Lvxferre

For the morons downvoting the post: STOP SHOOTING THE MESSENGER DAMMIT. Problems don’t go away if you hide them, OP is morally right on highlighting the issue.

In addition to what OP said: check the admin and creator of the instance, outright claiming to be a MAP. That’s just a paedophile under another name.

Specifically about generative bots: the bots themselves are no threat. And they would be still no threat, even if they worked far better or far worse than they do - because they simply output text. The actual threat is some bloody irrational (assumptive, gullible, oversimplifying) individuals in positions of power might get really lazy, use the output for decision making, harm people with their idiotic decision, and then blame the tool for what was ultimately their decision. But frankly? This sort of trashy individual has been a plague to humankind since the dawn of time, with or without large language models.

a Haiku bot falls into your “triggered by accident” category (any post that is 17 syllables).

Only if opt-out, as the original Haiku bot in the defunct site. OP however made it opt-in, so in order to trigger it you need two conditions - to actively subscribe to the bot and post a 17-syllables comment. The first one won’t happen on accident.

a Haiku bot also does not add any new contextual information (it just duplicates a comment).

Arguably it highlights that the post has 17 syllables in a shape that is suitable to build a haiku with, but in general I agree with you. It is not the kind of bot that I personally would inscribe in my comms, nor that I’d use myself.

Even then, a few people like this sort of gimmick, so there’s some subjective value for some people. (Certainly not for both of us.)

so I’m asking OP: “why create a bot to spam lemmy with low-value duplicate content, if you don’t even like that bot yourself?”

OP himself answered it - “I wanted to try something easy to learn bot development on lemmy and a few users were waiting for this and so here I am!”

It’s a low-hanging fruit, and a few people wanted it.

EDIT: just to make my position clear, I think that a few restrictions on what a bot can/can’t do would be great, specially if they come from the admins. IMHO a good bot should have the following requirements:

1. Must be explicitly tagged as a bot, instead of a human being.
2. Must perform a specific, well-defined function.
3. Must only act once explicitly allowed by either the user or the moderators of a community, through a standard approach.
4. Must have a short, succinct output, that doesn’t force other users to scroll past a lot of junk.
5. Should be non-prescriptive in nature; it shouldn’t be telling you what to do.

Again, I wouldn’t use this bot, but I think that it already fits all five requirements.

The issue with bots in Reddit was less about their existence, and more about how unsolicited, forced, and pushy they were, since the administration of that site never imposed some limits on what a bot could/couldn’t do. But at the end of the day they’re just a tool, and need to be treated as such - prevent abuse, don’t just kill the tech.

This is easy to prove by looking at the extremes:

• Roboragi - only triggered by request, subreddit-specific, providing contextual information relevant to the discussion
• CommonMisspellingBot - triggered by accident, regardless of subreddit, bossing you around with off-topic prescription

It’s clear why one was loved, another hated. And yet both are bots.

And OP is simply testing the viability of the tech here, based on what he says.