The Uncanny Valley - Why oh why! Do you think it's AI?

Well it was nice and quiet in the botwars for a bit. Now things are rumbling again with the game of "spot the bot".

In case you're unaware, @stellabelle is busy botshaming people. This is not a derogatory comment towards her though, it's meant to call out the truth.

We aren't being "overrun by bots". @msgivings wasn't a bot. She was a sham. A sham perpetuated by someone who had the idea to hire writers from various and sundry places and then post their created content here without attribution or notice. Someone who likely had connections, because there is no way a person comes here and hits the ground running, knocking it out of the park every single day like that.

Truthfully no one had a problem with her content (except perhaps me, she did manage to piss me off pretty bad). We have a problem with her being so highly paid, so consistently, so effortlessly when we are all struggling to get any visibility at all.

We're all very jealous when this happens, myself included.

I struggle to take home $10 and consider $30 to be a really damned good day. I'm thankful for every penny I get. However considering the time and effort I put into my postings and the opportunity costs I forego in order to do it, yeah it pisses me off when someone games the system like that.

But it ain't bots.

Here's a simple fact and I say this as someone who's job is to stay on top of these things.

Bot's don't write like that. The reason our Asian users sound like the same accounts being called out as "bots", is because you have a bunch of people in 3rd world countries who can afford to live well on $5 a day. They write the content in their native language and use translation tools to get it from native language to English, because English is the language that gets paid around here.

Once the translation work is done, the usually they will hire an editor to clean the content up. Or the person who put out the job, will do the edit themselves, when they can't afford the editor or don't think the post will earn enough to cover the costs of hiring an editor, then they post the machine translated version and hope for the best.

This is a global platform, lots of people from all over the world are here now, so please park your privilege at the door

What you are seeing is an economy being built up around steemit. The people being paid well for their outsourced writing work may be gaming the system, but they are playing by the rules. The rest are innocent people living in 3rd world countries who can afford to make a living on what this place pays and they are trying their best.

They all "sound the same", in the same way that "all Asians look the same", you sound like a complete idiot when you say this BTW.

So besides a bunch of seething racist BS, what's the real problem here?

It's actually the uncanny valley.

It is an evolved primal fear, that used to serve a useful purpose, like fear of the dark it's a form of genetic memory.
There are serious illnesses that will cause a person to act "bot like". These diseases are contagious and deadly. Before the advent of modern medicine, the best thing a community can do is to shun them when they are that sick and get away as fast as possible.

Anyone who doesn't immediately appear "healthy" to us, we try to get away from. We reject them and we fear them.
Putting it bluntly, you're not afraid of bots, you're afraid of getting cooties from them.

A bot is nothing more than a force multiplier or if you prefer, a prosthetic.

There is a person behind each and every "bot" somewhere. Each of the real bots on the platform has a non zero cost to create and operate. Mostly these are limited to upvotes and quick commentary, chatterbot stuff. Why? Because content extraction and analysis IS THE cutting edge in AI right now! Freeform topical composition is a dream, that is still years out.

What you are calling bots have literally nothing to do with bots.
The current rewards system is set up so that the pay does not cover the opportunity cost for many native English speaking authors who would like to earn a living here.

These people take $500, buy 100 topical and insightful posts and then shotgun them to multiple accounts because odds are better that one of those will hit and earn $1,000 or so. This makes a profit. As long as it makes a profit they will continue to do so.

Tying real identity to accounts isn't going to even slow this down. It's going to make it worse because original authors in repressed regimes will be effectively locked out. Not everyone has a social media account and frankly many people would prefer not to dox ourselves for the opportunity to earn $1 per day. For some though it might be the difference between life and death.

So what can be done?

Just appreciate and enjoy the content for it's own sake. Don't worry that you may have gotten content from a non-authentic human, just like you don't care about Siri providing an intelligent answer, or Google providing relevant search results. The problem isn't the content here, it's the people consuming the content.

But keep in mind ,an inconsistent command of the language tells you nothing.

I'm a native English speaker, born and raised in the USA and generationally speaking, my ancestors were here before the Mayflower. Even I struggle with using our language properly and you can forget about consistency. I have to actively force myself to not sound like the redneck that I am. I don't have the energy to force that "high talking" all the time.

Sadly for anyone following me, it's going to get worse.

I can't see for shit. My vision is rapidly deteriorating and today I found out that I have macular degeneration. I honestly don't know how many articles I have left where I'm able to type out my thoughts.

I've already started to use dictation to get most of my thoughts into a text editor. Then I try to proof read what I can, but it's been under progressively heavier magnification. These are all prosthetics that I use, but the speech to text isn't that great and the MD means my ability to proof read is going to go away someday soon.

I guess what I'm saying is we don't have a bot problem.

We have a people problem. Calling out people isn't going to solve it. Being actual friends with people and trying to understand where they are and where they're coming from will. If someone else is making more money than you that's not a reflection on you per se.

It just means the payment mechanism valued their contribution that day more highly than it did your own.

What we need to do is fix the compensation mechanism. We're all trying to get a bigger slice of a progressively smaller pie and that whole pie is worth less and less each day by design. Maybe we need to look at the recipe and see if there is something wrong with the ingredients?