It is definitely apparent that the majority of conversations online are short lived and rarely build community quite like they used to.
Bots spam and ruin good conversations and then sow doubt and morale problems to boot which don't affect the bots, but do affect the people.
Bots have purposes tho - so knowing the purpose is half the battle. Bots designed to link farm for example act a different way than those AI speech bots.
-- if anything we need to start addressing the bots as agents of chaos or control and less as things we walk past like spam and ads.
Shutting down the bot nets seems an almost impossible task at this point without shutting down the whole internet and starting on fresh protocols and hardware. Not exactly feasible for the whole world but doable on small networks. Finding out who controls the boy nets, and ruining them seems the only option.
It is definitely apparent that the majority of conversations online are short lived and rarely build community quite like they used to.
Bots spam and ruin good conversations and then sow doubt and morale problems to boot which don't affect the bots, but do affect the people.
Bots have purposes tho - so knowing the purpose is half the battle. Bots designed to link farm for example act a different way than those AI speech bots.
-- if anything we need to start addressing the bots as agents of chaos or control and less as things we walk past like spam and ads.
Shutting down the bot nets seems an almost impossible task at this point without shutting down the whole internet and starting on fresh protocols and hardware. Not exactly feasible for the whole world but doable on small networks. Finding out who controls the boy nets, and ruining them seems the only option.
Yes, it's definitely hard to shut down them. If impossible without even worse problems.
What we need is to make the bots useful, not stop them.
Take recaptchas for instance. They don't do anything except make better bots... Not a good thing.
We should have captchas which use bots....