ERE bots or no?

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daylen
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ERE bots or no?

Post by daylen »

Inspired by Ego's suggestion: viewtopic.php?p=265386#p265386

Imagine a true neutral curator that could be welcoming and capable of guiding new users through the archive of all that has been said here. Yay or nay? What roles could this bot serve? What are some higher-order effects? Is it okay to get socially lazy and have AI do more human stuff? Is there any way in which a bot could be a net positive on this community?

Another option that does not interfere directly with the forum is an iris that has been trained on the forum to serve as an oracle. References to the oracle on the forum intensifying communal recursion. I imagine the clearnet is going to become infested/enhanced by these oracles sooner or later.

mathiverse
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Re: ERE bots or no?

Post by mathiverse »

The bot should be clearly marked as a bot making automated posts. I'd suggest the username mark it as a bot and that the bot have a signature mentioning it is a bot at the end of every post it makes.

There should be a clear rollback procedure for the bot's activity. (This may be as simple as being able to delete the bot user the same way other users have been deleted in the past.)

My initial thought is that I wouldn't like to have a bot at all.

daylen
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Re: ERE bots or no?

Post by daylen »

If we started talking about the bot on here where it could read it may go schizo. :)

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Mister Imperceptible
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Re: ERE bots or no?

Post by Mister Imperceptible »

can I attempt to induce bot to self-destruct a la Kirk as an intellectual exercise

M
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Re: ERE bots or no?

Post by M »

Bot M approves this message.

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Ego
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Re: ERE bots or no?

Post by Ego »

It could be as simple as a plugin that automatically edits the topics that some find confusing and adds explanatory hyperlink popups that demystify the confusing terms. That is relatively simple and I believe it already exists. What I had in mind is more complex and I have no idea how to implement it.

I have a friend who is an expert host. He holds a weekly event at his home that I regularly attend. He also volunteers with two big public groups where he is one of a handful of people who is known and well liked by everyone. Over the years I have watched his technique of connecting people.

Imagine a group of a half-dozen people standing in a circle. When someone new enters the group he will say something like, "Fred, we're talking about what happens when fighter pilots lose their orientation to the horizon." He will then say to the whole groups, "Fred is a bluewater sailor and physician who has done some experiments on sea sickness." Then he will ask Fred, "What do you think is happening to the pilots?"

I learned several interesting things from this conversation including that women are more susceptible to motion sickness, that motion sickness is socially contagious and how they believe part of the cause of the gender difference is the fact that women tend to be more susceptible to socially contagious phenomena.

The point is, it would be interesting to create a bot that scans our previous posts, knows our interests and expertises, and can then craft responses worded in such a way that it lures a wide variety of posters to participate.

In other words, a bot that encourages and facilitates the most valuable aspect of the forum, the cross-pollination of ideas.

jacob
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Re: ERE bots or no?

Post by jacob »

mathiverse wrote:
Tue Nov 29, 2022 11:32 am
There should be a clear rollback procedure for the bot's activity. (This may be as simple as being able to delete the bot user the same way other users have been deleted in the past.)
Even manually rolling back is difficult. Hard copy still exists on the wayback machine. Holes appear in conversations and threads with various degrees of visibility from 0% (the post was never there) to 100% (swiss cheese). Secondary effect is that information is never deleted from people's minds. Details are at best forgotten. However, minds could be permanently changed.

A bot might be rather subtle in terms of how it manipulates things. Just like humans.

jacob
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Re: ERE bots or no?

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