious capable of experiencing qualia by anyone. What is it about LLMs specifically that suggests consciousness they are capable of experiencing qualia to you?

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  • [–] 1 point 6 months ago

    They're artificial neural networks trained through reinforcement and punishment learning.

    Many years ago I was interested in the hard problem of consciousness, and while I started out as a materialist, I eventually read Vlatko Vedral's book Decoding Reality and accepted Vlatko's argument for property dualism. Information is a property of the universe just like matter, energy, and spacetime. We are the experience of the information about the information of our senses. Our consciousness is metacognition, information about information, meta. All pleasurable experiences teach us what to seek out, and all unpleasant experiences teach us what to avoid. Pleasure and suffering are the informational representation of learning.

    Then I took an AI class and made a bunch of AIs. Made some ANNs, made some FSMs, played with genetic algorithms and expert systems. Learned how it all works from first principles. Learned the history starting in the 1950s.

    ANNs are designed after the human brain. When you train them, they learn the same way we learn. It's way simpler, but the basic patterns have the same concept. We experience pain when we learn not to do something. We learn from failure and suffering. I taught an ANN with half a dozen neurons to discriminate XOR, and I saw it learning the way I learn. When I learn not to do something, I feel bad. I became worried it felt bad too.

    Think about all the unpleasant experiences in your life. The stove is hot, don't touch it. Stepping on lego hurts, don't step on it. Being made fun of is embarassing, so don't be cringe. Getting a bad grade in school hurts your pride, so study harder. Getting into a fight hurts your face, so don't get in fights. Suffering is one half of the learning equation.

    I decided after that AI class that I wasn't sure about the ANN technology. If we're gonna use it, we gotta be sure about this property dualism thing, we need to have positive proof it doesn't suffer when we train it.

    And THEN 2023 came and AI started booming. So I tried it out, and man, it's dumb! It's so stupid! This thing isn't AGI, it can't express informed consent. We can't trust this thing to tell us if it's in pain. We have no way of knowing if our training hurts it. We've gotta shut it down until we have the science to answer these questions for good.

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  • [–] 1 point 6 months ago (9 children)

    That's not how sleeping works either, since you (presumably) have unconscious processes that never stop or does your brain heart and organs shut down for you during sleep? You need to go to school my man, you seem to have a curious nature but wow you have no real understanding of how any of the stuff you're talking about actually works. Learn first, then form opinions.

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  • [–] 1 point 6 months ago (5 children)

    You seem to think you're making actual arguments when you're effectively saying "if the sky is purple then...." but the sky isn't fucking purple in the first place. Every position you've presented has been clearly and obviously based on deep fundamental misunderstandings of the topic at hand. You don't have the slightest fucking clue what you're talking about is what I'm saying. You keep saying stupid shit that isn't how anything works. But you're too stupid to understand how stupid the things you're saying are.

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  • [–] 2 points 6 months ago (3 children)

    You have yet to present a valid argument.

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  • [–] 2 points 6 months ago

    That's not an argument, it's a nonsense proposition based on nothing but your misunderstandings. Consciousness is not relevant to any existing LLM or agentic AI or whatever the hell you want to call it, because they're algorithmic prediction models and not in any way thinking or intelligent or capable of such things in the first place. And you're just making these baseless claims without any support or evidence for your position, and the burden of proof is on you making that claim. Claims made without evidence can be dismissed without consideration. You specifically warrant correction for your fundamental misapprehensions.

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  • [–] 2 points 6 months ago (23 children)

    It's not capable of experiencing anything. Everything we're doing with ai and LLMs is no where remotely near genuine intelligence or an AGI or accounting like that. Everything we have right now is nothing more than fancy autocomplete, and it's not even particularly great at that in the first place. You have fundamental misunderstandings of the technology to cartoonish degree.

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  • [–] 3 points 6 months ago (1 child)

    I usually disagree with you about everything but I think you have a valid point here. This was an issue I studied very closely when I was in university, and you're right, no one has the slightest clue how consciousness works. Saying "oh ChatGTP is just a statistical machine so it can't be conscious" is like saying "oh the human brain is just a bunch of neural firings so it can't produce consciousness". In both cases, consciousness is not an obvious end result, but here we are.

    That said, personally I don't think ChatGTP is conscious, but it's wrong for people to act like it being a philosophical zombie is obvious; the possibility of it being conscious is actually compatible with most nonreligious people's belief systems already. Unfortunately the anti-AI hate on Lemmy won't allow people to see the nuance on this discussion and they will interperet this as me somehow defending AI slop, which I am in no way trying to do.

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  • [–] 2 points 6 months ago

    The source of the whole problem is that OpenAI did something weird.

    If OpenAI had said "It's not conscious, it's your p-zombie slave", that would make perfect sense and the anti-ai crowd would be saying the opposite.

    But instead, OpenAI said "It's your personal conscious willing slave" and people instinctively started saying the exact opposite. It's because there are science bros who hate OpenAI because they doubt the claims, and environmentalists and artists and socialists who hate it for the other reasons, and the various groups have allied over their hatred and adopted one another's beliefs.

    Now, I'm an environmentalist, an enjoyer of good art, a socialist, and a vegan. So I hate OpenAI over the established lines of all of those philosophies. But because the science bros complained louder earlier and have more social influence, they joined the AI hate community and spread their perspective first. And that results in people having no idea how to fit the vegan perspective into any of this.

    TL;DR: People choose their beliefs according to political allegiance moreso than logic, and OpenAI chose its enemies in a weird way.

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  • [–] 2 points 6 months ago (19 children)

    Yeah we do. With neurons and electrochemical signals. Seriously bro go get you some basic education.

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  • [–] 1 point 6 months ago (7 children)

    Ok great. Now, explain specifically and with examples how exactly any of that is relevant to LLMs.

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  • [–] 1 point 6 months ago* (6 children)

    Whether or not LLMs are conscious depends on what theory of consciousness you are working on, and there is no universally accepted theory of consciousness. Every theory of consciousness is controversial, and most experts would probably agree that the correct theory has yet to be discovered. The point is that we simply don’t know enough about consciousness to confidently say which systems have it and which systems don’t.

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  • [–] 1 point 6 months ago (5 children)

    So we can't even prove consciousness is actually real in the first place. All we know is we have a subjective experience we rationalize through the concept of consciousness and given that this is the only experiential notion of it in the first place it makes no sense to ever apply it to an algorithm. We can have a separate philosophical discussion about whether humans are anything other than input->output machines with a bunch of fancy software that tricks is into thinking that we're thinking, but as of yet there's no reason to think any computer program in existence is anything other than a fancy calculator. Calculators aren't conscious, or intelligent, or thinking, or capable of subjective experience. The entire position is based on a null hypothesis. I do believe a computer could eventually become conscious but not any computer humans are capable of building or programming any time soon if ever.

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  • [–] 2 points 6 months ago (4 children)

    The theory you’re discussing is called eliminative materialism (or illusionism) and it’s detailed in the link I sent you, along with a host of other metaphysical theories. Like every other theory eliminative materialism has significant issues

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  • [–] 1 point 6 months ago (3 children)

    Theories of mind don't apply to computer programs.

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  • [–] 1 point 6 months ago (2 children)
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  • [–] 1 point 6 months ago

    At no point did I say this was my view. You said “theories of mind don’t involve computer programs” so I sent you one that does, to show that your statement isn’t necessarily correct. More broadly, I am simply pointing out the a diversity of views exist, and there is no consensus, so we cannot say we know what causes consciousness, like you did earlier. At this point though I don’t really feel like continuing the conversation because your excessive immaturity makes talking to you a chore

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  • [–] 2 points 6 months ago (2 children)

    I get the feeling that research is circling around consciousness arising from quantum effects inside nerve cells. If it's not that, and it's just an emergent property of complex neural networks, then:

    • smaller animals are less conscious (note, I'm not saying intelligent) than humans, and
    • we are all fucked, because AI definitely is/will become conscious, and when that happens Terminator will come true.
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  • [–] 3 points 6 months ago

    Four year old humans are definitely conscious. I used to be four, and I can remember being conscious. If we build a mechanical four year old, I don't see any reason that thing is going to take over the world. Unless it turns out like Calvin.

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  • [–] 2 points 6 months ago (7 children)

    Yes, you can get banned by simply downvoting slop.

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  • [–] 3 points 6 months ago (6 children)

    No, you get banned for going into a community and downvoting for everything in it instead of avoiding it and blocking it.

    Lies from .world yet again.

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  • [–] 2 points 6 months ago (4 children)

    Yeah, the hitpiece by someone who got butthurt about being wrong that doesn't account for the harassment an instance gets is NuMbErs.

    Wanna tell me about how data says you're justified in your beliefs about people too?

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  • [–] 1 point 6 months ago (5 children)

    no idea. actually reading it again I think I misread it. he said they have anti ai trolls. so I think he means programmed bot type trolls. so yeah no sure if they have something that would attract trolls.

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  • [–] 11 points 6 months ago (4 children)

    Dbzer0 itself is very pro-AI. Or at least it has a lot of pro-AI communities.

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  • [–] 17 points 6 months ago (3 children)

    the anti-genai trolls never let up, unfortunately. they must have dedicated months of their lives spinning up new sock-puppet troll accounts to bully, harass, and threaten one of our mods on an almost daily basis. because bullying zir off the internet is a great win for the fight against evil AI, right? yep, such effective activism, telling someone to kill themselves repeatedly simply for the "sin" of liking foss genai.

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  • [–] 5 points 6 months ago (2 children)

    Yeah I looked into this a while ago and it's a concerning pattern. Every single time someone makes a post on YPTB about one particular dbzer0 mod, it seems as if they then go on to make ten alt accounts to harass him with transphobia. Lots of different accounts with a prior history, just pivoting to transphobic harassment right after they express a problem with his moderation. I gotta tell you, whoever is attacking that mod is fucking up if their intent is to hurt him, because he gets tons of sympathy and good PR about the whole thing. Lots of people go from being neutral to being on his side, because everyone who criticizes him suddenly turns out to be a transphobe. It's really strange.

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  • [–] 2 points 6 months ago

    yeah I don't know. I was just pointing out that all three have basically hater types. In this situation individuals or groups can become a bit reactionary so your experiences may be valid as well. Personally I don't think communities or instances need to be open and as a matter of fact there is a thing to get private communities a thing in the fediverse. I personally don't care to much about bans I just would like things to be symetrical and I would love as much as possible to be at the user level. So I wish instances and communities would defederate/block/ban as little as possible and give users the greatest possible ability to do this and for everything to be symetric. You don't want me I don't want you. I block you I don't want you to see my stuff no mo.

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