To protect the integrity of Buddhism, does BSE take any measures to prevent AI bots here?

Question

Could be totally off base but due to quite peculiar syntax it seems some of the responses here could be derived via Artificial Intelligence. Even if this is not the case, to protect the integrity of Buddhism, would BSE consider taking any measures to prevent AI bots here?

Answer 1

One of the more obvious ways -- to me the only obvious way -- in which "Artificial Intelligence" might be used for creating posts on this site, is someone using a translation tool (like Google Translate or others).

I expect people might do this when they don't write English themselves. And I think that doing so is unobjectionable, that in general we want to welcome users, and not discriminate against or discourage those for whom English isn't their first or even one of their second languages.

You might, similarly, find some "quite peculiar syntax" from people who are themselves translating into English without a translation tool -- some simple examples that I know of, Russian doesn't have articles ("the" and "a"), German sentences sometimes have a different word order (with a verb at the end), and so on.

Even "correct" English sounds unusual if you refer to everyone including yourself in the third person, or use anything archaic, which some people do when they try to write formally (i.e. in the so-called static register), especially if they don't do it well (because their English isn't fluent).

Note that we are all welcome or even encouraged to improve the language -- grammar, syntax, spelling -- of any post, to make it more easily understandable. I do that sometimes, my reasoning being that as I'm a fairly expert user of English I might be able to understand badly-written or non-standard English that another user might not. My experience is also that automated translation tools fail to translate a word that's mis-spelled, so again, correcting the spelling and so on of a post make it easier for people to translate if they want to.

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That said, another type of "bot" on the internet is the type that's used for spamming, i.e. for posting an advertisement on 100s of sites including this one. That kind of post is not tolerated, and is deleted. The deletion is remarkably quick, often within minutes, so you might see spam sometimes but not often and not for long.

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More generally the users of this site do prefer "sincere" questions, i.e. a question for which an actual human wants an answer -- see this answer for example:

Personally, I find seeded questions irksome.

It's hard to create and enforce a rule about the intent of people who post, but we do sometimes.

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Also there is more-or-less a rule against posting the same answer more than once to multiple questions -- we'd expect that different questions would get different answers, and if you post the same answer to all questions then it's not a good answer.

A repeated post might possibly be good advice, without being a good answer -- see Answers vs Advice

Answer 2

Stack Exchange's own bots are pretty harmless, and generally do clean-up activities like mass-correcting linked URLs. They also bring up some old questions to the top of the feed to encourage activity.

But what if there are external bots which are writing questions and answers?

Well, Stack Exchange also monitors for unusual activities like spamming, vandalism, mass upvoting or mass downvoting. For e.g. sock puppet accounts can be detected by the system.

And beyond that, users can flag posts, and moderators can take action. We've had commercial spammers, religious missionary spammers and vandals posting gibberish or inappropriate content in the past, and we have almost always swiftly deleted their posts.