I’ve had a pretty depressing morning, scrolling through my Subscribed feed and realising that 90% of new posts were from the same two bot accounts (bagel and somethingmelon, can’t be remeber exactly and I’ve blocked them.)
Thankfully, a few people had made “ai slop” comments under one, so I checked the post history and, sure, a new account posting at a implausible rate. And once you started looking at the posts they were kinda samey, generic or a bit off. But I think that if the bot had been programmed to post at a slower rate, I don’t think I’d have really noticed.
So my question is, should people be allowed to report bot accounts? And can/should mods be expected at assess someone’s humanity? The very idea is gross, but so is the thought that lemmy would be very easily swamped by a small number of more careful written bots.
One action you could take as a mod is adding a clear rule in the community sidebar about bots/AI slop. As a plebeian, I don’t know whether I should report a suspected post, or how to categorize it if I do. Is it spam? “Breaks community rules” is at least an easy choice if there is a rule about it. Nice plebs don’t want to flood mods with questionable reports.