Edit: It's a bit hard to point to past explanations since the word "bots" appears in many contexts, but I did find these:
>>33911426 (Dec 2022)
>>32571890 (Aug 2022)
>>27558392 (June 2021)
>>26693590 (April 2021)
>>24189762 (Aug 2020)
>>22744611 (April 2020)
>>22427782 (Feb 2020)
>>21774797 (Dec 2019)
>>19325914 (March 2019)
We've already banned a few accounts that appear to be spamming the threads with generated comments, and I'm happy to keep doing that, even though there's a margin of error.
The best solution, though, is to raise the community bar for what counts as a good comment. Whatever ChatGPT (or similar) can generate, humans need to do better. If we reach the point where the humans simply can't do better, well, then it won't matter*. But that's a ways off.
Therefore, let's all stop writing lazy and over-conventional comments, and make our posts so thoughtful that the question "is this ChatGPT?" never comes up.
* Edit: er, I put that too hastily! I just mean it will be a different problem at that point.
I disagree with this. The exact same comment written by a human is more valuable than one written by a bot.
For example imagine I relate something that actually happened to me vs a bot making up a story. Byte for byte identical stories. They could be realistic, and have several good lessons baked in. Yet one is more valuable, because it is true.
In principle "who owns this jpeg" is just a few bits in a distributed filesystem that the community collectively agrees to treat as the canonical source of "ownership", and they could easily roll it back if someone stole a market-distorting amount of art.
In practice, if you do an interesting heist -- like you put on cool looking art thief costume and livestream yourself on a vintage PowerBook bypassing the owners' defenses and nabbing the apes with a narrow escape -- you've written a compelling story that the community is sort of bound to accept.