Not looking to debate or stir up anything. But, I will say despite anyone’s thoughts the anti-meta fedi pact at least allowed people to have some information on where instances and people stood on federation with Threads. Some decisions were able to be made based on that information. I think if it doesn’t exist there should be one also regarding AI, which is a polarizing topic especially on fedi. I believe similar to the Threads issue it would allow people to make somewhat informed decisions one way or the other. Are there current lists, sites dedicated to this? If not what are you guys thoughts?
PieFed has rather strong thoughts on the subject: https://piefed.social/c/piefed_meta/p/1523426/labelling-or-hiding-ai-generated-content.
In short, just as NSFW/NSFL posts or bot accounts are totally fine so long as labeled, so too AI posts are fine… unless unlabeled as such. And if users refuse to label them, then community mods have tools that help them detect and label them for the users.
PieFed’s options for AI content are:
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Show
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Hide completely
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Label as AI
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Make post semi-transparent
This method democratically puts powerful tools into the hands of end-users to individually choose what approach works best for them, rather than e.g. make an authoritive declaration such as defederation of instances that often allow AI content.
Labeling AI generated content isn’t strong thoughts, it should be baseline for all social media
What makes the thoughts strong is that their implementation already exists.
Likewise, PieFed saw a number of opportunities to improve things, and rather than simply wishing that something were so, people expended effort to actually code them up so as to make them REAL, i.e. no longer mere thoughts but actions.
e.g. Lemmy offers a marking/tagging for NSFW, which PieFed expanded so that NSFL (gore) is an entirely separate category. Theoretically I could completely hide all NSFL while blurring the thumbnail of NSFW posts, or vice versa, or make both sets semi-transparent, or whatever. The Lemmy software might offer thoughts and prayers along those lines - e.g. theoretically you could dedicate different communities for each type, or even different entire instances (one for NSFW and a separate instance for NSFL?), or perhaps add standardized keywords (not that Lemmy allows keyword filtering innately, as PieFed does, but in case some 3rd party apps wanted to do so?) to distinguish between NSFW vs. NSFL - but multiple years ago now PieFed birthed that thought into a full-blown solution.
In the same manner, PieFed is far beyond the stage of merely beginning to have a couple thoughts along the lines of dealing with AI content: as that linked posts indicates, 5 months ago it already offered a full implementation of a solution.
And if users refuse to label them, then community mods have tools that help them detect and label them for the users.
And another reason for me to dislike Piefed, I guess.
There is no reliable way to detect AI use automatically, so these tools can’t be a source of truth. But if they’re not, what’s even the point to them for moderation?
This issue is discussed a bit in the linked post.
The situation is a bit similar to that for NSFW: if all content is not perfectly labeled, then is the tag worthwhile to exist at all?
And mods will abuse the system regardless - e.g. look at how often Lemmy.ml removes posts citing “rule 1”, despite that rule never anywhere anyway in any language stating that you are not allowed to criticize (or not support strongly enough?) Russia, China, or North Korea (or perhaps soon adding the USA and Israel?). Regardless of platform - Reddit, Lemmy, PieFed, Mbin, nodeBB, Mastodon, Pixelfed, Loops, etc. - mods are gonna mod regardless, and some will be better at that task than others.
Though it is still useful to have “rules”, and use them in communities, even if they aren’t properly implemented in all situations. The alternative being 4chan where anything and everything goes - not everyone is looking for that?
I guarantee you that Lemmy has for multiple years already abused non-AI content in a far worse manner: see e.g. the (non-AI) moderation tool santabot. Even so, Lemmy does not abolish the ability to post things, or to vote on it. i.e. the worst excesses of a thing do not preclude good uses for it. Knowledge that Santabot exists may encourage you to stop participating in the entire Threadiverse, but it does not need to? Systemically, the Threadiverse is fairly good, overall?
And now PieFed offers tools to detect AI content. I guarantee you that it will be abused, somewhere/way/when/how. Though at least now it exists, and can be improved? And we can be a part of that process too, by offering realistic suggestions to the development team, which demonstrably listens to and actively solicits such feedback all the time.
This issue happens regardless of your way of dealing with it. If you have instances that don’t allow AI content, how will they identify when someone breaks the rule?
That’s precisely why AI content is so dangerous in the first place.
There’s good and bad tools out there? Most internet services that pop up on the first page of Google are in fact rubbish. But that doesn’t mean there’s good ones. I once tried tools for detecting AI text for a different reason and there were one or two who didn’t have any false positives with the 20-30 example texts I tried. Schools and universities have come to use the same tools. Seems they also look at how people are typing, that’s pretty much 100% accurate, but people do both.
There’s also crazy different approaches out there. Like looking at the probability distribution of the vocabulary and see if that matches ChatGPT. And it’ll be a certain unique probability distribution since that’s what ChatGPT is. It has to leave a fingerprint, since it’s picking the words based on probability. And there’s more good strategies. We have one or two open-source tools which demonstrate how it can be done.
I really like this solution.
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