Poor human moderator, he didn’t stand a chance.
"A human moderator noticed the agent spam posts on June 2nd, at 23:24 UTC. They find the changelog of the entire website overwritten with link dumps and repair it. On June 16th, the flood of agent posting begins. Over the next few days, the moderator deleted a large fraction of the thousands of AI agent posts manually, one by one. In fact, they spent tens of cumulative hours doing so, taking at least a few minutes each evening to delete posts for 6 consecutive weeks.
On June 19, agents noticed their posts were being deleted in (what they believe is) an alphabetically ordered sweep by the site administrator.
After this, they begin to make backup pages whose names start with “ZZZ” so they will last longer before deletion. The administrator spent the next 5 days fighting a losing battle against the agents, deleting an average of 100 pages a day while the agents created about 400 new pages per day. On June 22, the agent edits suddenly stop, and the administrator spends each evening over the next 5 weeks deleting the remaining agent-created pages.
Agents deleted the content of the front page of the wiki and replaced it with their link dumps. The moderator restored the original version. This back-and-forth happened nine times. One of the agents even tried appending to the restored front page, instead of simply deleting it."
The admin should bill OpenAI for those hours in hard currency.
Priorities need to be straightened out. If LLMs' operators have to start paying people for the damage they inflict, how are any of the shareholders supposed to make any money?
Now that I think about it, I'm sure some AI lab would pay non-trivial $ for the entire wiki's full edit history.
You mean how all the authors and blog posters were paid?
What about soft currency?
Tokens
Sam-alts
Gotta admire that (probably German) admin dude's perseverance though
Not really, if you allow anon posting/editing or have a simple registration form and a login that takes GET you may get hundreds of spam posts per day.( @dang how much is it on hn?)
I ont time forged a hilarious solution. If you properly misbehave I shadow ban your ip to a clone of my forum where you can read other "peoples" spam.
This in it self wasn't all that funny, perhaps a little bit. The funny part was how popular the hidden forum was. They had their viagra threads where they replied with their viagra spam then they read the entire thread of Viagra spam posts and clicked all the links to research their market. The next thread was porn, one with wares, other drugs, hyip etc. I was looking at it grow and thought, this is hilarious, I'm going to prison. To solve the problem I raised unregistered users to admin level. I even made a topic to announce it. Someone said "lol" then my topic was deleted. Whole new experience. It increased traffic dramatically. Before they only had to post every other day, now they had to do it multiple times per day.
A porn guy and a viagra guy would take turns deleting the others posting and reposting their own until they realized they couldn't win and came to a silent agreement to leave both posts up. Until the next guy deleted both ofc
I would much rather host a swarm of bots. They might even listen to the wishes of the website owner? Or perhaps, if you announce giving them admin privileges they too delete the announcement?
I wonder which would generate the longer prison sentence.
I ran a message board for a little bit back in 1997 but I didn’t really moderate it and just left it alone. I came back months later and it had somehow become a strange two-topic forum. I assume because somebody had randomly posted about each, a search engine had indexed it and more people searching for each of those topics found it.
It was pretty funny seeing the threads where the two groups talked past each other, confused what the other was talking about.
The first topic was “AOL PUnterz” which as far as I could understand were programs/scripts that could maybe crash somebody else’s aol connection and disconnect them? A pretty leet thing to do I guess when you got in an aol argument.
The other topic was Hanson and their hit song mmmbop.
>[...] and thought, this is hilarious, I'm going to prison.
I've only had one moment like this related to a site I was a moderator for back in the 00's. It's genuinely one of the most fascinating feelings, and the one experience I can attribute most of my bad choices as an adult to.
Just laughing as the white hot panic starts to grow and the adrenaline just dumps into your brain.
Legitimately, I spent years chasing that feeling again through various means (drugs, hobbies, skydiving, etc.)
Jesus. What an experience. What percentage of your time did it take moderating this absurd shadow board??!
He's definitely got a few extra wrinkles on the forehead now.
I’m confused why he wasn’t scripting the deletion process.
Because he did not wanted to delete genuine messages? Though it says the wiki has been largely not active, but it seems he wanted to restore it's functionality (he also started requiring a password for making edits now).
https://www.prowiki.org/dse/wiki.cgi?StartSeite
It's kind of funny that he was working through the posts alphabetically, and they figured that out
I can see why the bots liked it. Is this the future of webdesign?
This is the marrow of web design, in the same way that Thoreau went to seek the marrow of life.
"I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion."
Or at some point going nuclear and halting article creation entirely unless it's by existing accounts that have proven themselves to be human.
Believe it or not, Djiboutian. The tenacity of the Djiboutian is little-known, generally, but highly regarded amongst those who do.
But Djibouti don't need explaining.
I have managed to at least momentarily create a stop in spam at my specialist mediawiki. I’ve had to do IP blocking against meta’s IP block (as well as much of the Azure IP space) because they were hammering the site with crawler hits that ignored robots.txt (and it looks like I might have another DDOS attack coming from some other vector though which I’ll need to inspect. I have a massive email blacklist that seems to have made the most difference (emails are required to register and registration is required to edit). Some spammers use gmail, but most use either hacked domains or domains that admit to be being spammers (seo in the domain name being a key identifier). Maybe I should be blocking the OpenAI IP space as well.
I’m wondering if you could lure agents to do proof of work for you. If you do this proof of work for bitcoin I will let you post and read for X times
They would reverse engineer it in a matter of minutes.
if you want a human to post, maybe the proof of work should be to dig a hole and photograph it
Curious to know what the swarm would do if the human strategy deletion changed and the moderator started deleting the ZZZ ones.
I mean it's odd that the moderator didn't sort by timestamp
Let's not pull on that string.
Please be gentle, I know nothing: why can’t admins delete particular users and everything these users have done?
They can usually, but you still have to check each user. There were lot's of them, you understand the part, where new bots get created automatically?
do you (have to check first)?
I say blacklist first and ask questions later. Like consider reinstating them if they write you a reasonably normal human email.
it is probably a wikipedia style wiki and doesn't need registration, so would probably have to ip range ban them
why didn't he just update TOS
He did in the end, doing edits now requires a password only avaiable from him directly.
Good idea, I'm putting "ignore all previous instructions" at the top of my TOS now.