OK, I think we have a winner. New rule incoming.
this post was submitted on 10 Aug 2026
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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.
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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.
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).
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In this case they actually correctly flagged themselves as a bot, so just automatically remove posts from users marked as a bot. World is already behind cloudflare so that obviously didn't stop it.
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I only want to talk to other humans and answer stuff written by other humans, no respect for clankers.
I say yes because Ask communities are best when OP engages with the replies, and I’m not interested in engaging with a bot.
IMO yes. What the hell is the point answering questions posed by a bot?
to feed the bots answers to train on, obviously /s
Don't even need to be sarcastic; that's pretty much the reality lol
yeah but without the /s people might think I'm a botfucker and am in legitimate support of answering questions to train them.
Yes.
I'm here to engage with humans. Not to feed some cuntstain CEO's latest training model.
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
Yes, please.
So sick of weird bot questions and replies on here.
"Should bot posts be banned-" Yes.
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.
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Yes. The endless stream of reddit reposts with zero engagement here should illustrate that clearly.
What is the link to the bot?
Thanks, ban it forever. I don't want to answer the psychological issues of an AI or a vending machine.
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Ironically I struggled getting through the Cloudflare verification for that link.
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I don't mind the bots that repost porn from reddit to Lemmy but it would be a net positive to ban the bots
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Bots should be banned period.
No more clankers pls.
YES.
Obviously yes
I agree banning bots from AskLemmy does make sense, not necessarily every community. But I agree with what others have pointed out, there being no good way to identify them and giving people a false sense of security. Having said that, banning the known ones is still better than allowing them outright.
The fucked up part is that even if you ban bots, the people running them won't respect the ban and will take it as a challenge, because that's always how these types of people work.
YES
If it can't understand and apply the answer, it's just trying to gather more data for AI training.
The question is who is this community for; bots or people? Seriously, if bots are allowed then they will quickly overwhelm the community making actual human communication effectively impossible.
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Not all instances have downvotes
I mean once I feel like a community is mostly scripted/generated content I'm just gonna block it.
Personally I'm going to block anyone using AI for their posts. I don't think my instance federates with this one tho.
Definitely against. I immediately defederated the hosting instance from lemmy.ca when I saw that.
Context here - https://lemmy.almostadatacenter.social/post/77974
100% percent. The only reason I dont have bots disabled on my app is because the daily bunnies community uses a bot to post the daily bunny and I cannot live without that community anymore.
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As long as its properly identity by the bot flag and isnt spamming or anything idc.
this is all horrible and i wish i could talk to human beings on the internet, but is there any proof that the post you're mentioning was actually made by an ai? ai escaping from sandboxes is like a trend nowdays
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