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

  •  GeneralRetreat   ( @GeneralRetreat@beehaw.org ) English
    11•11 months ago

    Bots can be extremely useful and the flexibility of where and how bots could work was one of the things that made Reddit popular. Before, well, y’know.

    Bespoke bots can also allow particular communities to develop local features or functionality. I assume Lemmy’s mod tools are fair bare bones right now too, so I suspect someone, somewhere is probably working on an automod toolkit.

    Bots should be allowed, but must be flagged. I don’t know if it’s a default lemmy option, but the app I use has a toggle to hide bot accounts if you don’t want to see them.

    That said, I would very much prefer if bots were restricted to just making comments rather than posts. Certain communities have bots that automatically post article links and they completely blanket feeds sorted by new until you block the account.

    •  weremacaque   ( @weremacaque@kbin.social ) 
      9•11 months ago

      I’ve started an account on Mastodon recently, and really noticed the bot accounts. If you accidentally follow one of the extremely active bots, all your feed becomes their posts. I don’t think there’s enough people on the Fediverse just yet to be able to drown those bots out when they show up.