Re: bots

If feasible, I think the best option would be an instance that functions similarly to how Reddit’s now defunct r/BotDefense operated and instances which want to filter out bots would federate with that. Essentially, if there is an account that is suspect of being a bot, users could submit that account to this bot defense server and an automated system would flag obvious bots whereas less obvious bots would have to be inspected manually by informed admins/mods of the server. This flagging would signal to the federated servers to ban these suspect/confirmed bot accounts. Edit 1: This instance would also be able to flag when a particular server is being overrun by bots and advise other servers to temporarily defederate.

If you are hosting a Lemmy instance, I suggest requiring new accounts to provide an email address and pass a captcha. I’m not informed enough with the security side of things to suggest more, but https://lemmy.world/c/selfhosted or the admins of large instances may be able to provide more insight for security.

Edit 2: If possible, an improved search function for Lemmy, or cross-media content in general, would be helpful. Since this medium still has a relatively small userbase, most bot and spam content is lifted from other sites. Being able to track where bots’ content is coming from is extremely helpful to conclude that there is no human curating their posts. This is why I’m wary of seemingly real users on Lemmy who do binge spam memes or other non-OC. Being able to search for a string of text, search for image sources/matching images, being able to search for strings of text within an image, and being able to find original texts that a bot has rephrased are on my wishlist.

Re: AI content

AFAIK, the best option is just to have instance/community rules against it if you’re concerned about it.

The best defense against both is education and critical examination of what you see online.

Just ask them to draw images of full glasses of wine.

My instance has "Rule 3: No AI Slop. This is a platform for humans to interact" and it's enforced pretty vigorously.

As far as "how":

1. Sometimes it's obvious. In those cases, the posts are removed and the account behind it investigated. If the account has a pattern of it, they get a one way ticket to Ban City

2. Sometimes they're not obvious, but the account owner will slip up and admit to it in another post. Found a handful that way, and you guessed it, straight to Ban City.

3. Sometimes t's difficult on an individual post level unless there are telltale signs. Typically have to look for patterns in different posts by the same account and account for writing styles. This is more difficult / time consuming, but I've caught a few this way (and let some slide that were likely AI generated but not close enough to the threshold to ban).

4. I hate the consumer AI crap (it has its place, but in every consumer product is not one of them), but sometimes if I'm desperate, I'll try to get one of them to generate a similar post as one I'm evaluating. If it comes back very close, I'll assume the post I'm evaluating was AI-generated and remove it while looking at other content by that user, changing their account status to Nina Ban Horn if appropriate.

5. If an account has a high frequency of posts that seems unorganic, the Eye of Sauron will be upon them.

6. User reports are extremely helpful as well

7. I've even banned accounts that post legit news articles but use AI to summarize the article in the post body; that violates rule 3 (no AI slop) and Rule 6 (misinformation) since AI has no place near the news.

If you haven't noticed, this process is quite tedious and absolutely cannot scale under a small team. My suggestion: if something seems AI generated, do the legwork yourself (as described above) and report them; be as descriptive in the report as possible to save the mod/admin quite a bit of work.

I don't think there's really a solution to this.

Everyone is so fixated on getting more users but honestly I don't think that will make it a better experience.