How do you all feel about bots?
I’ve seen a gpt powered summarization bot pop up recently. Do you find this useful? Do you hate this?
Do you think bots serve any useful purposes on this website or do you think we should ban all bots? Should we have a set of rules for how bots should interact - only when called, needing to explicitly call out they are a bot on their profile, etc?
I’d love to hear your thoughts
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98% of bots are crap. The problem is that people have different opinions as to which 98% of them is the crap portion.
Absolutely any bot needs to self-identify.
While I understand the use cases of bots that provide some sort of utility or post helpful information, I lean towards having no bots. Reddit was festering with bots of all stripes - mostly memes - and it was kind of unbearable.
I personally long for a community that features strictly human-to-human conversation and interaction.
I’m aware that this opinion will likely be in the minority, given how tech-centric the fediverse in general is, but that’s my thought on the matter.I like summary bots, summoned bots that serve a purpose, and meme bots if they stay in specific communities where they are expected to be. All bots should self identify.
I could be mistaken but doesn’t Lemmy just have a setting for the user to not see bot posts?
I also figure users can block specific bots if they don’t like them.
The summary bot has now been disabled as per the decision of Beehaw. Contact your favorite community mods if you’d like to change that.
Disappointing. There’s a number of reasonable bots and auto-tl;dr can be extremely useful for avoiding tracking and shady sites.
Honestly, as a programmer, I’d like the freedom to share bots that can benefit the community. Although, I do think that there should be measures in place to ensure bots don’t degrade the quality of the community.
Bots that can be summoned (e.g. !savevideo, or whatever the command format would be) could be useful. Otherwise, bots can sod off.
bots are kinda boring
I don’t want bots on Beehaw. Either unknown ChatGPT generated comments or bots that just listen to keywords and hey heres a Wikipedia link type. I want discussion from real, good, people with opinions. Not a bot with useless commentary I could just Google(Kagi) instead. Rules around this type of bot is okay, this isnt gets into rules lawyering and favoritism. My vote is no to bots.
I don’t find bots useful. I was on Reddit for years and I didn’t use any of them. I don’t think the door should be closed on bots permanently but for now I’d rather not see them, they’re no better than spam to me.
Bots like that one that changes YouTube links to Piped are good, as are bots like a metric/freedom unit converter. A well done meme bot could even be good. I just don’t like the ones that pretend to be human.
If they’re informative and/or helpful, I don’t mind bots. If they’re those stupid pointless novelty bots that were plaguing Reddit, they can go away.
The grammar bots were so annoying! I love good grammar as much as anyone, but really, what help are we actually adding to the world with the they’re/their/there bots, the your/you’re bots, the payed/paid bots, etc. I really can’t imagine those changed anyone’s behavior or spelling.
Is anyone checking the AI “summariser” bot for accuracy? I’d rather not get misleading ideas in my head from a poor summary.
The bot has now been disabled as per the decision of Beehaw. Contact your favorite community mods if you’d like to change that.
To answer your question, yes, I am checking it for accuracy as I’m the author and I’d like it to be as useful as it can be. I’d say its summary is really helpful in 90+% of cases, the rest could be better and only once I’ve seen it post a summary that wasn’t helpful at all.
Please keep the bots to a minimum.
Approved bots that the admins manually review the use cases for is absolutely fine.
I just don’t want things to revert back to reddit days where I’m constantly BLOCKING new novelty bots that are absolutely freaking useless and add nothing to a conversation.
Also; PLEASE; implement the following ideas into a(n) agreement/covenant for bot operators; I quote this directly from the Tao of IRC:
The master Nap then said: “Any automata should not speak unless spoken to. Any automata shall only whisper when spoken to.”
Personally - I think any bot that could be straight Lemmy functionality shouldn’t exist but that said, I think good ground rules would be :
- Bots should be clearly prompted by a command
- Bots should not act in a community without mods from that community being contacted first
- Bots should minimize the space they take with their messages (Example: Info on how to contact its creator should be in the bot bio rather than in every message)
- Bots should say who made/hosts it
I don’t know if I can say broadly one way or another but I really do not want to see those annoying bots like we’d see on reddit that would see, I don’t know, that you wrote “burger” and it responds with, “DID YOU KNOW BURGER IS SHORT FOR HAMBURGER?” and other useless nonsense.
My opinion is that bots should be classed by how they operate.
Summoned bots should be mostly free of restriction. If it needs someone to explicitly summon it, then the onus is on them to not needlessly summon bots. Requiring explicit
Keyword/auto-summon bots should at a minimum be required to implement easy user/community/instance opt-out. I think the most viable would be allowing auto-summon only when explicitly allowed by the user, community, or instance, but allow them to reply to manual summons without restrictions.
So how it would work is if someone had a bot that would, for example, post Nitter links in response to Twitter links, it would be allowed to:
- Respond to @nitterbot@example.com
- Respond on posts by someone who’s indicated they want the bot to auto-reply to their posts
- Respond to posts on a community that allows the bot to do so
