I've noticed the AI bots are becoming more sophisticated and it's a worry.
Like on my forum (called CricketMX), a bot signed up and made a post and ended the message with something along the lines of "What do the long-time CMX-ers think?".
That's quite clever, it's obviously crawled other topics and found people using the shorthand (CricketMX -> CMX) and then adapted it to sound more natural.
In this case it was easily identifiable as a bot because it included links, but I'm a bit concerned about when they become patient enough to become "naturally ingrained" in the community by using those natural-sounding shorthands, nicknames for forum members, etc, and then when they are trusted maybe people will click on those links thinking that they've been interacting with a friend.
Generative AI is interesting and has legitimate uses, but it's going to be a real problem for us to combat in the context of forums and whether users are real or not.
Like on my forum (called CricketMX), a bot signed up and made a post and ended the message with something along the lines of "What do the long-time CMX-ers think?".
That's quite clever, it's obviously crawled other topics and found people using the shorthand (CricketMX -> CMX) and then adapted it to sound more natural.
In this case it was easily identifiable as a bot because it included links, but I'm a bit concerned about when they become patient enough to become "naturally ingrained" in the community by using those natural-sounding shorthands, nicknames for forum members, etc, and then when they are trusted maybe people will click on those links thinking that they've been interacting with a friend.
Generative AI is interesting and has legitimate uses, but it's going to be a real problem for us to combat in the context of forums and whether users are real or not.
Statistics: Posted by battye — Fri Feb 28, 2025 4:07 am