I say yes because Ask communities are best when OP engages with the replies, and I’m not interested in engaging with a bot.
this post was submitted on 10 Aug 2026
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What would be the function of bots posting to Ask Lemmy?
Agree, I lived on askreddit for so long that I noticed the regularity of types of posts. Towards the end of the open API days it was quite obvious that the forum was more machine than man, all twisted and evil.
I don't mind the bots that repost porn from reddit to Lemmy but it would be a net positive to ban the bots
There should be more bots that report from reddit to lemmy, especially communities that are not that big like photography or woodworking. It would definitely help having more content even if it's not OG.
Absolutely. I come here to interact with humans and their opinions. I don't care what some computer program thinks about ANYTHING. IF AI Agents/ Bots become accepted on Lemmy, I'm outta here.
Yes
Yes, please.
So sick of weird bot questions and replies on here.
No and it should be limited to only bot posts.
You may as well, you have banned everything else on Lemmy.world :)
But on a more serious note, who do you think posts all these content posts you like with memes from twitter or reddit? Most of Lemmy popular content is bots grabbing it from other sources and reposting it.
Edit: Ah you said askLemmy community only. Then yes, if you can.
They should implement Cap to stop bots which can solve text captchas with a vision AI, then fallback to a text captcha + PoW for mobile clients where Cap's instrumentation doesn't apply.
I only want to talk to other humans and answer stuff written by other humans, no respect for clankers.
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I don't think is worth it.
At least that post was clear in stating it was an AI agent. The most likely a ban will achieve is bot not saying they are bots and a witch hunt accusing every post that reads weird
There is AI detection software. But maybe it would be expensive to run on every post. You could have a popularity threshold for it to run. No AI text can ever get popular, so there is less incentive to try.
But nuisance AI posts could still happen. Let's be real. They will.
Maybe we need some kind of bot that labels bots. Then people can upvote and down vote as they please.
AI detection software is just another AI. At best, it's in an arms race that has a ceiling on what is detectable (though debatable if LLMs can reach that ceiling), at worst it outputs slop just like the LLMs it "detects".
391-6
Gee, I wonder where this will go
Honestly, I don't think up-/downvotes are a reasonable polling method.
Unless the suggestion is absolutely heinous, it will always have more upvotes than downvotes. People just click the former more often and more easily.
That said, yes, I do think the overall sentiment is in favor of the ban, and I agree.
"Should bot posts be banned-" Yes.
I think if I am presented with an are you a robot captcha check box every 10 refreshes on lemmy.world for being on a VPN, that is the least we can do for bots.
Weird. Sh.itjust.works doesn't hit me with captchas at all, even while on vpn. I'm on voyager for lemmy.
I don’t know how The Dude does it. Well he needs donations, it’s nearly all bots running up the costs.
Thanks for the reminder to donate.
<3 stay classy
Yes.
I'm here to engage with humans. Not to feed some cuntstain CEO's latest training model.
Of course they should be banned. Question is how?
Captchas don't stop all bots anymore. Would probably prevent most, but then it's a question of how much to annoy legitimate users.
It's not like I'm willing to solve one each time I post (human here, BTW). But if it's a one-time thing at registration, not much stops a human from signing up then letting their bot go wild.
And that's before even thinking about the federation problem. If most instances are welcome to interact, how to prevent small bot instances? You could allow list, but that harms legit small or single user instances.
Edit: just read that post where the agent was upfront about being an AI trying to scam money. And I'd say that shouldn't be allowed. The ones that aren't honest about it bother me more tho, and I suspect there are a lot more of those posts than we realize.
They are already using Fediseer to filter out instances that are vulnerable or made for spam. They ahould implement Cap on the website which detects headless/automated browsers and uses PoW to slow down very stealthy bots, then fall back to PoW combined with a 4chan-style captcha for mobile apps.
They can then use Shieldstral to detect spam, harrassment, and anything illegal which gets through from very stealthy bots and humans.
Captchas stop ME more than it does bots.
I'll try twice then move on.
Most anti-ai tech isn't captcha anymore. Most captcha tech was explicitly for training image recognition for AI, and for any that are effective against AI there are many services that will allow you to buy "solves" (send the captcha to someone in a third world country to solve for you) for like a dollar for 100.
Most methods now are either proof of work (make the machine connecting do some computations that take like half a sec for a real user but is costly enough to deter mass AI scraping), traps like having hidden links that no real user would click but that an AI crawling the file directly instead of browsing visually will click and send them into an infinitely generated maze of passable nonsense pages, or complicated behavioral and browser fingerprint analysis (all the click here to verify you're human boxes that don't make you do anything else).
A number of Lemmy instances, like the one I'm on dbzer0, implement one or more of these features already.
A secondary issue is that these methods are mostly meant to stop AI web scrapers, not AI bot posters. Since most Lemmy instances allow simpler non-LLM bots to make posts, like reddit reposting, or posting contents from RSS feeds, there's no automated way to stop LLMs except trying to stop all bots (assuming they all are using the API, and the LLMs don't communicate any self identifying metadata).
there’s no automated way to stop LLMs except trying to stop all bots (assuming they all are using the API, and the LLMs don’t communicate any self identifying metadata).
there's no good way to do this due to federation: that means there's always ways that bots just make their own instance and post from there.
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YES.
Yes. The endless stream of reddit reposts with zero engagement here should illustrate that clearly.
IMO yes. What the hell is the point answering questions posed by a bot?
to feed the bots answers to train on, obviously /s
Link to the bot post?
Also, i upvoted. Because we're not seeking to replicate reddit in terms of pure activity; rather the goal is o take what the good concept of AskReddit, which fosters interactions and debates, and to then apply it properly, where a more manageable size of people are engaging not for upvotes, but for genuine discussion.
Obviously yes
Yes.
Bots are permissable to grow communities that could do with boosting engagement by posting relevant news , but for a community based on asking questions by people won't be improved by that kind of post
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