AI summaries of people have landed on Reddit.
Stumbled across this screenshot. Now, instead of judging people for yourself, the computer can do it for you!!! This will in no way be used negatively by Reddit nor people who are arguing with each other. Original post is here, if anyone still has Reddit maybe go spread the good word of Lemmy and Piefed to these users :P
This clearly shows that such implementation of AI is a solution that still seeks for the problem. Such summary doesn't add anything helpful. On top of this, since AI is known to hallucinate, one has to check the comments for themselves, making a summary obsolete.
If I was still posting on Reddit, shit like this would immediately prompt me to delete all my stuff
Outside of medicine or other data analysis, AI doesn't have much of a use.
Generating bland corporate copy/logos?
It's helpful in the nominal sense of allowing mods to dismiss people without having to do any work themselves. Which is precisely the problem AI is designed to solve... human beings have to do work and make judgemental calls. People generally do not like doing work if it can be avoided.
I'm curious how stuff like this works. Surely, many people's post histories can't fit into context. So, maybe the LLM keeps some sort of "blackboard" of summaries of posts, and edits it as it goes along? Would be pretty computationally expensive. I suppose another way would be to create embeddings of each post, and do some sort of clustering or something.
The same way that you can look at someone's post history, skim it, and more or less understand what their deal is.
Most users on reddit don't have this diverse set of interests or posts. Most of them post on the same subs and repeat the same types of posts... ad nauseam. Most people, online, aren't much more sophisticated in their language use or POV or anything... than a bot.
Sure, 10 years ago you'd look at someone's post history and it would be all over the place, and they'd be writing detailed and nuaced paragraphics in lots of detail... but that's not what reddit is like anymore, or most of the internet really. God I remember when libertarians actually had decent theoretical argumentation to defend their viewpoints... and now it's just memes and cliche phrases repeated over and over.
Pretty easy for any LLM to parse a person who just incessantly posts about the same stuff over and over. And if it came across someone doing long-form explanatory stuff... it would just ignore that data since that doesn't fit the task LLM is designed to process.
If you want to relive the old times there's a few of us minarchists libertarians that migrated over here. But yeah most of us got banned from /r/libertarian back in 2014. I'm still pretty sure it was a Russian govt backed op. Whole mod team was purged twice. Once all of us troublesome posters who would point out that all the new talking points were antherical to personal liberteries and freedom we were muted it devolved rapidly.
Lol that is some dystopian shit right there.
Fuck reddit. Corporations ruined it.
I was away from Reddit for over two years, and then one of my old accounts was compromised by some pornographer.
I didn’t like that, so I got the account back. Poked around for a little bit after that.
I got banned from /r/worldnews on my first comment there for celebrating the beating of that douche-nozzle known as “Big Balls.”
Fuck em. Didn’t dispute anything, just immediately done posting there again. Reddit is unrecognizable vs where it was in June 2023. I’m pretty sure half the participants are AI; and they’re using AI based personas to drive up their metrics and subsequently their stock price.
it generally only rewards group think and rage bait. like every other algorithmically driven social media platform.
and trolls will report/ban anything that deviates from that as controversial or harmful.
i wonder what my old Reddit account is.
I edited all my comments to be generic observations, so the only really useful metrics would be where and what I commented on
i couldn't even find the shit feature anyway
insane
What they're talking about here is a blueprint for stamping out individuality.
Omg, you are such a Monica.
Human personalities can be clustered into which member of the cast of Friends they most resemble.
Fortunately, Friends is so brilliantly written that they managed to capture the entire spectrum of human diversity.
(this is snark. I am totally a Chandler.)
Could you be any more Chandler?
it will be nothing more than grok and FB combined soon enough. the only reason reddit has completely astroturfed left leaning content, is because it allows right wingers to drive up engagement in those subs.
Can we get some more titties on Lemmy so I have zero reasons to go to that crappy site?
I noticed that there's virtually zero women asking for naked men. I kind of hope this means they are done with men, and will finally allow the population to collapse.
https://lemmynsfw.com/ exists, so..
That sounds like a pretty good feature if you ignore the lies AI might produce
This really makes me think the Amish were right after all with regards to modern tech.
I personally wouldn't go that far. But, yeah, we need to de-tech-ify a bit. And I am all for steal the control of the internet back from giant corporations.
it's not tech that is the problem. it's predictive algorithms that push users to passive consumption of media.
The internet was interesting when it was random. algorithms remove randomness. corporations loathe randomness. in the 2000s everyone was going on about how tech/internet was going to allow us this international cultural renaissance by making everything everywhere accessible to everyone...
Remember when netflix and spotify algorithms actually helped you find interesting and new content? I do. But those algorithms didn't promote the right content... so they were changed to promote the 'right' content that benefited their owners most, not the users. Now if i want to find random/new/interesting stuff... I have to manually search for it and know exactly what I'm trying to find... because that type of content is actively suppressed.
the algo driven internet has only been predominantly since the 2010s
Fuck Reddit and Fuck Spez.
nothing shows up for profiles viewed on old.reddit.com.
huzzah!
Old Reddit is the only reason why I visit it sporadically. Combined with RES, I still have the same basic keybindings to browse I had multiple years ago. The new UI of Reddit is a waste of space.
Sounds an awful lot like the social credit score China was working on a few years back. Wouldn't be surprised if mods start preemptively banning users based on their AI summaries.
Mods already use bots to preemptively ban you based on what subreddits you have left comments on regardless of context.
The "social credit score" in China was blown out of proportion too. It probably changed since I last looked into it. But when that shit was all over American media it was literally the equivalent of a background check or credit score in the US. Work history, loan and credit history, etc.
Like, it's funny how we can have essentially the same exact thing but only critize China's version of it. Make it scary by adding "social" to the name. People ate that shit up.
Edit: to be clear I think both should be critized. Especially related to criminal history bias on race. But we spend more time talking about the Chinese version that doesn't actually effect anyone's lives in the US.
It was blown out of proportion by american media but its still used to levy economic punishment and blacklist people from using basic features of society like riding a train or catching a flight.
And the US border control can look through your social media accounts. People have reported being quizzed about their opinions on the president.
And Black Mirror was before that with the idea.
And Corey Doctorow did it before that in Down And Out In The Magic Kingdom.
This person has strong opinions about the population of people currently victim to a live streamed genocide their tax dollars are funding.
Well, fuck, I would sure hope so.
I am thankful for the fediverse and hope this never finds its way over here.
Honestly the fediverse is already a bit of a privacy nightmare, and people refuse to take it seriously. Our version of this horror will include your comments and voting activity and likely a bunch of other telemetry which isn't public on reddit. Oh and it won't just be a single "official" AI agent, it will be dozens of them from every corporate or government which wants to build a user database and keep it around forever.
We could bake real privacy protection into our fediverse apps, but the admins and devs seem to have completely punted on this.
it's not a "privacy nightmare" as much as just entirely public and transparent. As long as you're aware of this when posting, then I don't really have a problem with it.
I mean... The fediverse was never tought to be extremely private, which is ok-ish, we want a social network free from corporations and then some.
It could have better privacy? Sure, but it's meant to be open and public, if someone is stupid enough to post their personal data or something that could be tracked back to them, then they would do it on any other network too and there's no way to prevent that.
If someone needs some sort of private social network and away from the eyes of the public and bots... Then make a forum or some obscure IRC server.
It would be literally about 3 hours of coding for someone to make one of those, and another few days to feed the fediverse into it.
Jokes on you I vibe coded this and it took me 5m /s
Unfortunately, you know it will. If it can be done, someone will do it.
Sure, but one instance making something stupid doesn't mean all or most will. The decentralizing part has its advantages and disadvantages. Not being owned by a single corporation with stock holders is definitely the main advantage.
Reddit won't ban the shitheads but they will summarize their post history so you can better determine who the shitheads are! ....thanks?
Narrator : "they were all shit heads"
my fav is people who harass you via messaging about some random comment you left months/years ago about how deeply hurt and offended they are.
I'm fascinated by the level of egotistical delusion it takes to be offended by random internet comments, let alone ones from old threads.
Holy fuck!
did you guys not use reddit detective back in the day?
also..
you get what you get in that shit show anyway.
I did, but the key difference is that it didn’t make an evaluation for you. It just gave you a collection of facts with some hard-coded things to look out for.
The new thing is way worse. It’s just skipping the facts part entirely.
Hahaha holy shit, Reddit's become worse than I thought. AI being added to something is how you know it's truly turned to shite.
its called crossbanning, it been in the works for many years already. most of them would ban you if you were very controversial political subs, like joe roegan, or another.
I wonder what it would do on my empty reddit account that I cleared all the comments on before coming here
Ooo found a scary Reddit poster who might upset me. Thank Odin AI is here to save me like this /s
Could one make a bot that automatically blocks people for you based on these descriptions. See how the admins like that.
Just wait til they do that using tracking cookies and IP addresses across every site you visit, and sending the results to President Trump.
Jeez, at least make the fascists wait for the language model to spit out ideas for them to steal.
It's a sure thing they are already doing that. Think Facebook and "superintelligence".
Time to find out what my profiles look like... so I can post differently on purpose.
edit: That third party site doesn't know what to make of me, so reddit might be equally confused.
That summary doesn't say anything. It's just the most neutral statements.
Agreed that it doesn't say anything because 'strong' and 'provocative' mean different things in different contexts such as subs with very different users.
A fediverse example is saying 'AI sucks' isn't provocative in c/Fuck_AI but is on the dbzer0 instance if provocative is based on votes or replies. Strong can just mean direct and clear. Sure, they might comment a lot about Palestine but the rest doesn't indicate whether they support Palestine or Israel because there is no context for what subs they post in.
Just worthless word salad.
I looked at my account to see if I'd have one, nope.
It looks like a thing only mods can see
Fuck AI, but this is probably the most apt utilization of AI I have ever seen.
Yeah, AI is so reliable that this is totally helpful and nuanced. Probably counts down votes on comments about how Israel is committing genocide in conservative subs when determining if their comments are 'provocative'.
Profile-based judgement was always sky high, I don't think AI summaries will change that much.
I read about a political polling company that will begin creating AI bot versions of the people that they poll. And they will use those AI bots to ask additional questions in the future. Questions that may not exist at the time of the poll.
Imagine what companies like Reddit will be able to do with their user data and advertisers.
reddit already gave it to GOOGLEs ai, and Open AI as well.
That actually seems like a good feature. If I open someones profile and thats the description I can instantly save myself time and energy by not replying and blocking.
What if the summary is wrong or misleading?
It probably is
Huh. That's actually not a terrible idea.
I wouldn't automate moderation attached to that (yet), but to give people a tool to gauge if a responder is just disagreeing or is a frequent troll? Yeah, that could work. Better than having to dig through the literary works of some rando stuck in an argument with you when deciding whether to block or report them.
Worst case the summary isn't particularly accurate, but for the reasons you'd be digging through someone's post backlog that's not that big of a deal anyway.
Are moderators this lazy?
I don't know that you can accuse a volunteer of laziness, just on principle.
I'll say that moderation is the single hardest problem of the Internet. Corporations being lazy and cheap about it, plus deliberately neglecting it because lack of moderation drives engagement, has led to... let me check my notes... ah, yes, the end of democracy and civil society as we understand it.
So... you know. There's that part.
I don't know that AI is a silver bullet for it, you get lots of problems if you cut humans off that loop, and a lot of the issues are deliberate corporate choices. But, you know, we hadn't already messed this up beyond repair, any tool in that toolbox would have been welcomed.
I was a moderator once. I didn't want to be, but was asked to help. It's incredibly boring, unfulfilling, and a chore. You are the supervisor of the playground during recess and there's always some moron eating sand or a fight breaking out over which dinosaur is best.
Though, if there's concise rules, job's easier.
"Miiiiiss! Daniels being mean again!"
"I don't care you little shits." Taps rule board and sips more wine from a World's Best Teacher mug
Amazon uses something similar to summarize product reviews, and it seems fine... But who knows how accurate it is.
(considering amazon reviews are completely dogshit and mostly bought off I'd imagine not very)