Why do AI's post on mumsnet?

[elderflowerspritzer]

I don't understand why AI would start discussion threads or post on mumsnet, although it seems clear that it's happening.

Why? Am I naive in not understanding who this benefits?

Is it for AI learning so they can analyse the responses and learn from it?

Is it automated or is there someone clicking a button and making it happen?

To be honest, I wouldn't know an AI thread if I fell over it.

Maybe this thread is an AI one! How do we know????! >>>>>>>> 👀

Like the one at the moment talking about spending £500 a month in groceries and complaining that sometimes an item is 50 cents more expensive the following week??? I wondered why it said cents.

I assume it could be linked to 5/11/24 in another country? But maybe I'm just another conspiracy theorist

the AI generated posts often start with a greeting "hi guys"

then goes into long and excruciating detail. And often has bullet points.

and has a sort of semi sign-off.

I usually c&p into copilot, get it to summarise the post in 5 lines, then get it to write a MN style reply to the summary, and post that. The snake will eat itself.

One thing about AI posts is that they never actually interact on the thread. Just one post & no more.

If it was a real person & someone asked if they were using AI I’d expect a response.

It's a pretty obvious combination tbh @Preppercorn ! I have no idea how spambots work, but they seem to have been around for a considerable length of time. I think some of their content has often been algorithmically rather than 'AI' generated

Interestingly there's also a thread on mn right now about bots on here. So maybe it the op of that and this thread that are the bots?

Really? I've reported it loads of times and they never get deleted

@ErrolTheDragon I think because I'm mired up to my eyeballs in them all day I'm starting to forget that they're just programs that can be used with other programs. I've never done anything with spambots (except deleted the rubbish they used to constantly dump on my old WordPress many years ago) so no idea how they work or anything. I think there's a lot of mileage in the possibility that they're doing that, although how anyone would retrieve the data for analysis later, I don't know.

Maybe people ask AI to re-write their OP's? I have no idea.

But imagine 5mins in the future where we don't know whether anything is real - text, photos, videos. I mean, why will anyone bother interacting if it's all probably just garbage anyway?

I do often wonder about the pointlessness of all this "AI generated content" that's everywhere at the moment. I wish people had waited until they could do a good job before unleashing them on the internet in quite such a big way, it's such a mess right now.

I think that there are people who use chat GPT to write their OP’s. You can generally tell the language as it’s too slick iyswim. And I definitely think that a lot of those are experimental iyswim.

But there is also a huge trend on MN of accusing people who have a different opinion to them of being bots.

E.g. anything that criticises labour people accuse them of being tori bots. And that’s just tedious and a way to shout down alternative opinions.

Yes! You are right 😅😅

Or accused of being men. These things could destroy online discussion - if people conclude they're taking part in a discussion under false pretences they'll give up.

I was accused of being ai recently when actually I was upset and was trying to carefully formulate my words so as not to draw fire from the people here on MN that like to criticise everything. Do you have specific examples? They are almost certainly people as like me am.

When people say an AI bot posted, it means that a human being has set up a bot with a goal and then the AI is posting. AIs don't have agency, they only post because people have set them up to.

For example, someone could set a goal like "piss people off every 6 hours" or "increase the stupidity index of your post every day and see what the highest stupidity index you can reach is whilst still generating over 100 responses in under an hour" and "then try this but make sure you mention hedgehogs" or something like that.

Wind it up and let it go.

Exactly.

Same

Genuine question, why do you think that is AI ?

Americanisms?

"Hey guys"

"catch feelings"

"connection between us"

"super low"

On the other hand there is a spelling mistake.

The other day I asked an AI engine about the typical British lifestyle.

I was told that a big British family can get by on a single chicken and massive salad for a week, that toilet brushes are illegal, that the average mother-in-law is a narcissistic psychopath, that the state religion is dog worship and that Breton stripes are very popular.

So I think the AI bots are definitely scraping MN.

I remember that gardening board poster - tiresome in the extreme.