this post was submitted on 13 Dec 2024
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Fediverse

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Fediverse is a portmanteau of "federation" and "universe".

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How can the Fediverse protect against AI slop? (lemm.ee)
submitted 1 week ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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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?

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Thanks for the thoughtful response. I too think that regional instances would be ideal for a "backbone" of the social web. But at the same time, I feel that interest-based connection is a truly unique strength of the internet and it would be a sad thing to lose to the slop.

Ultimately, I think that more, smaller instances is likely the best "ultimate" defense against slop since there is no incentive for them to scale beyond their needs. But every instance admin is technically responsible for the content on all federated instances. Which can get overwhelming!

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I mean, regional instances don't have to stop folks from engaging primarily with interest based communities.

Some regions will dominate certain interests for example - here in Tucson we're consider one of the Amateur Astronomy capitals of the world. If mander.xyz were to disappear tomorrow, Tucson would make a good home for all of the fediverse's astronomy needs even though its a region based instance.

Further, there's nothing that states an interest-based instance needs any registration. One could imagine a world where local instances have all the users and identities, and the interest based instances simply provide communities to the larger fediverse with no users of their own.

But yeah, it's definitely a paradigm shift that makes interest based communities a bit more difficult to find.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago

Further, there’s nothing that states an interest-based instance needs any registration. One could imagine a world where local instances have all the users and identities, and the interest based instances simply provide communities to the larger fediverse with no users of their own.

Yes, I've had this same thought and I think it's a great model! If it comes to pass or not remains to be seen. But the concept is good!