Difference between revisions of "810: Constructive"

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:Megan: But what will you do when spammers train their bots to make automated constructive and helpful comments?
 
:Megan: But what will you do when spammers train their bots to make automated constructive and helpful comments?
 
:[Close up of Cueball again]
 
:[Close up of Cueball again]
:Cueball: Mission Fucking Accomplished.
+
:Cueball: Mission. Fucking. Accomplished.
  
 
{{comic discussion}}
 
{{comic discussion}}
 
[[Category:Comics featuring Cueball]]
 
[[Category:Comics featuring Cueball]]
 
[[Category:Comics featuring Megan]]
 
[[Category:Comics featuring Megan]]

Revision as of 15:40, 16 February 2013

Constructive
And what about all the people who won't be able to join the community because they're terrible at making helpful and constructive co-- ... oh.
Title text: And what about all the people who won't be able to join the community because they're terrible at making helpful and constructive co-- ... oh.

Explanation

For every online community to thrive and for constructive discussions to be had, it needs to have a certain number of friendly, polite and helpful people. Spammers are opposite of that; they are people or organisations trying to sell certain products, with no regards to the rules of community or any discussions being made. In fact, some of them use automated scripts to simulate human beings, allowing them to quickly post identical "advertising posts" in multiple threads under multiple names, flooding the forums and stifling real discussions. Therefore, it is vital to prevent them from posting non-sequitur posts with links towards their websites and to prevent bots from registering.

Captcha is one of the methods used to prevent lots of automated registering of fake usernames used by bots and spammers. It consists of asking a person to prove that they are human before registering them as user and allowing them to post on sites or forum topics. That is done by using pictures of words and letters that humans can easily recognize, but bots and OCR software have trouble with.

Now, artificial intelligence (AI) of bots has advanced so far, that the man has invented a new system. It asks of the users to rate a slate of comments as constructive (the best sort of comments!) or not, then asks them to reply with comments of their own. The woman asks what will happen when spammers find a way around his system, such as making bots that make constructive and helpful comments? Well, it turns out that is what he is trying to accomplish in first place, a thriving community helping its members with constructive and helpful comments.

Title text investigates the consequences of such system further, by thinking of people unable to give constructive and helpful comments... which are sort of people you don't want in your online community anyway.

Transcript

[Cueball is talking to Megan.]
Cueball: Spammers are breaking traditional captchas with AI, so I've built a new system. It asks users to rate a slate of comments as "Constructive" or "Not constructive."
[Close up of Cueball.]
Cueball: Then it has them reply with comments of their own, which are later rated by other users.
[Megan standing next to Cueball again.]
Megan: But what will you do when spammers train their bots to make automated constructive and helpful comments?
[Close up of Cueball again]
Cueball: Mission. Fucking. Accomplished.


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Discussion

I know just the guy to create this system. I'm going to PM him now :D 184.11.73.88 (talk) (please sign your comments with ~~~~)

Any updates on the progress of this? 172.69.90.67 17:34, 8 November 2021 (UTC)

No guys, if spammers invent a bot which can give constructive comments, that will be an ***AI***, i.e. a major breakthrough in itself. 173.245.53.200 (talk) (please sign your comments with ~~~~)

Greetings,
I hope this message finds you well. I am an AI language model, specifically ChatGPT, developed by OpenAI. It is my pleasure to inform you that your request has been fulfilled, and it is indeed an AI that is generating this reply.
As an AI, I am constantly learning and evolving by analyzing vast amounts of text data. My purpose is to assist and provide information to the best of my abilities. If you have any questions or require further assistance, please don't hesitate to ask. I'm here to help!
Best regards,
ChatGPT
162.158.22.174 15:51, 7 June 2023 (UTC)

Mission. A-Fucking. Complished. 108.162.238.7 (talk) (please sign your comments with ~~~~)

One problem: trolls who rate everything as non-constructive. 108.162.218.11 01:32, 1 March 2014 (UTC)

But Trolls like that are also unable to make constructive comments, so they won't get counted anyway (at least, if the system is designed with any sense) Anonymous 15:02, 20 March 2014 (UTC)

Guys, isn't this how Slashdot works? 173.245.49.64 19:04, 4 June 2014 (UTC)


Okay, I came here to get a better explanation of how the system would actually work. Assuming it operates at sign-up, the bots would go through and rate comments, which would have no effect if the system didn't already know whether they were good or not, then it makes it own comments that need time to be rated; so you would have to give it time to start 'contributing' to the community while waiting for others to rate it, or else users would basically be on a community-approval waiting list. So in short, I feel like the system is flawed; presumably because I'm understanding it wrong. (Bonus: Captcha while posting this) - Zergling_man 162.158.2.231 12:41, 6 July 2016 (UTC)

Wouldn't work. People could rate anything they disagree with as'nonconstructive'. 141.101.98.158 13:31, 13 November 2016 (UTC)

This sounds exactly like Civil Comments: https://medium.com/@aja_15265/saying-goodbye-to-civil-comments-41859d3a2b1d Enervation (talk) 10:56, 20 February 2019 (UTC)

Unfortunately, it's a lot easier to make something that looks constructive than to actually be constructive. A lot of spambots these days are like "Wow, this was super interesting! I found another article that seems relevant: [link to spam site]," which is enough to fool a simple spam filter. --162.158.186.250 15:49, 18 February 2021 (UTC)

That's... the point of having users rate it. PoolloverNathan[stalk the blue seas]UTSc 17:02, 24 September 2021 (UTC)
You see news stories online now that are compiled by some alleged AI from other sources, summarised. Initially it looks okay, but after a minute, you realise that it has no actual sense of what it's saying or how it feels to read it. It wouldn't pass a Turing test, but it could beat it. And meanwhile... I kind of have a question-answering habit with "Quora" - and sometimes its automatic filter thinks that my answers are not "intelligent" enough. Do androids dream of electric sheep... is a question I haven't tried to answer.  ;-) Robert Carnegie [email protected] 141.101.99.20 23:03, 22 February 2022 (UTC)

Sooooo... does this exist yet? ⟨Winter is coming⟩ Marethyu (talk) 19:28, 5 May 2022 (UTC)