If you let good old spam bots loose on a forum, it will outnumber legit messages ten to one easily. If someone uses an LLM to argue about certain topics, that's not spam. It's manipulative, and clearly abusive if there is no human in the loop, but there's no commercial message they're spreading, or at least I'm not seeing any 'buy xyz here <link>', nor off-topic messages
Then again, I noticed a few years ago in a previous "when to report as spam" discussion on HN that this is a lost cause. People will label things they signed up for as spam because they didn't want to receive it anymore, and others defended that behavior. Abuse and manipulation might as well go in that same category of "anything I don't want to read == spam", just know that when you say "spam", there's some people like me who will understand what it used to mean and try to interpret the message as referring to things such as the stereotypical viagra spam
They may not exactly be posting 'buy xyz here <link>' but they can use LLM's human like sentences to advocate for/against whichever product some company wants. A lot of people rely on google searching "best monitor for Mac Reddit" to get reddit results. However, with LLM, these no longer seem reliable.
I guess that can be spam but I'm not seeing a ton of that either, so it's still not obvious to me we're losing this or that war
The thing we're losing is the open web where anyone can view any page and buy any product they can afford without being banned (edit: or, reading back up what this was about, contributing to projects without the input going to /dev/null apparently)
Then again, I noticed a few years ago in a previous "when to report as spam" discussion on HN that this is a lost cause. People will label things they signed up for as spam because they didn't want to receive it anymore, and others defended that behavior. Abuse and manipulation might as well go in that same category of "anything I don't want to read == spam", just know that when you say "spam", there's some people like me who will understand what it used to mean and try to interpret the message as referring to things such as the stereotypical viagra spam