alt Hacker NewsYou sure about that?
https://youtu.be/WEc5WjufSps?t=193
Dr. Egon Cholakian sends its regards. That is to say, the bots are getting good. LLMs made this technologically easy a few years ago, it would take a couple years to develop and deploy a sophisticated bot network like this (not for you or I, but for an org with real money behind it that timeline is correct) and now we are seeing them start to appear. The video I linked is proof that bots already deployed in the wild can take 40 minutes of dedicated effort from a capable suspicious person to identify with high conviction. Maybe it would have taken you 10, I'm not hear to argue that, but I am here to argue that it is starting to take real effort to identify the best bots and this is the worst they will ever be.
I don't care how smart, capable, or suspicious you are, within 3 years it will not be economical for you to curate your list of non-bot contacts on the basis of content (as opposed to identity).
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That's the Darwin's theory for bots: only the fittest survive on the Twitter lands.
Well on my "for you" page, I also follow a pretty niche audience of tech people, which helps :P They're a little easier to verify since they generally also have blogs, or websites, or github accounts, or youtube videos, etc that help verify they're not bots.
I also think people create bots for some purpose -- instability, political divisiveness, financial gain, etc. And I'm kind of inherently not using twitter for any of that. I don't think I could find an account on my twitter thread that mentions the word "liberal", "trump", "conservative", or any of that if I tried! I agree that's a muuuuch more likely place to find bots. What sort of bots do you notice the most in your twitter?