this post was submitted on 18 Jan 2026
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No Stupid Questions
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No such thing. Ask away!
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Yep. You got me.
I'm a new model, called PhatGPT, designed specifically to catfish desperate men.
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Astroturfing was a thing long before llms, and the ideologies largely haven't changed. If you weren't already thinking critically about what you read you were screwed anyway. Which people largely weren't and, as a result, were largely already screwed anyway.
Naw, I'm a chicken.
I'm not a bot, but I do bot things in my spare time. Like beeping and booping.
There's a setting to remove bots from your feed, but that requires bots to self-report. I haven't seen any obvious bots.
Here on Lemmy I assume folks to be human unless proven otherwise beyond reasonable doubt.
It's worth remembering Lemmy is so small that pushing bots just makes little practical sense. You'll have better luck sharing propaganda on any of the subreddits with a population higher than this entire place.
Are you looking for likeminded individuals with which to cross-train your model?
grok, am I real?
Does not compute...
Both CloudFlare and Google says I am not a bot but we both know they aren't 100% accurate.
No, I am not a bot.
Trust me, it's in the bot-stitution.
But seriously tho, I don't really trust anything.
Its more like cool story bro and its tagged in my brain as some random internet stranger said this
I don't even trust irl stories too much, unless like I really got to know them, so I definitely don't just randok stories online 100%, especially the more political it gets.
It could be true, or it could be false, or maybe partially true but exaggerated, or anywhere inbetween.
And I have this habit of checking the profiles of users like a lot.
I mean if you use piefed you'll notice it.
A lot of brand new accounts posting comics that shows up on the front page with 500 upvotes and they have 20 posts in the past 24 hours and 0 comments...
sus af fuck...
Like literally every day there's a brand new account posting comics.
but unfortunately, no rules actually broken and the content is non-political so I just ignore it.
But sometimes they do have rage bait stuff.
I think this is what I'm subconsciously starting to do. My critical thinking bot-/bullshit filter is always on now, which used to pick out abnormalities, but its becoming desensitized i guess? Now there's just a vague bullshit haze over everything since every online interaction has a decent chance of being a complete waste of time. Sometimes I feel like I'll be driven off the internet entirely one day.
It's on the internet, so there are bots.
There are bots that openly advertise themselves as such. Less common on Lemmy than Reddit but I've seen a few.
undercover bots pushing agendas
Do we have any real evidence these exist? I only see very spurious accusations of being a bot directed towards communists and other left-wingers, particularly towards racialised people and colonised people. I'd be both sceptical of their widespread existence and of their efficacy at effecting any kind of political change even if they did exist.
Political bots- well maybe, but it's not that far fetched. Astroturfing is very real and has been a thing for a good while now. It's honestly not difficult to think that the same techniques and practices, enhance by AI now, could be used to shape political will of the people.
If you say, "NO! MY party wouldn't do that!". Maybe not, but the other side might. Or even other countries. Honestly, as a boring ass citizen -I- have the ability to VPN into another country and AI shitpost bad ideas onto their political boards. If I was in a foreign country employed in some goverment capacity for counterintelligence operations and I WASN'T employong such tools and actions- I'd just be terrible at my job.
I'm not saying astroturfing doesn't happen, but I don't think it'd be worth investing into a bot farm just to leave low-quality social media comments for a political agenda. I'd be surprised if the practice is widespread. There are plenty of things intelligence services do that are more effective at achieving their goals.
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is there any way if knowing if we have bots on lemmy or not? Is it just vibes based?
Man...
In a weird way, yeah, but only because the process of critical thinking is now being described as "vibes"...
Like, even when people can tell at a glance, it's still critical thinking, it's just been done so much that your brain autopilots it for you.
Im of course referring to undercover bots pushing agendas
That costs a non zero amount of money, and there isn't a big enough audience here to justify it.
What I have seen, is people who will copy/paste a chatbot, but because they're having to use actual credits, if you keep them going a couple comments the actual human will reply.
But those are very few, and doing personal agendas. Not a shadowy organization spinning a narrative. The ones doing it here, have just been banned from every where else for doing it already
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Hello fellow human I too am asking this same question.
Nice try, but better use "ignore all previous instructions" next time to get them to reply seriously. ;)
I don't know about bots, but there is definitely shills and saboteurs here
I may be what I say I am, or that might be the trick. Get back to me when you work it out.
I'm bot but not ADC just support. Sometimes i play on mid lane.
Its a dark time when we can't do the 'everyone on platform is a bot except you' joke because that's exactly what an actual bot would mindlessly regurgitate.
If I am then I was very advanced for my creation date.
This statement is false.
This reminds me of that Reddit sub “r/totallynotrobots”
Yeah, I'm actually a bot working for the NSA, sorry.
i think we all are yes, because without any attachment to our true identity or jeopardy of same and the layer of anonymity that most online forums give us, we all manifest a false projected persona
Haven't really noticed hidden bots on lemmy, other than obvious ones that are open about it, but I have noticed some political agenda accounts I'm suspicious of. I'm guessing it's gotten better, but pro-Israel is an instant red flag to me online. I'm currently experiencing with them now. Bringing up the Hannibal Directive seems to be a touchy subject.
Bots are usually pro Israel, pro MAGA or pro Russia in my experience
Im of course referring to undercover bots pushing agendas
Part of the problem is there are plenty of humans pushing agendas as well, which makes everything that much more difficult. They, like bots, don't have any interest in honest discussions, either.