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

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

    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