Comment by BrenBarn
9 hours ago
> Ban bots from social media and all other speech platforms.
I would agree with that, but how do you do it? The problem is that as the bots become more convincing it becomes harder to identify them to ban them. I only see a couple options.
One is to impose crushing penalties on whatever humans release their bots onto such platforms, do a full-court-press enforcement program, and make an example of some offenders.
The other is to ban the bots entirely by going after the companies that are running them. A strange thing about this AI frenzy is that although lots of small players are "using AI", the underlying tech is heavily concentrated in a few major players, both in the models and in the infrastructure that runs them. It's a lot harder for OpenAI or Google or AWS to hide than it is for some small-time politician running a bot. "Top-down" enforcement that shuts down the big players could reduce AI pollution substantially. It's all a pipe dream though because no one has the will to do it.
You can do it but you won't like the answer. Link social media accounts real ID, you'll be able to spot the bots because one real person is associated to hundreds of posts a minute.
Going that dystopian extreme wouldn't help. Simply rent real IDs from poor people at cheap rates to be your sock-puppet and you have even more convincing bullshit from bots. Sapient actors aren't so easily solved.
I like this idea. The problem isn’t free speech it’s the money which gives monied interests vastly disproportionate weight.
What if we banned the technologies that enable bots in the first place?
Remove the precursor, remove the problem.