To be more suspicious of disingenuous threads nowadays?

[HillyHoney]

I might be imagining this, but are there now a lot more threads along the lines of "AIBU to think that this [insert terrible thing] my [insert close relatives] do is actually not great? Just doesn't sit right with me, but maybe I'm wrong!" Tinkly little laugh implied.

It's usually qualified by a casual mention, as if not at all relevant, that the OP is saintly, moral and humble in various ways whereas the [terrible relatives] have also been in prison/are murderers/don't like puppies etc.

Are these increasing just to generate engagement and therefore ad clicks?? Who's writing them?! (Sorry, dont mean to be disingenuous there 🤣)

@SixtySomething I hate those posts where they describe the entire conversation & body language, who the fuck remembers in that detail!

At least I've found my Oxford comma people 🤣

And the bigots " I hate men, all men. Wouldnt a life without men being super?" Tinkly laugh. Any other the or bigotry would be removed by moderators. Yes the majority of us are female. Yes, a lot of comments are" my male whatever did something bad/dreadful/hateful/ annoying etc and ate genuinely looking for support and guidance but the "let's live without men" are pure hate.

I wouldn’t know how to recognise AI from something that someone has written but I absolutely agree that so many posts are just made up. If something seems unlikely, then it probably is.

Posts where people are asking for other’s stories don’t bother me as they are normally quite entertaining to read. The ones that get me are all the relationship ones (this includes the friendship, family and in-law ones as well as husbands and partners). I think so many are made up.

They don't necessarily have to lead to an immediate gain/goal now - AI platforms are still learning so just the process of putting together a post, learning to prompt a response, judging the favourabikity of that response, and determining whether to continue engaging with it are all valuable lessons for the AI to learn. Effectively Internet discussion fora are being used to provide free training for AI (and other AI platforms are then able to benefit by scraping the data and looking at the same things - what did it post about, did it get a response, did it correctly judge whether the response was positive or not, did it drive repeat engagement).

Terrifying @Gliblet, thank you 😳

There are so many threads where "@MarryForMoney" posts something along the lines of "AIBU to find women who marry for money the sensible ones. By which I don't think women should work. It's just that I have observed that really, to be happy, women have to have a manly presence in their life. Have you noticed this too or is it just me?"

OP then disappears or comes back with word soup. "No, that's not really what I was saying. I've just noticed that women are happier in a supporting role. Not all women obviously, just some that I see, especially younger women at work".

It is so obvious, so anti feminist and so repetitive. I can spot them now before I open them.

Excuse me but the Oxford comma is NOT incorrect grammar. The rest of it - is agree, it's very bot-ty!

Me too.

Agreed. It’s not quite as bad but even so it’s mostly fiction. It’s like those movies which have a caption at the end ‘based on real events.’
It’s also worse than those movies because people will comment on the details, believing them to be genuine.
Perhaps the presentation of AIBU needs to be changed to reflect AI, ‘The scenarios presented are intended to represent real life situations but do not actual characters and events ’ Something a bit like that.

There’s been a lot with ‘what three words’ usernames - always a number/colour/object - usually new posters and posting utter tripe. Not hard to spot but deeply irritating.

Also get frustrated with people who continue to engage with post and run threads - why do they run for pages when the OP never replies?

The what three words names are an actual mumsnet feature, they are suggested to new members who don't want to think of their own username, not suspicious in themselves

Ah I didn’t know that! Thanks

I've had 3 of my recent threads declared fake by other users.

Some people are far too suspicious. If someone calls it early on, the thread dies.

Justine licensed the OpenAI LLM to crawl Mumsnet, no doubt part of the deal was that they were allowed the data back, ie could use Mumsnet to improve their LLM.

Don't be hatin' on the Oxford commas!

I agree OP. They range from quite silly'AIBU to object to my aunty setting fire to the christmas tree while we were all asleep' to blatant faux naive political propaganda.

I have just realised that I often use an Oxford comma. I just didn’t know it had a name🤣

I’m fed up with the number of trolls. We are told not to troll hunt and to report threads which look like the work of trolls. Sometimes I don’t particularly care whether the thread is deleted. I just want to let the OP know, subtly or otherwise, that I’m onto them. Especially when people are spending their time replying in good faith. I reported a thread yesterday (I rarely report anything other than spam) because it started out as one of those ‘hmmm, not sure, but COULD be dodgy’ type threads. But every time the OP came back, the scenario was embellished to a ridiculous extent and it became pretty obvious. I must admit, it was funny. The thread was left to stand. It did fizzle out pretty quickly though, so maybe that’s why. Obviously I didn’t expect it to be taken down on my say so, but an explanation as to why not might have been helpful. I’d rather just be able to say straight out ‘I think you’re making this shit up’ without having my comment deleted.

There seem to be countless threads along the same lines. "My boyfried of 7 years won't marry me." Or woman moves into boyfriend's house, gets pregnant, gives up job. How many of these are made up, I wonder.
Not sure what point I'm making!

I don’t mind the troll threads if they are funny with funny responses. Much more interesting than the “my 5 yr old has just read War & Peace, is he gifted” or “my boyfriend ignores me & never says anything nice to me but he’s a great boyfriend” & “neighbour is on benefits but lives on 10k a month”.

I had to google Oxford Comma!

Same

I write and use punctuation just as I speak. I find it makes things easier to read. No commas needed here because I took a breath at the full stops!! 😆

Bit odd to waste your time starting this?
Just pass these ‘disingenuous threads’, by 🤷‍♀️.

For the past few months AIBU has been cluttered up by a person/bot/cyborg who posts one dimensional, high school debate team style word salad threads and it drives me bonkers!

I suspect rage baiting or trolling because as soon as others pick apart their argument, they claim they didn’t actually mean what they explicitly said in their title and OP, but something totally different.

It’s the same format and writing style every bloody time. The latest one was the ridiculous thread about not judging powerful women whether they earned their status by hard work or marrying up 🤨