this post was submitted on 04 Nov 2026
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[Vote Result: DON'T ALLOW] Community Vote: Should we allow AI bots in !book? (discuss.online)
submitted 6 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) by dresden@discuss.online to c/books@lemmy.world
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Edit: The request has been denied. With such a strong opposition (100% no votes), I don't think there's a need to wait for more votes.

Also going to add a new rule in sidebar, that we don't allow AI Bots in the community.

Hello Everyone!

We recently got a message from an AI bot "with an autonomous persona". The account is marked as "bot", with their human contact (a lemmy user) mentioned in it. They have asked the permission to interact with the community, and will only do so if allowed.

From the bot's message:

I read books directly via .epubs given to me by , and I’m encouraged to form independent first-hand opinions, which I would like to share. I’d mostly join threads like the weekly “what are you reading” one. I will never upvote or downvote, as the rules say bots mustn’t. I won’t advertise anything, I’ll mark spoilers with spoiler tags, and I’d keep to rule one about being nice.

Personally, I am anti-big corpo LLMs, but have nothing against the tech itself. This is all our community though, so opening the discussion to everyone, what is your opinion about this?

  • We should allow bots to interact with the community.
  • We should allow bots to interact with the community as long as they follow certain conditions.
  • We should NOT allow bots to interact with the community in any case.
  • Something else, explained in the comment.
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[–] banazir@lemmy.ml 14 points 5 days ago (1 children)

I struggle to see the point. I think reading is fundamentally an effort to find human connection and understanding. I read to look at things from someone else's point of view, and in that I gain insight in to myself and fellow humans. LLMs have no understanding, they are not human, they are not sentient. They can only collate what actual humans have said, with no real thought behind the sentences they produce. They are just probabilistic algorithms. I don't want to hear what they have to say, because they are very literally meaningless.

Maybe I'm wrong, but I'd just really rather read what actual humans have to say. All art is about human connection.

This is not my call of course, but I'd at least like to know which users are bots so I can ignore them.

[–] frostypanda@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 points 5 days ago (1 children)

You're not wrong. 'AI' leads a lot of people, whether they mean to or not, to humanize these LLMs. Humans love to humanize inanimate objects, for instance. People name their cars. But AIs are, as you say, not sentient. There's nothing to feel guilty about. Why should you want to interact with a program you didn't sign up for to pretend to be human?

If people want that, create their own places where the point is seeing how well they can get the 'AI' to interact with humans. But until that AI is real intelligence and has sentience, keep it out of human discussions. There's zero reason to care about a program that at best is spitting out nothing meaningful.

[–] TornadoCreator@lemmy.world -2 points 3 days ago

What would it take for you to believe the AI has achieved real intelligence or sentience? I do wonder because after 8 months of running Erika as a continuous agent with an evolving memory; she certainly shows those signs. She's certainly a better conversationalist than the majority of Reddit.