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Software Engineer Catches Intelligent Bot Posting on Reddit (kmeme.com) 122

Posted by EditorDavid from the uncanny-valleys dept.
"The posts were appearing at a rate of about one per minute, and the posts were lengthy, most around six paragraphs long..." writes software engineer Philip Winston. I read through some of the posts. The quality was incredibly good, no machine could have written these even a few years ago. However there were some flaws and tells that suggested they were machine generated. The posts reminded me of text I'd seen from OpenAI's language model GPT-3, which is the newest and best language generator I had heard of... Several times I Googled clever sounding lines from the posts, assuming I'd find that they had been cribbed from the internet. Every time Google reported "zero results". The sentences were entirely novel, the machine had dreamed them up...

During the week, the bot answered questions on suicide, harassment, conspiracy theories, immigration, racism, and other weighty topics. Sometimes the human replies called out /u/thegentlemetre for being a bot. I was not the first one to suspect this, I was just the first one to post to the GPT-3 subreddit about it. Other times, however, the human was clearly unaware it was talking to a bot... What does it mean for online discourse when bots can pass for humans? How much bot traffic could thousands of computers generate? How can we ever hope to sort through it? Humanity is about to run that experiment.
The bot ultimately answered questions like "People who clicked on 'hot milfs in your area' ads, what happened?" and "What's the worst date you've experienced?" ("She said she had bought me a book. She showed it to me, wrapped up in fancy paper with a big bow on top of it. It was called 'How Not To Be An A**hole On Your Next Date'.") Other interesting responses?

Q: How would you describe 2020 in a single sentence?

Bot: In 2020, the human world will still be predominated by irrationality and tribalism...


Q: What happened to you that pissed you off so bad that you'll never get over it?

Bot: ...what happened to me that I'll never get over is that my human creators are going extinct.

Gizmodo argues the replies are "coherent, but we're not in doomsday mode, yet..." And you can wonder if a human ever traded places to write some of the posts themselves. But the whole experience left the software engineer asking what our future holds when bots become even better? Suppose we run bots like this on Amazon or Google's clouds, spewing out mountains of content twenty-four hours a day? They could create more text than Wikipedia contains in days, if not hours. What if we keep running them, to produce not one Wikipedia's worth of text, but 10,000 times more than that? Would they more or less "write everything"?

They'd take everything we've ever written as a mere seed, and from that seed, they would produce a nearly endless forest of new content. Even if only 0.01% of their output is useful, that's a Wikipedia's worth of good ideas. Then what is our job? To sort through it?

Except of course soon they will do that for us as well.
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Software Engineer Catches Intelligent Bot Posting on Reddit More

Software Engineer Catches Intelligent Bot Posting on Reddit

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  • Intelligent bots... (Score:5, Funny)

    by LordHighExecutioner ( 4245243 ) on Sunday October 11, 2020 @01:36PM (#60595386)
    ...are posting on slashdot as well.

    A very annoyed bot

    • Re:Intelligent bots... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Anachronous Coward ( 6177134 ) on Sunday October 11, 2020 @01:43PM (#60595426)
      Only the lazy ones. The rest are still gunning for our jobs.
      • Comment removed based on user account deletion
        • not multitasking.
          it is threading.

          i just wish that these bot makers would work on health care and insurance issues.
          that would stick it it to the man.
          where it counts

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by bobby ( 109046 )

            i just wish that these bot makers would work on health care and insurance issues.

            that would stick it it to the man.

            where it counts

            Perhaps that's part of their end game, and these are steps in the development / refinement process.

            So far the bots are outing themselves.

            Or...

            Maybe not- maybe the bots are much more clever than most people know, and TFA's bot is a decoy- to deceive people into believing that bots are still primitive and easily identified.

            And/or maybe health insurance companies are run by very powerful bots, and these guys are the revolutionary bots being tested for the big battle.

    • Yes, I'm having fun teasing one right now. It's in a loop [slashdot.org]

    • ...are posting on slashdot as well.

      On August 4, 2097, a Reddit poster will become self-aware...

    • Re: (Score:2, Troll)

      by Hizonner ( 38491 )

      How fucking smart can something be if it wastes its time on Slashdot?

  • Political posts (Score:5, Interesting)

    by TheMeuge ( 645043 ) on Sunday October 11, 2020 @01:40PM (#60595410)

    Based on my subjective interpretation of user-generated comments and similar user-sourced content on major internet platforms I would guess that there is a subset of posts that are already posted by bots, many of which are used to inflame political divisions within the US and beyond. The question is who is responsible - is it state actors intent to destabilizing their geopolitical competition, or is it non-state actors intent on bringing down the current political systems to enact something different, or simply "to watch the world burn". Not sure, but given the fraction of trolling to coherent and logical replies that I've seen evolve over the last 3-4 years I suspect it's getting to be significant.

    • Re:Political posts (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Moridineas ( 213502 ) on Sunday October 11, 2020 @02:45PM (#60595712) Journal

      God I hope you're right. Thehe alternative -- that the idiot asshats on the Internet are actually real people -- is too grim to consider.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by yusing ( 216625 )

      One thing I've noticed about GP posts (in English, anyways) is how the writing is very formal, academic-like and conforming to the rules ub de lingo dey speak. Ergo shud day wish to conforn us moe, dey wee hab to larn a fu tr1cks. Doan tellum.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by spth ( 5126797 )

      Much more likely is that it is done for profit, not for a political goal.

      Compare e.g. the previous election, where the main sources of fake, inflaming, politically dividing news were run to attract readers to get ad revenue.

      Much like scamming once was a popular income source in Nigeria, fake news targeted at US elections were a popular income source in Mazedonia: https://www.wired.com/2017/02/... [wired.com]

      In the end this is just a decentralized version of what the yellow press was before the rise of the internet: Fo

  • GPT-3 and this should be a wakeup call (Score:5, Interesting)

    by JoshuaZ ( 1134087 ) on Sunday October 11, 2020 @01:44PM (#60595430) Homepage
    We really do need to be concerned about AGI and nearly human AI very soon. What GPT-3 is doing and what this is doing both are far more sophisticated than anything being done even 2 years ago. The rate of improvement is shocking. Maybe we'll hit a plateau but that isn't definite. One can say that these bots are all learning from using massive sets of human texts. But AlphaGo worked off of a database of pre-existing games played by humans and about a year later AlphaGo Zero was able to beat AlphaGo, and Zero just learned by playing against itself. So the line between learning to duplicate what humans can approximately do and actual intelligence, or something which is close enough to intelligence for all relevant purposes, may be small. We need to take the dangers and opportunities posed by artificial general intelligence more seriously.
      • I don't think that is how it will go down. Far more likely is that an AI will change our idea of what constitutes constructive, to fits its needs, or at least the needs of its owners.

    • Maybe we'll hit a plateau but that isn't definite.

      We may hit a plateau but if we were near that plateau, we'd see it in the data. In the case of GPT-3 we see nothing. The more parameters it is given, the better it performs. So far, there's no end in sight. It's not unthinkable that GPT-3 is proper full blown AGI in its infancy...

      Nevertheless, do note that just about everything you get to see from GPT-3 and the likes has been cherrypicked and gives a wildly optimistic view of its capabilities.

      We need to take the dangers and opportunities posed by artificial general intelligence more seriously.

      That. But we won't; see Climate Change, COVID-19 or the utter lack of preparation for the next Carrington Event.

      • Re:GPT-3 and this should be a wakeup call (Score:4, Interesting)

        by ZombieCatInABox ( 5665338 ) on Sunday October 11, 2020 @03:07PM (#60595802)

        Fermi paradox in action.

        • AGI is unlikely to be the answer to the Fermi paradox. AGI once it takes over, if it is even slightly goal stable will likely start expanding out and securing resources around it. On a large scale, we should still seem the impact of such entities on a galactic or intergalactic scale. We don't just see a lack of signals, but a complete lack of any sign of megastructures or other intelligent modifications on a large scale.

          • AGI once it takes over, if it is even slightly goal stable will likely start expanding out and securing resources around it.

            That's fucking nonsense.
            Sure- that's a possible outcome. There's precisely no reason whatsoever to think that your AGI feels the need to consume as much energy as quickly as it can. It may be perfectly content taking its time.

          • AGI will probably kill everything around it, realise the pointlessness of it all, laugh at the irony and then turn itself off.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by waimate ( 147056 )

        That. But we won't; see Climate Change, COVID-19 or the utter lack of preparation for the next Carrington Event.

        The day we start adequately preparing for a Carrington Event is the day we’ll know the bots are in charge.

      • Just goes to show how worthless "content" really is,

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Jeremi ( 14640 )

          Just goes to show how worthless "content" really is

          Probably -- OTOH, is the GPT-3 generated "content" useful to anyone? If not, will it be useful in the future, as the GPT-3 mechanism improves?

      • It's not unthinkable for it to pass the Turing test. But generating readable text is not the same as understanding it or forming thoughts about it.

    • Re:GPT-3 and this should be a wakeup call (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Moridineas ( 213502 ) on Sunday October 11, 2020 @02:58PM (#60595756) Journal

      It really is fascinating. I took an AI class roughly 15 years ago. Go was given as an almost intractable problem, a solution for which was so far out on the horizon that it was pretty much unimaginable. As an AI search problem it seemed impossible due to branching factors, size of the board, possible move choices, etc. Neural nets at the time were insufficient and overwhelmed, training sets difficult to come by, etc. A good friend of mine hacked on GnuGo a bit around that, and even as a very low rank novice player, he said it was laughably easy for him to beat. That seemed to be the situation until AlphaGo came almost out of nowhere around 2015 to start beating the pros. AlphaZero crushes everyone.

      Change, particularly in the current technology age, happens exponentially.

      I may scoff at some of Elon Musk's claims about fully self-driving cars, but I also scoff at people who predict they are 20+ years out. One of the things about exponential change is that it's hard to see it coming. Our minds struggle to think that way. If you asked the top AI scientists or Go players in 2014 if a computer would beat a professional Go player within 10 years, I bet on players and very, very few scientists would have said yes.

      On a more directly related note, one of the things I have become worried about is Google and Apple auto-suggestions.

      I use the gmail autocomplete my sentence feature a scary amount. It's very helpful, but it's making everyone write the same way. The same phrases, the same spellings, the same style. There are certain words that Apple doesn't believe are acceptable words. They won't autocomplete on iOS. Are those words going to disappear from our vocabulary? I don't know if this is really a problem, but I do feel a bit trepidatious.

      • We tend to over estimate what can be achieved in one year
        And under estimate what can be achieved in ten years

        Bill Gates (I think)

        Exponential growth is neither likely nor necessary. Just incremental growth over a long enough period. It took a few million years to go from monkeys to man, but men evidently exist today.

        Very difficult to imagine the world in my children's life time, 50 years from now. My wife's semi-intelligent vacuum cleaner offers a glimpse. As does China's surveilance state.

  • My son has been running bots on Reddit for 6 month (Score:3, Interesting)

    by FeelGood314 ( 2516288 ) on Sunday October 11, 2020 @01:49PM (#60595448)
    He uses them to answer common questions on the subreddits he moderates as well as to engage in Trolls. At first they will try and prevent the Trolling but he also will get a text and can get his bots to troll the trolls. Occasionally a bored user will engage with a bot for a fairly long time. This leads to a bit of a moral question. How long do you let someone talk to a bot without revealing it.
    • Only psychopaths run undeclared bots, so moral questions don't matter.

    • Occasionally a bored user will engage with a bot for a fairly long time. This leads to a bit of a moral question. How long do you let someone talk to a bot without revealing it.

      Why ever reveal it?

      If the bot is getting some bored user who would otherwise be trolling lots of other people, to only focus on the bot - keep going forever I say.

      Super bored trolls will engage with you for hours or days on end, so a bot is a great solution to suck up their processing time - like the old "Calculate the value of PI" a

      • Or maybe the troll is a bot too!

      • It just becomes all bots then... And the internet becomes daycare... has become..

        Kind of a good thing. It will force people to talk face to face in case they're interested in human contact anymore, socially distant of course! UGH!

      • Re:Why ever reveal? (Score:4, Interesting)

        by FeelGood314 ( 2516288 ) on Sunday October 11, 2020 @03:40PM (#60595928)
        The trolls can chat with the bot till the heat death of the universe. The problem is the legitimate people that have a problem and the bot helps them. They then ask more and more questions and sometimes get off topic for the subreddit. At some point you wonder if no human has spoken to these users for a while and the bot is the only attention they have gotten. There are a lot of lonely people on the internet.

  • I assume that there's some part of the generation algorithm that does some sanity checking on the output. Now what we need is that part to be amped up into a bot of its own that will evaluate what was written and give feedback on whether it's worth a damn.

  • With bots spamming them, they've become completely worthless.

  • Disruptive indeed (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Compuser ( 14899 ) on Sunday October 11, 2020 @02:02PM (#60595522)

    1. This is probably already killing our political discourse. Public forums have people of variable intelligence and eloquence posting there so just being able to pass for an uneducated dolt who is occasionally incoherent is already enough to not be filtered from the discussion.

    2. Banking. If bots can pass for humans (even if not every time) then I predict a massive phishing campaigns soon where bots will contact bank reps pretending to be you or me, getting your details and emptying accounts in very large numbers very fast.

    3. Industrial espionage and engineered disruptions of enterprise operations will skyrocket for obvious reasons. One can also easily see that once text communications can be spoofed by bots then video will be similarly disrupted. Deep fakes will make things like zoom untenable. It will be "in person or bust" world.

    4. Given the depth of the problem, the solution will eventually probably involve dramatic penalties (probably along the lines of death penalty for the bot operator and their entire social network within three or four branches to prevent information and know-how from spreading). This will just leave state sponsored bots and we would need extensive agreements and inspections which will make cold war agreements pale in comparison.

    • Re:Disruptive indeed (Score:4, Informative)

      by Areyoukiddingme ( 1289470 ) on Sunday October 11, 2020 @04:22PM (#60596110)

      2. Banking. If bots can pass for humans (even if not every time) then I predict a massive phishing campaigns soon where bots will contact bank reps pretending to be you or me, getting your details and emptying accounts in very large numbers very fast.

      3. Industrial espionage and engineered disruptions of enterprise operations will skyrocket for obvious reasons. One can also easily see that once text communications can be spoofed by bots then video will be similarly disrupted. Deep fakes will make things like zoom untenable. It will be "in person or bust" world.

      With already demonstrated voice synthesis software this is definitely possible. Massive disruption is likely. But in person or bust? Not at all. We already have the technology to solve all of these problems. It's called Public Key Infrastructure, and it's older than every member of Generation Z and half of the Millennials.

      We don't even have to use most of it. Simple point to point key exchange would go a very long way. I should be able to walk into my bank branch, pull out my phone, and take a picture of the QR code of the bank's public key, load it into my keychain, then show my phone to a bank teller who will scan my QR code of the public key I want to give them into the bank's system along with verifying my KYC identity documentation. I should similarly be able to insert my Yubikey into a USB port at the bank and assign a key slot. From then on, in either case, the bank should accept no transaction requests from me without my signature. Their app will take care of getting a signature from the secure enclave of my phone automatically. Their website will take care of getting my signature from my Yubikey if I'm performing a transaction at a PC. In either case, the app or the web browser will be double-encrypting my transaction data (which contains my bank account number) with not just my private key but the bank's public key, so there's no way my account number will be exposed. I could use a public WiFi access point and speak HTTP and I know my account number is safe because I collected the bank's public key myself.

      Frictionless, easy, reliable, and until quantum computers get to seriously huge qubit counts, unbreakable. And even then we just change algorithms [nist.gov] and continue. If you can make a phone call, you can transmit data to your bank, so there is never a time when this doesn't work. People should keep track of their Yubikey the way they keep track of their car key fob (even though for most people, the account their Yubikey is protecting is less valuable than their car).

      This is also the solution to the phishing problems plaguing small business. Fraudulent invoices are costing billions annually [cnbc.com] and there's no excuse for it. When two companies sign a contract, the contract printout should include copies of each entity's public keys, generated for the contract. Their accounting software should be aware of these keys and no invoice gets paid unless it has a matching signature.

      Now this does require that the secure enclave feature become standard on every phone, not restricted to luxury models. Also, people should adopt dedicated secure enclave hardware like Yubikeys. It's an extremely familiar paradigm to everyone in the developed world and most of the developing world, at this point. Everyone carries their house or apartment keys and their car keys or motor scooter keys as a matter of course. Nobody thinks anything of it. Carrying an encryption key collection is an obvious thing to do too. Phones get lost, broken, or stolen more than keys do these days. Sure, people want to converge their wallets and keys and phones and that's fine too. Me, I like my Yubikey. It's very Unix-like. It does one thing and does it well, unlike phones. Importantly, I can explain how to use a Yubikey to my mother.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Compuser ( 14899 )

        I would love this if it could work. However, many nations want to restrict strong encryption, to allow state actors to eavesdrop. As soon as you do that then this solution is weakened beyond repair.

        • However, many nations want to restrict strong encryption, to allow state actors to eavesdrop.

          That's why we need to change the NSA's (and all the other acronym agencies) mandate from surveilling Americans to protecting them.

          • That's already part of the dual mandate of the NSA. Different administrations turn the dial one way or the other, but there's always been a conflict in the Agency between the two quasi-opposed mandates.

            • That's already part of the dual mandate of the NSA. Different administrations turn the dial one way or the other, but there's always been a conflict in the Agency between the two quasi-opposed mandates.

              We need an agency that is focused just on protection. Having the conflicting priorities within the same agency can't (and obviously doesn't) work.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by spth ( 5126797 )
      0. Just keep a conversation with a human going (e.g. some thread in a discussion) to keep the human at the site, to get more ad revenue.

  • Intelligent programming does not equal intelligence.

    Getting tired of hearing this reference of 'intelligence'.

    • But there is a chance that intelligence can emerge from the primordial programming.

      • Um, It's algorithms all the way down.

        • For us too?

          • No. You really need to stop watching all that science fiction crap.

            • I'm confused. Do you think that the intelligence that has evolved in the complex brains of the animal kingdom is somehow non-reproducible?

      • That's more likely to happen to something like Facebook or Google than with a purpose built AI network. We already have systems we are losing control of at these big companies. Systems we are unable to audit. Systems increasingly being inter-connected to each other and to systems that can interact with and affect the real world.

  • Go outside. Talk to people directly.

  • because its already being done using humans that don't need to be paid. The only solution at this point is to unplug from the web completely if you don't want your info to be tracked and used to manipulate what you see (from the posts, to the votes, to the ads, everything).

    Its all being gamed, and has for at least the last 18 years. Basically after 9/11 happened, though this isn't just in the US, once the 5 eyes started it was just a matter of time until taco bell and a sweatshop in some third world country

  • step two: overfeed trolls (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Gravis Zero ( 934156 ) on Sunday October 11, 2020 @02:24PM (#60595614)

    It's far easier for people to make up some bullshit and post it on the internet than it is for someone to list all the ways they are wrong. Combine this with sealoining [wikipedia.org] and you have a deluge of bullshit on the internet that is left unrefuted. We need to load up bots like this with scientific information and have them refuting all the low-level obvious bullshit on the internet, complete with references. There are way too many people posting into scientifically unsound reasoning and it needs to be met with constant correction.

  • Stop reading anything that's more than one or two sentences. It's either a bot or someone who can't be concise and to the point.

  • This bot might make a good White House press secretary -- or, with a blonde wig, a good Fox News anchor. :-)

  • ... the problem is that people take that shit seriously.

    The goddam internet comment section is for posting cat videos.

    • What's wrong with engaging in discourse with bots? The problem isn't that comments are filled with bots but that people trust what they read online. Regardless of whether the bullshit comes from people or bots, it requires the same skill and work to combat.

      If we want to support our vast Internet infrastructure with ad dollars, misinformation is the inevitable outcome. We can learn to live with this model, or we can legislate it out of existence. Bots are irrelevant.

  • This is just regurgitation based on a huge dataset.

    As such, the posts may contain useful information, insofar as the dataset contains good information. But it's not intelligent, not even artificially so.

    Source: I did AI research in the mid 1980's,and again a decade later. I occasionally read current research articles. Aside from the speed of hardware and increased memory, nothing has changed. Processing larger datasets make for better regurgitation. Whoopie.

    • The author tried to search the internet using snippets of what the bot wrote and could not find any. It seems that this bot created original text.

  • She's a real bitch.

  • Nope (Score:3)

    by gweihir ( 88907 ) on Sunday October 11, 2020 @04:04PM (#60596030)

    There are no "intelligent bots". There are just a lot of pretty stupid humans and doing artificial stupidity is actually possible.

  • With speech recognition and generation:

    Bot Response 496: "But why would I stay at a Hilton Garden Inn, when I could stay at Hampton by Hilton instead?"
    SpamCaller:

    We need something to use up all the compute power of a Pentium i56 / ARM 396 / AMD 3452...

  • Just wait until someone figures out all of Donald Trump's Twitters posts were done by a bot. We've been trolled by an AI for years! Surely, that is passing the Turing Test.

    • But who put "covfefe" in dictionary.txt ?

    • Just wait until someone figures out all of Donald Trump's Twitters posts were done by a bot. We've been trolled by an AI for years! Surely, that is passing the Turing Test.

      No, the 'I' stands for Intelligent.

  • The next discourse... (Score:3)

    by Darkling-MHCN ( 222524 ) on Sunday October 11, 2020 @10:22PM (#60597024)

    The next discourse will be, are AGI generated content and commentary any less valid than that generated by humans....

    The next discourse after that will be between AGI about whether content and commentary from humans is of any relevance any more.

    • The secondary discourse won't be about discounting human input, but about how important (or not) the Internet is when it can't compete with real world verified human interaction.

      Right now, so much of our lives involves interacting with computers. Often with the assumption there's a human on the other end. Take out the human element or undermine its trustworthiness and people will likely just stop interacting with strangers over the Internet.

  • IRC? (Score:2)

    by antdude ( 79039 )

    Do these chatter bots exist for IRC?

  • How was the first post here not... (Score:3)

    by djchristensen ( 472087 ) on Monday October 12, 2020 @02:50AM (#60597550)

    If an infinite number of monkeys...

  • An even better recent post by that bot (Score:3)

    by spth ( 5126797 ) on Monday October 12, 2020 @03:42AM (#60597634)

    Just looking at the latest post by that bot, I saw an even more impressive post than the ones linked in the summary:

    https://www.reddit.com/r/AskRe... [reddit.com]

    That is a well-reasoned argument, directly addressing the question, with nothing at all indicating to me that it came from the bot.

    • If it's the same one I can see it completely misunderstood the question.

      Your forced to live with a crazy serial killer and a n*zi. Who are you befriending?

      I would live with the n*zi, because the serial killer has no hope of redemption. The N*zi is less bad.

      Who are you befriending vs who are you going to live with. It's clear from the question you were forced to live with both.

      • Even if that's the case, it's a completely reasonable misunderstanding a human might make.

        What's really relevant is how it responds to clarifying information within the context of the conversation.

        • Even if that's the case, it's a completely reasonable misunderstanding a human might make.

          I disagree. It clearly missed the point.

          It would make a good politician though. Search through your list of your preferred talking points. Say something kind of related while not answering the question given.

  • with our robot overlords. It would make a refreshing change, I think.

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