thank you! I feel terrible I haven’t been posting as much here as life’s been finding a way to consistently disrupt my writing and admining time, but mastodon’s format is pretty good for turning disrupted, high-anxiety writing into threads

glad to have you! we’re happy to be comfortably LLM-free (to my knowledge at least, these shitheads get off on when the slop machine temporarily tricks a person into thinking they’re not touching slop) and frankly still a bit shocked an established ActivityPub instance figured they could get away with using the things at all

db0 posted here for years but also thinks we’re all dgerard

given that the guy runs fediseer, an algorithmic spam blocklist that previously had a glowing endorsement for awful.systems and our moderation style straight from db0 until he deleted it yesterday, I don’t think it’s a stretch to imagine fediseer is about to go the direction all similar projects go and turn into some group’s personal shitlist, and the idea that we’re somehow all david and somehow all trolling (even though our instance pretty much keeps to itself) is going to be why we end up on the spam shitlist and possibly automatically defederated by a few large instances

db0 posted on awful.systems communities for long enough we were slow to deal with him being a huge problem and for that I apologize

k

believe it or not we’ve read the posts and context in question and come to the conclusion that the use of LLMs for summarizing posts and confirming a moderation decision still obviously fucking sucks and obviously represents algorithmic bias in a way we don’t want on any instance we federate with

I know you kids won’t read this but uhhh if you come at us with an attack on our ability to read, all that’s going to happen is I’m going to tell you to fuck yourself before I ban you

hey fucko, you know we don’t have to take their word for it right? we can read all the relevant posts and come to the conclusion that actually the use of LLMs as stated fucking sucks, and that we don’t fucking want it. we can read something and come to a different conclusion than you, believe it or not.

the only worthwhile thing they do is piracy and they’re very proud to be the only worthwhile place for it

We are aware that our instance is seen as “LLM-friendly” due to our nuanced take on LLMs

AI-haters are making themselves irrelevant so why care. Using local LLMs for various tasks they’re well suited for is just being smart.

wow I wonder why having you around is fucking exhausting

cultivate this horseshit elsewhere thanks

the awful dot systems open source moderation model codenamed anarchy cop spit out this image:

what does it mean?

oh no the goalposts! think of the theoretical shitheads who might do this in secret!

please see the pinned post and fuck off

perform away! please keep in mind that Lemmy and ActivityPub are communities, and the only proof of intent we have is through action. a change in policy might feel performative, but it gives me something I can boost as a positive example and a sign that things will be better going forward.

I’d rather make this a learning moment than a purging moment.

absolutely! please show me you’ve learned from this moment by taking a stance against the use of LLMs anywhere in the moderation process and making it part of your instance’s policies going forward.

fuck off with this equivocating shit

piefed banned the user by, uhhhh, reading their posts like a fucking normal person

The admin took the decision to ban the user irrespective of the LLM, and the rest of our admin team and me specifically, would never let an admin become a “human in the loop”. The LLM was used just to summarize

you don’t appear to have much understanding of how a human in the loop system works in practice. LLM summaries are used to confirm biases, especially when the prompt is something along the lines of “do these posts contain <negative term>?” though these systems are stochastic so you’re going to get unpredictable biases regardless of the prompt.

I don’t accept that the LLM summary didn’t influence the decision because the mod in question confirmed that he knew the LLM agreed with him (that’s bias, and also not something LLMs are capable of actually doing) and because if it didn’t, then the summary is worthless

which is why maybe you should just not have them in the future? just don’t touch LLMs when you’re doing mod work. either there’s no reason for it or you’re doing something monstrously wrong.

cool! please make it clear to the mod in question that they shouldn’t be using an LLM for anything in the future, even summarizing posts. make it part of your instance’s policies.

why are you going to bat for someone using unofficial tooling that proved to be extremely unpopular because it was used in a manner that looked like abuse to most observers and qualifies as abuse for instances like ours? it feels kind of rich to come here angry when other people are asking you to stop. maybe you can just take our word for it that we don’t want an LLM anywhere in the moderation process, even as a post summarizer? you don’t have to understand why if you don’t want to.

and yeah you absolutely can lie about this crap. it kind of makes it worse that you and your mod felt they didn’t have to. we really don’t want any of this normalized on any level.

assume I know and understand that the LLM did not literally do the banning

maybe there’s a large body of existing research on how even human in the loop systems confirm and worsen biases? maybe it’s a bit obvious when you go through the process the moderator took to get to their decisions in your head? slowly now, maybe you’ll get there

think very carefully on this because I’m not sure pretending to not understand what I’m asking is working out for you

no but you’re about to be talking to a defed unless you stop this all caps fake outrage shit. should I do you the favor of deleting the garbage post you just made so you can give it another go?

Finally, just because I included an LLM summary of the comment history in the public modlog, it does not logically follow that the ban occurred because of the LLM summary. It simply happened to correspond very well to my own manual review

yeah, it’s ok because the LLM wasn’t hooked up directly to the ban API, you just used it systemically to not do the only fucking thing you’re supposed to be doing as a moderator

this human in loop shit is how corporations absolve themselves of responsibility for decisions taken purely on the word of an LLM. it lets them fire a worker instead of an executive. you’re sure this is the route you want to go?