No, and not always. For quite some time now, there have been certain "humanizers," whose scripts you can simply indicate to the tool. For example, avoid "universal" phrases like "should be noted," "must be emphasized," "important to point out," and so on. Or use a friendly, informal communication style, ultimately setting a tone that perfectly aligns with human communication. Such scripts have long been circulating in online public groups, and many users are now actively using them. Again, the mega-thread, which regularly rehashes the same thoughts and ideas about buying, selling, holding Bitcoin, and so on, is the very swamp where such scripts are spread.
They evade detection by detectors, they paraphrase the presented text and maintain the topic of discussion, but the fact that these are written not by people, but by AI, is already ineradicable, unfortunately. As long as there are these huge mega-themes where users just need to take a post and paste a script into it, AI will be the "king" of such topics.

In the very near future, we will see AI with a communication style similar to philipma1957, or anyone else whose posting style is quite recognizable and individual.

In all seriousness, have you considered using AI for this? At a minimum, it could help identify low-quality posters, without having to look at an excessive number of false positives. This could be especially helpful when dealing with newer accounts (and those with low post/activity counts), when the threshold for banning is generally lower.

AI could also be used to better enforce rules about posts being on topic.

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I have long wondered if the source of large portions of low-quality posts over the years has been from AI. I get that some people put in very low effort for sig deals, but the level of intelligence (or the lack thereof) seems excessive for some of the spammers.

Some campaigns have humans reading and rating posts every week, with users making between 20-70 posts per week.
Do you think campaigns can help the forum in any way? It is a job that it is being already done anyway.

But keep in mind that even when there is a lot of souless posting, it is really hard to proove they use AI: Newest AI tools sometimes pass as "100% human". And when you catch them, they say "I'm using an AI translator".

The problem imo isn’t copy pasting ai text. It is a bit deeper than that. Thanks to ai people can outsource thinking to llm models now. Before ai, people had to show effort, make a websearch, find the right and relevant content, make sense out of it, educate themselves and then answer… now you can copy paste someone else’s post to a llm, ask it how to counter this message, ai gives you instant ideas that has high probability of success and you don’t even have to copy paste text to make it work. You copy paste its brain. And no amount of restriction can stop it. The genie is out of the bottle.

How does this align with this rule:
I assume this rule was created to stop people from posting their automated translations on many boards, and I don't think this should be allowed again. But I have found myself in the situation a few times where I wanted to respond to a post on a local board (usually after I was mentioned there), but couldn't do it, or only with a quote or in my shittiest handwritten German.

Good description: "soul-sucking". That's why I now often place them on Ignore after just one report, but if they're not banned, they'll keep spamming. Due to the lack of bans reporting their posts feels like such a massive waste of time, as it's takes much more time for a human to read than it takes for a bot to create it.

Just yesterday, I wrote down my realization that the Merit system is now luring shitposters to the tech boards:

I wish I was as optimistic as you are. Apart from having seen far too many movies that show how this can go wrong, I see it as more annoying in real life already. When I call a company for example, I get to talk to a machine because it's cheaper than an employee. I read more and more articles that don't make sense because it's obviously generated by a bot. I see it as mostly a very big money maker for very few people, and used for cheating by many others.

Most of the time, I can't even get myself to read the whole post if it's - as I like to call it - chatbot verbal diarrhae. It's just too terrible to process.

In this area I agree with @theymos
A forum where technology is a central theme, distancing it from our daily lives, doesn't make much sense.

Logically, I don't agree with posts generated 100% by AI. Doing so by copying and pasting, without citing the source, is really wrong. Now, this shouldn't stop people from using it to extract ideas or informative details.

So I think you really shouldn't use AI to write our posts. But, if someone uses it to translate some text, I should use it as a true translator, and not as a writing assistant.

At most, take the ideas he gives and write them in your own words!



I have been pointing out for some time that these AI tools are highly prone to errors in analysis. There are several studies that show how these detectors fail even with ancient texts, claiming they were written by AI – texts thousands of years old.

We have many writing patterns, and AI writes based on an analysis of these human patterns. Therefore, it's not so difficult for a human to write originally, with a pattern that appears to be AI-generated. Therefore, I think it's a mistake to evaluate a text simply by looking at these AI text detection systems.

The text needs to be analyzed in another way, at least here in the forum. Look at several of the user's posts, as theymos says, and observe if their writing style has significant differences. Sometimes it doesn't take much to notice; just the way they respond to a question raised about the suspicious post is enough.




I don't want to turn this into a debate about these "rules"... I think that this "rule 27" (like others...) is often misinterpreted.

The idea behind this rule is to prevent someone like me, a Portuguese speaker, from going to the Russian tab to chat, because there are more topics there than in the Portuguese tab. But that shouldn't stop me from responding to something that's there, where I was quoted, or perhaps about a subject very close to me.

But that shouldn't stop me from responding to something that's there, where I was quoted, or perhaps about a subject very close to me. I've done this myself, sometimes even leaving the text in the local language, in English (and sometimes even in Portuguese), thus allowing readers to do their own analysis. I did this punctually, and I never felt any kind of problem or discomfort from native speakers of that language. However, the person should not do this systematically and routinely.

On the other hand, this rule does not apply to the global English forum. I think that's the point theymos is referring to, where we can translate a text into English and participate in the general forum discussion.

Another point is that I think it's excessive for people to use AI models for translation. It's better to use tools specifically designed for that purpose, like Google Translate, even if those tools also use AI. I say this for a very simple reason. Just as it doesn't make sense to spread butter on bread with a cleaver, it doesn't make sense to use an AI model to translate text (in most cases used here on the forum).

Ultimately, everything deserves common sense from everyone: from those who write using translations; from those who read; and through moderation.

I am sure that with 50,000 posts to study my style of writing can be made into A.i. script

my annoyance is the coder won't ask permission

he or she will download my post's and some James Joyce novels and make the software essentially robbing the two of us.  But that is this world is it not?

oh! what an excellent suggestion. having an ai tag is definitely going to solve alot of problems.

• it will keep formatting neat
• it will also help the Ai models training in the forum.

This is fine since theymos doesn't want our little corner of humanity being misrepresented or omitted by AIs.

Will this policy be applied retroactively?  Assuming an obvious AI post was written before this verdict was issued by, should it be reported?



I would still like to see AI translations identifies as such.  Having a little experience translating my writings to Arabic I've notice much of the authentic nature of my writing style is obliterated when doing so.  Being fluent in the Levant dialect of Arabic (but shitty at writing) it makes easy for me detect the obvious soulless transcriptions.