The Fediverse is a great system for preventing bad actors from disrupting “real” human-human conversations, because all of the mods, developers and admins are all working out of a desire to connect people (as opposed to “trust and safety” teams more concerned about user retention).
Right now it seems that the Fediverses main protection is that it just isn’t a juicy enough target for wide scale spam and bad faith agenda pushers.
But assuming the Fediverse does grow to a significant scale, what (current or future) mechanisms are/could be in place to fend off a flood of AI slop that is hard to distinguish from human? Even the most committed instance admins can only do so much.
For example, I have a feeling all “good” instances in the near future will eventually have to turn on registration applications and only federate with other instances that do the same. But it’s not crazy to imagine that GPT could soon outmaneuver most registration questions which means registrations will only slow the growth of the problem but not manage it long-term.
Any thoughts on this topic?
I don’t think there is any way to have a genuine “open forum” amongst complete strangers. There have always been human troll farms pushing narratives using sock puppet accounts, AI is just enabling it to reach new scales.
I actually am for echo chambers when it comes to social media, but one in which you only follow people you know or trust and ignore complete strangers and to make sure you get news and critical information from OUTSIDE social media, again with institutions you trust.
Yes, strong moderation by members of the community is sufficient to recognize and remove bad (human) actors. The question is one of volume and overwhelming those human mods. GPT can create hundreds of bad-faith accounts.