Reddit Migration

I was wondering about this myself. If a bot presents a good argument that promotes discussion, is the presence of a bot automatically bad?

I don’t love that right now, the focus is on eliminating or silencing the voice of bots, because as you point out, they’re going to be indistinguishable from human voices soon - if they aren’t already. In the education space, we’re already dealing with plagiarism platforms incorrectly claiming real student work is written by ChatGPT. Reading a viewpoint you disagree with and immediately jumping to “bot!” only serves to create echo chambers.

I think it’s better and safer long term to educate people to think critically, assume good intent, know their boundaries online (ie, don’t argue when you can’t be coherent about it and have to devolve to name calling, etc), and focus on the content and argument of the post, not who created it - unless it’s very clear from a look at their profile that they’re arguing in bad faith or astroturfing. A shitty argument won’t hold up to scrutiny, and you don’t have the risk of silencing good conversation from a human with an opposing viewpoint. Common agreement on community rules such as “no hate speech” or limiting self-promotion/review/ads to certain spaces and times is still the best and safest way to combat this, and from there it’s a matter of mods enforcing the boundaries on content, not who they think you are.