The Fediverse is a great system for preventing bad actors from disrupting “real” human-human conversations, because all of the mods, developers and admins are all working out of a desire to connect people (as opposed to “trust and safety” teams more concerned about user retention).
Right now it seems that the Fediverses main protection is that it just isn’t a juicy enough target for wide scale spam and bad faith agenda pushers.
But assuming the Fediverse does grow to a significant scale, what (current or future) mechanisms are/could be in place to fend off a flood of AI slop that is hard to distinguish from human? Even the most committed instance admins can only do so much.
For example, I have a feeling all “good” instances in the near future will eventually have to turn on registration applications and only federate with other instances that do the same. But it’s not crazy to imagine that GPT could soon outmaneuver most registration questions which means registrations will only slow the growth of the problem but not manage it long-term.
Any thoughts on this topic?
“The fediverse” really can’t. That’s just the reality of a decentralized system. It’s going to be up to individual instances to sort it out.
But that’s a good thing, because what it means is that different instances can and will try different approaches, and between them, they’ll sooner or later hit on the one(s) that will be most effective.
Any speculation as to what those tools might look like?
Ban it outright in the rules of individual instances, bully AI piglets for printing the lowest-value content online in the same way NFT goobers are ostracised, run AI image and writing detectors on suspect posts. The common denominator of any AI post is that it’s going to be shit and it should just be treated like someone repeatedly posting a Lorem ipsum copypasta or spam email.
I don’t have the foggiest idea.
And really, if I did have a good idea, I wouldn’t post it publicly anyway. That’d just be tipping my hand to the astroturfers.