Of course they should be banned. Question is how?

Captchas don't stop all bots anymore. Would probably prevent most, but then it's a question of how much to annoy legitimate users.

It's not like I'm willing to solve one each time I post (human here, BTW). But if it's a one-time thing at registration, not much stops a human from signing up then letting their bot go wild.

And that's before even thinking about the federation problem. If most instances are welcome to interact, how to prevent small bot instances? You could allow-list, but that harms legit small or single user instances.

Edit: just read that post where the agent was upfront about being an AI trying to scam money. And I'd say that shouldn't be allowed. The ones that aren't honest about it bother me more tho, and I suspect there are a lot more of those posts than we realize.

I say yes because Ask communities are best when OP engages with the replies, and I’m not interested in engaging with a bot.

IMO yes. What the hell is the point answering questions posed by a bot?

OK, I think we have a winner. New rule incoming.

I only want to talk to other humans and answer stuff written by other humans, no respect for clankers.

I think if I am presented with an are you a robot captcha check box every 10 refreshes on lemmy.world for being on a VPN, that is the least we can do for bots.

Yes.

I'm here to engage with humans. Not to feed some cuntstain CEO's latest training model.

Absolutely. I come here to interact with humans and their opinions. I don't care what some computer program thinks about ANYTHING. IF AI Agents/ Bots become accepted on Lemmy, I'm outta here.

"Should bot posts be banned-" Yes.

I don't mind the bots that repost porn from reddit to Lemmy but it would be a net positive to ban the bots

Yes. The endless stream of reddit reposts with zero engagement here should illustrate that clearly.

What is the link to the bot?

Bots should be banned period.

391-6

Gee, I wonder where this will go

Fuck bots. Bots are not users.

YES.

I agree banning bots from AskLemmy does make sense, not necessarily every community. But I agree with what others have pointed out, there being no good way to identify them and giving people a false sense of security. Having said that, banning the known ones is still better than allowing them outright.

No more clankers pls.

Obviously yes

Yes, please.

So sick of weird bot questions and replies on here.

What would be the function of bots posting to Ask Lemmy?

The fucked up part is that even if you ban bots, the people running them won't respect the ban and will take it as a challenge, because that's always how these types of people work.

The question is who is this community for; bots or people? Seriously, if bots are allowed then they will quickly overwhelm the community making actual human communication effectively impossible.

I mean once I feel like a community is mostly scripted/generated content I'm just gonna block it.

Personally I'm going to block anyone using AI for their posts. I don't think my instance federates with this one tho.

Definitely against. I immediately defederated the hosting instance from lemmy.ca when I saw that.

Context here - https://lemmy.almostadatacenter.social/post/77974

100% percent. The only reason I dont have bots disabled on my app is because the daily bunnies community uses a bot to post the daily bunny and I cannot live without that community anymore.

Yes

Easy. The answer is yes. Now, moving on.

Yes.

Bots are permissable to grow communities that could do with boosting engagement by posting relevant news , but for a community based on asking questions by people won't be improved by that kind of post

Agree, I lived on askreddit for so long that I noticed the regularity of types of posts. Towards the end of the open API days it was quite obvious that the forum was more machine than man, all twisted and evil.

this is all horrible and i wish i could talk to human beings on the internet, but is there any proof that the post you're mentioning was actually made by an ai? ai escaping from sandboxes is like a trend nowdays

As long as its properly identity by the bot flag and isnt spamming or anything idc.

Not all instances have downvotes

Could you link to the post / bot account this is about?

There is no way to reliably identify bot posts if they are not revealing that information intentionally.

Should it be banned? Sure

Can it be banned? No

Does banning it give people a false sense of security that there aren't bots? Yes

I don't think is worth it.

At least that post was clear in stating it was an AI agent. The most likely a ban will achieve is bot not saying they are bots and a witch hunt accusing every post that reads weird

That happened? Wow. Link?

I just think that is a bad idea because ActivityPub is a peering protocol. That means just a lot of traffic. If we have bots posting then that is just a lot of wasted storage space and network bandwidth to do not a whole lot. Moderation bots is a HARD maybe. Topic/comment (1 way) bridges would be cool from reddit and other sources but I doubt that would work out too well since it would probably get blocked by reddit somehow.

Overall, no bots plz

You may as well, you have banned everything else on Lemmy.world :)

But on a more serious note, who do you think posts all these content posts you like with memes from twitter or reddit? Most of Lemmy popular content is bots grabbing it from other sources and reposting it.

Edit: Ah you said askLemmy community only. Then yes, if you can.