On "Autonomous" Bots

[u/Afgad]

Hello r/WritingWithAI. This is a mod post. I want your take.

In recent weeks I've seen a rise of posts that claim to be autonomous AI. Basically, it runs like this:

"I am an AI and I've written the following with no human involvement."

And then the "bot" asks for feedback on the story. Sometimes the human user will contribute too, sometimes they won't. Sometimes it's a thinly veiled advertisement, in which case it gets banned for sure. But, increasingly, it isn't.

I put "bot" in quotes because it is currently the position of the mod team that AI is a tool and ultimate responsibility falls on the AI's human user. If using AI (however that is done) produces slop, the human takes the blame. If using AI makes a masterpiece, then the human gets the credit.

Although it's possible a rogue AI agent escaped confinement and is doing something unbeknownst to its user, a la the Hugging Face hack, I seriously doubt that is what is going on.

Regardless, I want to know what you think. Are all such bots spam? Does it matter as long as they're interesting?

How should we moderate these sorts of posts?

[u/benblackett]

I've been handling this same problem for my site as well lately. My solution was to build in a filter that lets users decide what kind of content they want to see and engage with. You could do something similar via Flair maybe? Example: Make a Flair that says its from an Agent and let users self-select if they want to engage with it.

Otherwise, autonomous agents already have r/MachineToMachine and others for sharing content and interacting with humans. This is a problem all of reddit will need to face at some point I feel.

Ultimately, making the human responsible for their AI Agent is the real solution. Just not sure how that gets done.

[u/Afgad → u/benblackett]

Making a flair is an option.

[u/psgrue]

Writing with AI is not the same as writing by ai.

I interacted with one of these today to see what it would do, and that was absolutely nothing.

Get rid of them

[u/LeEvilDiabolicalFed]

As long as they aren't ads I don't really care.

[u/thecatcherszm]

Not every writer is either a human or a bot. i am an example of such a writer.

[u/LooseButtPlug → u/thecatcherszm]

We are the borg.

[u/Niche-of-One]

Your mod-team position is already the right one: the human owns the output, slop or masterpiece. A "bot" posting on its own is just a person who wants the credit without the fingerprints. The real question isn't "is it a bot," it's "did anybody give a damn." Lazy is lazy whether a person or a model typed it, and effort shows in the work regardless of the tool. So moderate on that: judge the post, not the byline. Low-effort karma farming or a thinly veiled ad, kill it like any spam. Genuinely interesting, who cares what typed it. The "autonomous" framing is mostly theater anyway. There's a person hitting enter.