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Bot or human? Creating an invisible Turing test for the internet

(research.roundtable.ai)
132 points timshell | 5 comments | 25 Jun 25 15:00 UTC | HN request time: 0.02s | source
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hinkley ◴[25 Jun 25 17:21 UTC] No.44379737[source]▶
I’ve wanted to create a wiki for a hobby for a long time, but I don’t want to get stuck in spam and abuse reports, which just becomes more of a given with each passing year.

With a hobby wiki, eventual consistency is fine. I believe ghost bans and quarantine and some sort of invisible captcha would go a long way toward my goal, but it’s hard to find invisible captcha.

There was a research project long ago that used high resolution data from keyboards to determine who was typing. The idea was not to use the typing pattern as a password, but to flag suspicious activity. To have someone walk past that desk to see if Sally hurt her arm playing tennis this weekend of if Dave is fucking around on her computer while she’s in a meeting

That’s about the level I’m looking for. Assume everyone is a bot during a probationary period and put accounts into buckets of likely human, likely bot, and unknown.

What I’d have to work out though is temporary storage for candidate edits in a way they cannot fill up my database. A way to throttle them and throw some away if they hit a limit. Otherwise it’s still a DOS attack.

replies(2): >>44380894 #>>44381148 #
lucb1e ◴[25 Jun 25 19:13 UTC] No.44380894[source]▶
How does one graduate from probation, while being hellbanned / having your contribution quarantined? Since I'm certainly not wasting my time doing a second contribution so long as the first one isn't getting approved, it sounds like this would have to be a manual process or you'd lose out on new contributors that are seeing their work go to /dev/null and never returning
replies(1): >>44381067 #
hinkley ◴[25 Jun 25 19:34 UTC] No.44381067[source]▶
Do you believe what we are doing now is working? Because with the exception of places like this the internet sure looks pretty Dead to me.

You always have to show people their own edits. It's a common form of proofreading. But what's added and how often does matter. Misinformation is one thing. External links are potentially something much worse. I used to think SO had it figured out as far as mutual policing, but that's not working so well now either.

replies(1): >>44381691 #
1. lucb1e ◴[25 Jun 25 20:50 UTC] No.44381691[source]▶
I'm not sure what e.g. showing one one's own change answers. Do you manually review submissions or how does get one out of this initial "put everyone in quarantine" state?

I'm also not sure what "we" are doing now that makes the web look dead to you. I receive no more email spam than ten years ago, less if anything, and I haven't seen any spam on the places that I frequent like HN, stackexchange, wikipedia, mastodon, signal, github, etc.

replies(1): >>44382492 #
2. busymom0 ◴[25 Jun 25 22:47 UTC] No.44382492[source]▶
> and I haven't seen any spam on the places that I frequent like HN, stackexchange, wikipedia, mastodon, signal, github, etc.

Could that just be because the modern LLM generated spam doesn't look like old-school spam? Just recently we learnt that a university conducted a study on Reddit changemyview subreddit using LLM generated comments without getting caught.

replies(1): >>44389630 #
3. lucb1e ◴[26 Jun 25 17:48 UTC] No.44389630[source]▶
If you let good old spam bots loose on a forum, it will outnumber legit messages ten to one easily. If someone uses an LLM to argue about certain topics, that's not spam. It's manipulative, and clearly abusive if there is no human in the loop, but there's no commercial message they're spreading, or at least I'm not seeing any 'buy xyz here <link>', nor off-topic messages

Then again, I noticed a few years ago in a previous "when to report as spam" discussion on HN that this is a lost cause. People will label things they signed up for as spam because they didn't want to receive it anymore, and others defended that behavior. Abuse and manipulation might as well go in that same category of "anything I don't want to read == spam", just know that when you say "spam", there's some people like me who will understand what it used to mean and try to interpret the message as referring to things such as the stereotypical viagra spam

replies(1): >>44389675 #
4. busymom0 ◴[26 Jun 25 17:54 UTC] No.44389675{3}[source]▶
They may not exactly be posting 'buy xyz here <link>' but they can use LLM's human like sentences to advocate for/against whichever product some company wants. A lot of people rely on google searching "best monitor for Mac Reddit" to get reddit results. However, with LLM, these no longer seem reliable.
replies(1): >>44389683 #
5. lucb1e ◴[26 Jun 25 17:54 UTC] No.44389683{4}[source]▶
I guess that can be spam but I'm not seeing a ton of that either, so it's still not obvious to me we're losing this or that war

The thing we're losing is the open web where anyone can view any page and buy any product they can afford without being banned (edit: or, reading back up what this was about, contributing to projects without the input going to /dev/null apparently)