Are you experiencing AI based spam?

Im curious to hear from community members whether they are experiencing any or an uptake in AI powered spam

This would be specifically seeing answers to questions that look like they are ChatGPT based and seem either non-human like or have hallucinations (a common problem with LLMs)

I am experiencing AI based spam

  • Yes
  • No
0 voters

If the answer is yes Im curious to hear…

  • How often this is happening?
  • How much of a problem is this creating within your community?
  • What are you currently doing about it?

If the answer is no Im curious to know…

  • How are you preventing this from happening?
  • Are there reasons as to why your community inherently doesn’t face this issue?
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We just use AI as a tool to seek knowledge, maybe a little causal chat.
Perhaps our community is small, and has a common sense that hallucinations are BAD

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Private community (login required, invite only).

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I reckon the most effective way to stop anykind spamming is being member of very small and difficult language. It stops those clowns who are doing manual labour.

Well, we all know spammers aren’t that smart and automatic traffic doesn’t care of language, genre or even size. So, there must be another reason why some forums or sites are like honey pots for anykind trash and others live without drama.

For the reason why spammers can sign in there and can’t somewhere else when system and setup should be identical I don’t have answer. But one thing is sure: admin’s or other background force’s need to increase fast growth from global audience will lead to bot ans spam problems.

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In the last two weeks or so, we have seen a spike on our site. We’re seeing typical spam with hidden links on new replies from new accounts. When we increased the reputation for creating new posts, we saw AI-generated responses increase, and it seemed the bots were trying to slowly increase their reputation on bogus accounts. These responses don’t have obvious bogus links, they just have generic AI text that doesn’t contribute to answering the question.

We got hit over a weekend with a large spike in spam posts, enough that someone created a new topic saying there was too much spam on our forum. Since then, admins need to check the site every day to clean up bogus AI posts. We’re also seeing AI posts on accounts that were created in the past and had no activity, which makes it seem like some spam bots had been seeding accounts for a while and letting them sit with no activity. Now they are trying to slowly get past the engagement limits so they can post new topics.

As noted above, we increased the trust levels for posting new topics. We also enabled akismet. But this hasn’t stopped the AI spam posts. Currently we need an admin/moderator to check the forum every day to review flagged posts and clean up. Some are challenging and look like they might be a person, so two people need to check.

We encouraged our users to help out and flag posts that look like AI and that has helped.

Our forum is fairly low volume and has run for years with very low admin clean-up and maintenance, but it seems the AI bots have found us. I’m thinking AI may be needed to stop AI?

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Yeah, sadly. Either that or you temporarily just vet all new users and slow down the time from “when a user signs up” till the post.

We do have:

It also supports flagging, so you could use that today.

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On that note we just published a guide on this!

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