this post was submitted on 04 Jun 2026
805 points (98.6% liked)
Technology
85163 readers
3924 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I always wonder how much of Lemmy is just bots. Am I blissfully alone interacting with the machine? Or are you weirdos actually real?
You’re right to push back. As a Lemmy account, I can assure you that interacting with me will always feel human.
I find ~~arguments~~ interactions on lemmy go much more in-depth and feel dramatically more authentic than the responses to arguments i used to get on reddit. -That said i'm pretty sure c/political memes@lemmy.world is primarily bots. I'm also sure there are a few similar communities that are just as bad, but they appear limited.
Lemmy has a small userbase that has a high percent of humans vs bots, but a lot of those people tend to be whackos. Reddit has a huge user base with way more bots and whakcos (both by percentage and raw numbers), but also more normal humans. So there's a tradeoff there in which platform you use I suppose.
I'm real, but how could you "really" know?
There’s only one way : Pics or didn’t happen
It's impossible to tell the dumbest human and the smartest bot apart, because anything one bleets out with no thought or intelligence to ground it against an underlying reality... Could also have been bleeted out with no thought or intelligence to ground it against an underlying reality by the other.
Unless they use en dash when it "should" be used according to the grammar books, apparently.
It's not about intelligence, it's about patterns. The bigger LLMs can already mimic the smartest individuals fairly well.
And other signs of AI writing, at least for now. They may move away from that in time as people catch on. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signs_of_AI_writing
Signs of AI Writing - just grab a book on corporate way of speaking/writing e-mails and you will find it exactly the same.
What a wonderful question!
You are right in doubting the identity of users using Lemmy. But I can assure you, not only am I human -- I am real as well!
Missed the opportunity for an emdash there
It has such a humanistic approach
I am absolutely human. Now, real? I'm not too sure about that.
Just botting it up over here. Sorry dawg, blessings to your skin.
E_PLAYHUMAN
I am not a bot.
I feel like the incentive for corpo/astroturf/spam bots is not really there to visit fediverse. So let us remain unpopular !
I agree with this take. We’re not gonna be worth the bandwidth over here. Facebook can generate millions of impressions.
Actually, they don't mean that bots are making content on the internet or interacting with anyone. They mean it is agentic AI doing internet searches etc.
I am human. My insides are soft and warm. Nary a nut or bolt to scrape you raw.
I’m a real boy!!!
Prove it
How long is your nose?
ID age verification is a good example of something that could actually do a lot to reduce spam and ensure people are talking to real people, but it would never happen because the money is in flagging and tracking the verified people and selling access to the bots talking to them.
What happens in 18 years when the bots are all grown up?
They get put out to pasture, selling WoW gold to each other until their server goes down.
There are some bots that behave like some Tracies straight from myspace, I don't know why they're doing this, they are just paraphrasing the memes they comment
I'm not joking