[ZainRiz]

Good point. It doesn't necessarily have to be a paid membership, but it would need some type of reputation formation. Ability to pay money is one way to grant you a "prob not a bot" reputation.

There's many other ways to set reputation thought:

- I've seen private online communities where you need one or two members to "vouch" for you

- StackOverflow has it's own reputation model based on how helpful you've been in the past

- Bitcoin et-all use proof-of-work as a reputation model.

I'm sure there are many more just waiting to be discovered

[majormajor]

I think generative AI is a game changer here. The more easily people can be fooled into thinking the bot is alive and sentient, the more easy it is to scale reputation-gathering.

StackOverflow and such are probably fine since they are generally "testable" answers.

Otherwise, we've already seen marketers figure out how to deal with reputation - "influencer marketing" is far higher-reputation, in terms of whether or not people want to interact with the marketing/marketers, than email spam was a decade ago. So imagine a forum about Toyotas. Have a bunch of mostly-chatbot-powered members hang out for a while, talking about how they like Toyotas, each with distinct voices and personalities and hobbies and (AI-generated) photos of their cars in different parts of the country... then over the next year, they slowly all start realizing that man, that new Honda is making them rethink their Toyota fandom!

You could do this today without generative AI - and people do, especially for things with huge marketing budgets like political campaigns! - but it's gonna be a LOT cheaper very soon. So it'll happen a lot more.

Vouching would certainly slow things down, but if someone is managing a fleet of 50 GPT bots, once they convince 2 real people to let the first ones in, they can start bringing their others in on their own.