this post was submitted on 03 Aug 2023
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What does everyone think of bots on Beehaw? (beehaw.org)
submitted 1 year ago by Gaywallet@beehaw.org to c/chat@beehaw.org
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How do you all feel about bots?

I've seen a gpt powered summarization bot pop up recently. Do you find this useful? Do you hate this?

Do you think bots serve any useful purposes on this website or do you think we should ban all bots? Should we have a set of rules for how bots should interact - only when called, needing to explicitly call out they are a bot on their profile, etc?

I'd love to hear your thoughts

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[–] Lionir@beehaw.org 60 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Personally - I think any bot that could be straight Lemmy functionality shouldn't exist but that said, I think good ground rules would be :

  • Bots should be clearly prompted by a command
  • Bots should not act in a community without mods from that community being contacted first
  • Bots should minimize the space they take with their messages (Example: Info on how to contact its creator should be in the bot bio rather than in every message)
  • Bots should say who made/hosts it
[–] storksforlegs@beehaw.org 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I also vote for these rules!

[–] the_itsb@beehaw.org 6 points 1 year ago

I agree - these seem to me like very common-sense rules.

[–] nfld0001@beehaw.org 5 points 1 year ago

Do spoiler foldouts maintain their functionality across UIs, either directly or in essence (eg. popup instead)?

Part of me wishes that Lemmy also had spoilers that reveal in place, but foldout spoilers have some functionality that makes me appreciate having both on hand. I'd bet bots could benefit from using that to minimize visual space if we go through with it.

[–] TehPers@beehaw.org 5 points 1 year ago

These rules seem great honestly. The main bot that comes to mind is the TL;DR bot, which one could easily prompt for in a post if they want a TL;DR, if those communities want to enable it for that specific community. Eventually, a list of promptable bots could pop up in one of the instances so that people know which bots are available to be prompted. Alternatively, someone could make a website to list them or something. I can see there being a healthy bot ecosystem forming based on people's needs.

Since we have more control over the source code, I think eventually what would be nice are community plugins to replace some of the functionality of these bots. For example, a plugin could de-AMP a link, or could provide a banner indicating the rules on a post. If someone really wanted to, they could make a plugin to auto-generate summaries of articles too and include it somewhere in the UI. Since these rules are for Beehaw specifically, I don't think bots which create new posts are that relevant, since there aren't really any niche-specific communities (like a bot which posts changelogs for a game or something), just broad communities.

Any bots not clearly labelled as bots should be given a warning, then banned from the instance in my opinion. The bot setting exists for a reason, bypassing it indicates that the bot author is not willing to respect the rules of the communities the bot is posting in.