According to the U.S. Supreme Court, I am actually TWO PEOPLE–one a human being endowed with a soul called John Green, and the other a corporation that gives its profit to charity called the Awesome Coffee Club.
Both these people have equal rights before the law, except that the corporate person can’t commit assault or go to jail or be killed by the state, whereas the non-corporate person can be all of those things.
When questioned, chatgpt doubles down on how it is definitely correct.
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But it’s not relying on some weird glitchy interpretation of the art itself, a la adversarial turtle-gun. It just reports the drawing as definitely being of the word “lies” because that kind of self-consistency is what would happen in the kind of human-human conversations in its internet training data. I tested this by starting a brand new chat and then asking it what the art from the previous chat said.
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Google’s bard, on the other hand, interprets it differently
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Bard has the same tendency to generate illegible ASCII art and then praise its legibility, except in its case, all its art is cows.
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Not to be outdone, bing chat (GPT-4) will also praise its own ASCII art - once you get it to admit it even can generate and rate ASCII art. For the “balanced” and “precise” versions I had to make my request all fancy and quantitative.
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With Bing chat I wasn’t able to ask it to read its own ASCII art because it strips out all the formatting and is therefore illegible - oh wait, no, even the “precise” version tries to read it anyways.
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These language models are so unmoored from the truth that it’s astonishing that people are marketing them as search engines.
[Shut off last version of this post to avoid possible continual spread of misinformation that was corrected by staff. Reposting clean with corrected info]
So I’m sure almost everyone knows about the porn bot problem by now, so here’s a post detailing why it’s a problem, and what we need to do about it.
First off, yes, always block the porn bots. Don’t be mislead into thinking they’re ok to keep around because they ‘inflate your follower count.’
Firstly, no one cares about, nor can anyone even see, your follower count. Be free from the shackles that are the bullshit other socials told you was important. Don’t let your ego be tied to a number. Having a lot of followers won’t earn you any clout here.
Secondly, bots only follow blogs to try and legitimize their malware (and other dodgy) links. This post goes into more detail about that.
Now that that’s out of the way, you’ll need to know how to recognize a porn bot. This round the template seems to be:
A profile photo of a pretty lady or guy, usually in their underwear, with a similar header photo.
A bio with some combination of: [Age] // [Name] // [Location] // [Emoji] // [Top Bullshit% OnlyFans]
URL consisting of a name followed by a number (i.e: firstlast999)
Typically an empty blog, or if there is content, it’s all dodgy links. Visible, but empty, Likes Tab, & occasionally a visible Following Tab.
You likely recognize the pattern.
So, what you want to do is, first, report the blog as spam On mobile it’ll look like this:
On mobile you’ll need to report spam first, and then go back to the menu again to block.
On desktop it will look like this, and unlike mobile, you’ll be able to report spam and block in the same motion:
If I remember correctly,* be sure to “Report Spam”, not “Report sexually explicit material” to feed the bots to the proper channels. Because the blog is empty, they haven’t posted anything explicit that would violate TOS. However, staff can recognize a bot, and if you report the blog for spam (the actual problem) they’ll take a look, more than likely find that the blog is posting or DMing dodgy links, and dispose of it.
And I think that’s it. Here’s wishing you all a happy and safe blogging experience!
[UPDATE: It was suggested on another post that the bots track your IP if you click on them to send more your way. However, someone from staff corrected and said this is incorrect.They also corrected the 'guilt by association’ myth that bots following you can get your blog flagged by tumblr.
That said, that trail all led to another, easier, way to report/block the bots all from your Follower Tab instead of visiting each blog separately, unfortunately it only works on desktop:
(For newbies, click on the little person icon at the top right of your screen and scroll to find the Followers tab under the blog/sideblog you need to block a pornbot from.)
*I remember this information from a blog that used to be all about taking down the pornbots. Unfortunately I do not know if that blog is still active, nor can I remember the URL. If anyone knows what blog I’m referring to, and/or if they’re still active, please feel free to tag them so others can follow them for more tips!
A small PSA to all those new to dealing with the porn bots that Tumblr now has a fresh wave of – I understand that when you go to report them, you want to report them as “[containing] sexually explicit material”, but don’t do that. Report them as spam instead.
These are spam bots flooding tags and the website in general with spam links. They often do not have anything sexually explicit on their blog (although they often have implicit material). Plus, these two reports get very different results. Reporting explicit material gets the bot slapped behind an 18+ wall, so minors can’t check if they’re a bot or not. Reporting spam gets the bot taken down.
Remember, folks: when dealing with a bot, report spam, not smut!
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