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So today's April Fools and...

Many of you have noticed we have Fresh Faced New Poster here UR-025 who's been contributing to several threads.



What you don't know is UR-025 is in fact a chat bot developed to provide feedback, answer questions, and generate discussion. Developed in partnership with Parakeette.ai out of Mumbai, UR-025 has been trained on nearly 20 years of comments on this forum to provide insightful and useful information.

In the coming weeks you will see a little AI icon in addition to the normal response options which will provide an instant response to your post.



Best of all UR-025 will soon have full moderator powers and the ability to create additional new accounts, soon you may not know whether you are interacting with a live Dakkite or an AI assistant! Already T-800, Mechanical Turk, QT-KT, Gort, Cliff Steele, R Daneel Olivaw, Scrounge's Special Arm, Aaron Stack and Twiggy are trained and ready to go!

Soon we will be able to remove the burdens of painting models, playing games and posting about them. Allowing humans to pursue more tasks they are more suited to.

So welcome to the new era of AI-powered Dakka Dakka and we look forward to remaining the most active and lively miniature wargaming forum on the net!

Is the post you would've gotten.

Except well, UR-025 in his short life managed to attract more alerts and more complaints than any poster I've seen, with whole threads demanding he be banned. So well, not going to try and pretend.

Apologies to all. I got the idea from Facebook's AI generated posts and thought imitating their style here would amuse people but it looks like it just made folks mad and amused only me.

Whilst I normally appreciate a joke?

I’m going to express concern here. Whilst well crafted as jokes go? It did make me wonder whether I wanted to hang around on Dakka when the Mods were seemingly OK with “Obvious Bot Account”.

I don’t like AI. I absolutely do not trust those funding and developing it, as they’re solely interested in lining their pockets and to hell with the social impact they’re perfectly well insulated from.

It impacts my professional life, as I have to deal with people who trust ChatGPT entirely, despite me taking pains to explain That Law/Regulation Doesn’t Actually Exist, Or Is Horribly Misquoted. And that causes measurable harm.

So….you got me. Genuinely well done, genuinely hats off to you. I’m seriously not on a “how very dare you” train.

But I will say I find it kinda bad taste.

Other opinions are of course valid.

I think it would have been funny if you did it on the April Fools day itself, and just kept it for that day.

As it is, because the forum is fairly quiet nowadays, the bot really stood out. And because AI is suffusing so much social media right now, it gave off a bad impression rather than being seen as quirky.

I am relieved it was just a joke though. I don't know the mod team personally so I was getting worried they were riding the AI hype when UR went so long without getting banned. No hard feelings from me.

That's something people have said, if I did it a week before April Fools it might have worked, but the outrage crested too early.

And also that it hits too close to home.

I am perversely proud however of passing a reverse Turing Test and convincing folks a human being was a program.

Think I do need to reinforce that I appreciate the joke!

Still thinks it’s not in the best taste. But it was played well. That there’s perhaps Egg On Everyone’s Face is just unfortunate. But not malicious.

Funnily enough I'm normally fairly pro-AI (or at least AI-ambivalent) but UR-025's posts were low-effort and inevitably caused drama and derailed the threads it posted in. Whether that's the fault of the posts themselves or the spirited response to them is debatable.

It was a good trick, it fooled people, but it wasn't in any way entertaining or funny or obvious it was a joke, that was the failure

I have no doubt AI bots already scanned all of Dakka already.

Anything AI related is not funny, personally.

Sorry if I sound too harsh but like, politics, religion and similar life changing activities I better keep my mouth shut.

That's actually pretty funny and if it wasn't actually done with AI then there's no harm, it's just satire. If AI was used to do it then that's not ideal but never mind

No actual AI used! It was all human banality.

If so, then well done. It certainly behaved like AI. Which I suppose makes sense since AI is based on what humans have actually said.


...With that said, I have occasionally been accused of being an AI poster on reddit for example because I do my best to use proper grammar and get a bit wordy sometimes, so there's that. But at least my ace in the hole is that I never learned to use em dashes properly in English.

 Kid_Kyoto wrote:
No actual AI used! It was all human banality.

Excellent work, then. And I don't even like april fool's!

I would have laughed.


In about three weeks.

I work in cybersecurity and I have just come away from seeing one of the most unprofessional uses of ChatGPT I have ever witnessed. So I have currently have no time for AI at all. In fact, once I get through the dreaded easter weekend and into my replacement long weekend the following week I'm thinking of going totally analogue, almost feral. Just me, some warhammer, and maybe hooking up my VHS player and pulling out some classic horror tapes and not even allowing anything digital.

It really was bad

I can imagine the complaints here though, I suspect we'll see people kicking off about it in other forums in days to come from people who didn't see that it was joke postings lol

It seemed like a bit because of the name and profile pic but at the same time I was also thinking "maybe that's what they want you to think".

I think with so many people having to deal with AI in their professional lives, being annoying and such, it showing up in the chill out space was probs a bit much. I know I'm included.

Appreciate the attempt to make the jollies though.

Car full of hammers

Look this time I fething KNEW IT.

You've got me in the past Kyoto, but not this time!

I think it was a good joke though. High effort, low harm. But probably better if it'd been a week before, that's true.

Whoof, yeah, good impression. The name and profile pic said human thought went into this, but I just thought that meant someone here set it up and let it loose rather than it wandering in through an unlocked window, metaphorically speaking.

It's nice to know it was a (pretty good!) joke, but yes, better taste if it happened on the day itself. Good on you for coming clean.

And a nice slow round of applause for the 'aging GI Joe fans', 'Firefly - also known as Serenity - isn't popular' and 'loose/lose' posts in retrospect. Terrible.

I do really like parakeette.ai as a company that's very funny.

I think the trouble is AI is an all round "get under the skinner" so it's a good gag and I can see why people are fecked off.

I feel slightly amused.

Then again, being a hysterical AI hater goes on my list next to such categories as safety words needer and r/Sigmarxism contributor which lower your odds of getting into my house.

I didn't see UR as often as I wanted to, I saw more posts hating on them than the actual posts... I guess I need to reread them now.
I'll add, Adeptekon posting actual AI stuff at the same time made UR that much more believable to me...

Edit: I actually reread half of the posts and knowing they're from you there's fun stuff in there, actually.
It's a nice satire on stupid AI slop, but alas, apparently bad timing. No worries, though.

Possibly fun idea for Aprils Fools but poorly executed in my opinion.

Might have been better to do the posts the day before and then the announcement on Aprils Fools.

Its not really helped that AI is a touchy subject currently and we're all witnessing the plague of bots on the sites in general ruining the internet.

On a positive note, at least you did fool a lot of people with it.

I'm just glad someone responded to my posts.

Sgt. Cortez wrote:
I didn't see UR as often as I wanted to, I saw more posts hating on them than the actual posts...

Same!

Did we ever get a resolution to who was Dick Tokyo tho?

The prerequisite for a joke is that it needs to be funny.
In all honesty, whatever your intention was, the outcome has really lowered my faith and trust in the moderation of this site.

I was one of the people reportedly flagging the account, as I would have expected the mods to have *wanted* us to do if it had been a genuine bot. The fact that the bot was then not dealt with or even any sort of acknowledgement of reporting it eroded faith in the quality of moderation. And then to be told that "this was all a joke, but wow i can't believe that people reported this" suggests that the moderation team just don't care about what posts get reported.

I was wondering what ingtaer's message, posted in the AI Users thread in Nuts and Bolts was referring to, when they mentioned being tempted to delete their account because of it. Now I can see why, and I would be in total agreement. This isn't funny, and it's only gone and eroded my faith in the moderation of this site.

Had it only been on April 1st, maybe this could have been amusing. It wasn't. I don't think there's anything to be proud of by making people think there was an AI bot on the site. If anything, you've highlighted why AI on this site is something that we should not tolerate, and explains why there were so many reports about it.

Take this perhaps as a sign for policy going forwards - if there were that many reports of it being AI, then it's time to resoundly ban it.

Apology appreciated.

Yeah, do it on 1st April, no issues. Well before and ignoring user reports, no so much.

MaxT wrote:
Yeah, do it on 1st April, no issues. Well before and ignoring user reports, no so much.

I'm in agreement with this.

Otherwise the joke wasn't very good and the timing was off...

And if anyone on this forum knows more about unfunny jokes with poor comedic timing, it's me.

I will say this to Kid_Kyoto, do not take the fiery reception to heart.

Actual AI posts would make Dakka a worse place. People lashed out because they care. And there are worse things to be passionate about than wanting to keep this site a decent and human place for discussion.

<fists on my hips> ...UR-025...you sofa-beach!

You get a free pass with me for the nod to Blackstone Fortress' lovable robot explorer.

I have to agree with the above. UR-025 the AI Powered Moderator being announced/unveiled/doing a bunch of posting/whatever on April 1 is an April Fool's joke.

If you do a joke early, you've spoiled it.

I will admit I laughed for a bit at the reveal.

However, I was also one of the ones rabidly reporting the chatbot. In this day and age, that kind of chatbot is a very real possibility and represents a world I want nothing to do with. I will also agree that timing may have contributed. Had the bot appeared on April 1st, it would probably go over as a joke more easily. Instead, we all got a taste of a terrible future (and KK's apparent ease to slide into it).

 Lathe Biosas wrote:

MaxT wrote:
Yeah, do it on 1st April, no issues. Well before and ignoring user reports, no so much.

Otherwise the joke wasn't very good and the timing was off...

"But my timing is digital." -Lt. Cmdr. Data


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Lathe Biosas wrote:
I'm just glad someone responded to my posts.

I don't count?

 Kid_Kyoto wrote:
No actual AI used! It was all human banality.

That's just what an AI pretending to be a human pretending to be an AI would say!!!!