5 Comments
Apr 19, 2023Liked by The Underdog

Has Elon solved the bots problem yet? I haven’t been following too closely. When social media companies are paid by advertisers for ‘page views’, there is no incentive to eliminate bots. Politicians will not get rid of them either because they use bots in campaigns.

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Elon Musk does not appear to have solved the bot problem already. I encountered an OnlyFans spambot horde only last week (buried in my Tweet history somewhere is my detailed exposure of them).

The only platform I know for sure that has anti-spambot technology is Gab.com, and I know that because I wrote the prototype example 'HunterKiller' code and gave it to them for free. They were being swamped with botnets trying to destroy the platform; since they adopted a variant their platform has largely been spambot free, except some edge-cases.

Unfortunately, the new generation of AI is far more sophisticated than the kind of spambots I helped Gab to squash only four years earlier. Spambots could only write repetitive, poorly 'randomised' sentences; now they can write Shakespearian plays that can challenge even the most discerning.

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Apr 19, 2023Liked by The Underdog

Excellent piece, UD. I enjoyed the test.

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This was cool, though it's kinda frustrating that there aren't answers for the photos and the language reveal is slightly confusing: choice is between fake and answers refer to what's real so you have to scroll up and down to see what you entered. Perhaps my brain is addled, sending this in the hope that it's helpful, no insult intended.

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Apr 19, 2023·edited Apr 19, 2023Author

I apologise I wasn't explicit on the photos, first time writing an article in this style.

The photos that have been linked are ones which were found online - all of which are presented by the various media outlets as being real (however I cannot independently confirm if they are or not, hence the comment).

If I'm being honest, the media could already be using AI generated images. In-fact, if we take the Twitter farm bot story to be real, they already are. It would be impossible to know the extent.

The photos that aren't linked are the fake, AI generated images.

(So the linked images are the 'right' answer for the real images. Yeah I could probably have designed the test a bit better.)

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