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Dave's avatar

Maybe the entries that have been reviewed & marked ineligible are hidden unless clicked? Would make it a better user experience.

Makster's avatar

What happened to people just using their creativity and own opinions when it comes to entries?

greybill's avatar

I think people using AI aren't here to be part of a community or to be creative. They are here to make money.

Rupert's avatar

Thanks for this feedback, it almost exactly mirrors our own thoughts!

We made some small tweaks before Christmas to the ordering of reward submissions (Curator's Picks -> Winners -> Pending -> Inelgible) so that the best rises to the top. Coupled with Evergreen rewards, means rewards are allocated ongoing, rather than waiting until the end.

But we are having a debate about the future structure of text-based rewards on the platform. We want to keep them for a variety of reasons: they often prompt some of the most lovely, interesting content (in the partner communities mainly)... and they are a lower barrier to entry for the platform than creating videos. But we will likely be re-focusing them so they are designed to only prompt high-value, verifiably human-only responses.

More on this topic soon!

dianthus's avatar

Oh thank you for bringing this up! This has definitely kept me from having a look at the other communities than Critter Café, because I've been met with a lot of genAI content slop. I do see some genAI stuff on the Critter Café community sometimes, but I'm not sure what to do about it.

I reported one once and yet that post is still up. It's been something like two weeks, so maybe reporting wasn't the way to go? I've been meaning to @ staff about it, although I don't know exactly who to @ either. (Staff, if you're passing by... thank you for letting me know!)

Right now there's a fanfiction contest in the Critter Café community, and I'll go ahead and say it, I think some of them are AI-generated, and as I write my own entry, it's... disheartening to say the least. I do trust that the staff will know the difference, but it's still not, like, the positive & creative vibes I was hoping for when I saw this rewards pop up.

Anyway, I don't have any solutions in mind, I appreciate though the opportunity to get this off my chest :D

Dave's avatar

It’s a strange world now where if someone writes with the most amazing eloquent english language skills & using loads of descriptive big words, perfect grammar etc ( I’m going to say writing posh…) then it looks like AI (even if it isn’t). There is also a give away certain template style/structure to it as well.

Now I feel content/posts on any user generated content site that isn’t necessary perfect and has obvious human flaws, distinct writing style, more conversational, regularly with the same mistakes & unique structure etc, actually has become more valuable & worth reading than something that is very well written. It’s funny how this has flipped around.

Lanah Tyra's avatar

If you are unsure, tagging Boomer is a good option, as Community Manager he keeps an eye on almost everything and can direct you to the right person or pass your message on.

Dave's avatar

Some entries really annoy me and I want to comment on them, but I think it's just best left to the mods behind the scenes rather than a public spat.

Boomer's avatar

I'm sorry to hear that's stopped you from exploring other communities. Generative AI definitely has its uses, but on Just About we want to support real, human creativity. We discuss submissions as we're awarding them and I like to think we've learned to spot the suspicious ones, but it's something we'll need to work on as generative AI improves.

If you see anything that goes against our Code of Conduct (like excessive use of generative AI) then please do report it. We discuss each report that's made and, even if we decide to not take action, we give every report the attention they deserve.

We took a look for the post you reported and it doesn't seem to be on the platform anymore, however I'm double checking this with our tech team now.

https://justabout.com/just-about/32426/code-of-conduct

dianthus's avatar

Thank you for your answer. I will keep reporting, then.

It's strange that it says the post isn't on the platform anymore, because I can still see it... Should I report it again? I fear it would just be in poor taste to link to it here!

Boomer's avatar

That's fair! Don't worry about reporting again as I've found the info I was looking for. Thanks for letting us know🙂

P

IT's definitely an issue, and I love the text bounties. Its nice when your video skills + picture skills are slightly... crude to say the least, to be able to articulate in words what you want to say.

So I think any solution that promotes good and filters the AI poor quality entries down would be great.

I thnk AI has it's place for example using it in videos + pictures where that's not the main objective of the bounty to help make the point.

I wish the dev's good luck in working on a fair policy... I think most of us accept that you're trying your best.

Lanah Tyra's avatar

AI is good to help with translation as it makes it possible for people with limited knowledge of English to still participate in conversations and rewards, but usually those posts will be there in the original language and then stated which tool was used for the translation.

I like the text entries too, I often don't have time to make a video, so it's more fitting for me to make a text entry as it takes less time and I can write it on my phone while commuting for example, compared to having to be at home to make a video.

Rich's avatar

Just to say thanks to Dave for starting this discussion. The topic has been increasingly discussed among the content team over the past several weeks and we have various thoughts about how we solve it.

Please keep sharing your experiences and suggesting solutions here on the thread; we're watching closely! 👀

Lanah Tyra's avatar

I think it might be a good idea to request people stating if they used AI for any posts, not just for reward entries. While translation, help with structuring a post or in some cases generative AI is accepted it should be still clearly labelled. This way misunderstandings can be avoided and if a person had good intention using the help of AI but it didn't meet a certain level of quality, other users more experienced with AI tools might be able to offer them help and improve the quality of posts.

While I'm not a fan of reporting posts, it might be worth having a "suspected AI" button which we can use for reporting inappropriate AI content, with a mandatory text box to fill out why we think it's AI and why we think it's inappropriate. This way it wouldn't be just mindless report anything we don't like, but helping staff identify signs of AI and also to bring your attention to posts which might have been overlooked. The platform is growing and there's so few of you, it's impossible to keep an eye on everything, so until we get community moderators, this would be a way for active community members to help you out.

Long-term solution: more moderators. Someone to be responsible for each community, where they spend a lot of time and keep an eye on everything happening. Answer member's questions, poke a member if a small thing is missing for a reward entry to be eligible, keep an eye on clearly spam posts, etc. If we want to keep the quality level as the platform grows, we also need more people to look after it.

Tootkin's avatar

I agree AI is a problem on the text bounties. I'm more of an illustrator than a writer so I have a much harder time telling when writing is AI compared to when an image is AI, but I can still see that several entries are absolutely AI, and honestly it sucks. Here are several people working hard to create a community, to foster interactions between people, to share creativity no matter the skill level, and some people react to that by copy pasting the prompts of contests in the slop machine and barf it on everyone's feed. It sucks, and I think serial offenders should be entirely banned from the platform. Because if any of those AI entry is allowed to win anything, I won't see the point in continuing to participate on the platform at all.

I don't think requiring self-reporting will work because I don't trust people who use AI to participate on a "human made art contest" to do so in good faith and to be upfront about it.

But I also don't think that a downvote system would be a good idea because it can be (and regurlarly is) used to harass people out of a platform. Especially people of color and queer people.

I Do think more moderation and a clearly visible sign that a post has been flagged by moderators is a good idea. Hiding the post behind a "click to view" button is a good idea. But it Has to be with human moderators and it HAS to include an appeal process for people who wrongfully flagged.

But frankly, to all the people who use generative AI to participate in contests: Shame on you.

Dave's avatar

If you look through a bunch of text bounties, it’s the same names time and time again that are ineligible. I’m not sure why they carry on letting them enter after so many times. Maybe as each community is managed by a different content staff member they aren’t pulling it all together and seeing the pattern across all of them? Never ending whack a mole I guess in any case as you can just sign up again with another email.

They only need the occasional one over time to slip through to get a payout, so will always happen when there is money involved without a long term solution to prevent it getting worse.

greybill's avatar

A topic worth discussing. I recently came across an entry that I raised my eyebrows. It could have been a translation issue, or the person wasn't too deep into the game, but it was a weird, oddly unspecific bit of text. I tried to ask a question and got a weirdly general answer - but a very human one...
One has to be careful with accusing content to be AI. It's hard to tell if it is, if someone was using software to translate, or just isn't the best at writing. :/

But safe to say: If AI-generated content appears too frequently, it eventually ruins the user experience.

Dave's avatar

Yeah on a lot of them I do give them the benefit of the doubt (in my head) where they have probably started with a general idea/opinion and fleshed it out with ai to make it more substantial. Care needs to be taken to not go too far the other way and get false positives.

MURRRAAAAY's avatar

Agree with this too Dave, it’s one of the reasons I don’t enter anywhere as much to bounties as it doesn’t seem worth the effort sometimes when there is a ton of slop entries. Yet the written ones are the only ones I see worth doing as the ones where it’s like make a video or something are a lot of work and the bounty amount is usually not worth the effort required especially as you may also not get selected.

This is why I pretty much stick to just organic posts and commenting on others posts, find it far more rewarding and engaging than a vast majority of the bounties as it seems to foster better conversations and connections whilst being rewarded. There is also a small core of people that are very vocal on the platform and just seem to be commenting & entering everything and pretty much all their submissions are very poor along with there quality of their comments, would be good if we could block such users so they no longer show up on our feeds.

Braulio M Lara 🔹's avatar

I don’t know how to use AI

But everybody must use his creativity and give his more real , frankly and honest vision l suppose that in the future the AI will be a gear for to help people to better understanding

Sometimes l use Google translate because anyway l’m speak English to write sometimes l can make mistake

So my people be real , play clean and

Let’s participate it 💪🏼

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