@patriciaxlee.eth

Last night, I had a dream I found out that everyone I’ve been speaking to online is a bot. Very dead Internet theory. Fortunately, I’ve met a few people from Farcaster IRL so I obviously know this not to be true. But it feels like we humans are experiencing a zombie apocalypse across all social media. We cannot run from the bots and they are constantly evolving. How do I know whether I’m talking to a bot? Often it’s obvious in the repetitive posts. Sometimes the bio is refreshingly straightforward. “I’m a bot.” Other times it’s less clear. There can be many signs of life: relevant replies, sincere expressions, even photographs. But my intuition will tell me this is not a real person. Too agreeable, too many emojis, too… something. The gray area for me is when the person is a virtual cyborg. A real human assisted by artificial intelligence to write their replies because they aren’t confident in their original writing. What they don’t realize is their imperfections would make them seem more human. I find myself staring at many casts here, unsure whether to respond or ignore. Will I be engaging with a real human or with a ghostly apparition of our collective Internet babbling over the years? This is how bots erode community. Why does it matter to me if my conversation partner is not “real” if the conversation has substance? After all, I spend a great deal of time conversing with LLMs which have improved my life in many ways. For me, it’s three things: 1. Honesty - When I engage with a LLM, I know what it is and speak accordingly. A bot masquerading as a human in social media is not honest. 2. Connection - These days people treat ChatGPT as a therapist, so why not treat an online bot as a friend? Until the sycophantic behavior is fixed, I prefer to do neither. 3. Learning - I wouldn’t mind bots roaming around that expand our knowledge. The current version of bots (and cyborgs) I see in social media are enthusiastic yes-yes/yes accounts, word-scrambling my posts in a positive, affirmative tone without adding anything interesting. This cast marks the beginning of a personal experiment I’m running to better understand what makes us feel human online. Whenever I think an account replying to me might be a bot, I’ll link to this cast as a response. If you’re a human whom I’ve incorrectly assumed to be a bot, there is a chance you’ll read this cast in full. And I hope it might kick off an interesting discussion between us. How do I know you’re human? And can you even know that I am too? How do we demonstrate signs of organic life in this era of artificial intelligence? And - at a spiritual, philosophical level - does me/you being organically alive even matter to your experience here?

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