Scylla Rhiadra

The problems that are likely to arise when instituting elements that belong to the bottom of the pyramid relate to the way in which these are handled. A great many of the ills of society -- and of SL too, arguably -- are the result of competition for a scarcity of resources. "Scarcity" in that sense doesn't just mean that there is a certain amount of corn that can be harvested, or a certain number of "jewels" that can be gathered for points or whatever: it also relates to anything that has to be "paid for" in some fashion. Something that costs L$1 is, by definition, "scarce" in the sense that not everyone can access it: you have to have Lindens. Something that requires an expenditure of non-trivial time also produces a scarcity: some people will have hours a day to expend on it, while others might be limited by RL to a few hours a week. And all of these "scarcities" will produce competition of some form or another, and will advantage some over others. It will also produce particular behaviours that are not necessarily very desirable, like "grinding" for resources -- what we used to see in SL in the form of camping, for instance. Whatever else might be said for such resource scarcity "workarounds," they don't much confer enjoyment. Not too many people enjoy grinding as an activity, and most people who camped simply went AFK while doing so. It's also the kind of thing that leads to people creating and then selling fully developed accounts, something not permitted by the ToS, but rife in other games. So, I think we need to make a distinction between activities that produce these kinds of unwanted effects, and those that instead do things we'd like to see happen -- such as community building. If something like this is to be instituted, it needs to be done in such a way as to incentivize activities that will, in and of themselves, confer enjoyment and benefit to both the person engaged, and the grid as a whole. And we need to avoid things that result in competition, inequity, and mere labour for the sake of labour.

Ok, can it be automated though? Is RLV enough to send them out on long excursions around the grid, automatically scooping and downloading data? Well, yes. This is a problem I've identified before: the idea that for every problem there is a "solution" that can be scripted. And that just ain't so, and often causes more problems than it solves. The problem is that policing behaviour is highly time intensive and so expensive. Essentially though the new(ish) rules on the use of data harvested in-world represents this kind of solution: it can't be scripted or automated, but will necessitate actual human engagement. And I'd argue that the wholesale changes to the BB web site since that rule was instituted are evidence that it works, at least where an operation is registered and above-board.

The convergence of AI and bots in SL could definitely lead to some issues, although at a fairly low level I suspect: no one who wants to scam large numbers of people is going to use SL. But it's why claims that people have integrated ChatGPT into NPCs in SL actually makes me a bit nervous.

Ironically, that may be because they've been booted from estates that ban bots. But the problem is real.

This is in effect exactly what I'm suggesting. It wouldn't impact very much on bot operations because they can perform those from anywhere withing a region, but it would mean that you wouldn't have to deal with a zombie assault on your personal holdings. It doesn't, of course, deal with unregistered bots, but, until someone can definitely tell me that these are easily detectable by LL via viewer credentialing, I don't know that there IS much that can be done about them. Including, obviously, traffic bots.

I want to highlight this because it has a lot to do with the outcry against bots -- probably much more than privacy concerns, to be honest. The enormous and very visible upsurge in bots -- registered or unregistered -- has demonstrably impacted on some people's SL in negative ways. Here's Lou Netizen's figures on (registered) bots on the grid (which includes only those belonging to "cohorts" he follows). I was in error when I said May was the busiest month, but it's still up there. Interesting to note that the numbers are trending downwards, but they are still much higher than they used to be: If you are unfortunate enough to live on a mainland parcel where these bots tend to spawn, you're going to be flooded with them. Personally, I don't much care how many appear in my parcel, but I don't get that many, and my parcel is public anyway. But given that we do in SL tend to value "privacy" and property ownership, it would be odd argue that landowners should have control over entry onto their property but not give them tools to prevent them from being swarmed by random bots. Qie has argued that this new script is simply going to mean that more bots go unregistered, and he's undoubtedly correct. I wonder if a better solution, in some regards, might have been to restrict spawning points to public land -- highways, or maybe abandoned land.

So, I don't know if this is possible, but I'd love someone to provide something close to a definitive statement on this. Because I remember very clearly being told in one of the BB threads that it was possible to spoof a viewer in a way that made a bot undetectable. Separately, I think you're right about LL not wanting an arms race -- although, to some degree, it may be too late for that: they've created one. But honestly, I'm surprised they ever actually published this new coding function; it would be more like LL to notice that the public furor had died down, and quietly shelve it.

Good response, and good points. Had Governance moved more strenuously against bots before the whole BB thing erupted and raised the profile of the issue, bot farms likely would have adopted new tactics anyway. We would just have been less aware of it. Damned if you do, damned if you don't, really.

You're hired!!!! When can you start? 🙂

Yeah. Oddly enough, although I've been fairly vocal on this issue here and elsewhere, I don't myself get terribly worked up about bots. I have no intention of banning them from my parcel, for instance. And I recognize that there are lots of "good" bots -- ones who collect and disseminate worthwhile and useful information that has been properly anonymized, and is securely stored. But then, my parcel is public -- I might not feel the same way if they kept appearing in the middle of my dining room table. And, wow, they have been proliferating of late: they seem to be everywhere. The figures I've seen -- I don't know how accurate they are, tbh, show a HUGE surge in the sheer number of bots -- I assume registered ones -- since about January. May was, I think, the busiest month for bots on the grid ever. However, their actual presence rarely bothers me much. What I do worry about is the kind of data that bots collect, and what they do with it. But that's actually in some ways a different question than whether bots should be banned or not. I assume that LL must have some means at their disposal that allows them to determine with a reasonable degree of certainty that "Account X" is a bot -- or it would be pointless to ask us to report them?

I do indeed like it -- with important caveats -- "the way it is." And a great many of us do: nearly all of us "play games" (who doesn't these days, even if it's just Candy Crush Saga?), but it is by no means true that all residents would call themselves "gamers." Honestly, if I'd had to "level up" to do interesting things in SL when I started, I wouldn't have got very far, and I wouldn't be here now. But it's a long established fact that there are some people, probably quite a few, who expect some kind of gamification, "leveling up" and even "goals" for SL, and have a difficult time adapting to SL because it doesn't have those things. I wonder if something like what Minecraft does -- with the option to choose "Survival" or "Creative" mode -- might not be something of a solution? There's a commercial system in SL now, is there not, that requires players to eat, rest, and so forth? A "survival" mode would certainly appeal to some.

That's a really interesting and, I think, excellent point. (And sorry, @Gwin LeShelle, I should have picked up what you were getting at, and not belaboured the obvious!) I am not a programmer, and I don't have any idea how difficult it would be for LL to institute such a change in how it checks the credentials of viewers being used to log in -- do I remember someone saying previously that it wasn't that difficult to "spoof" a viewer? -- but if this is feasible and not too onerous a change, it might be worthwhile. You note, though, that even this might be a temporary victory, as AI and automation software become more sophisticated. That's happening now, at a terrifyingly rapid pace. As I said in my response to Qie above -- there's not ever going to be a "final victory" here.

I suspect you're correct -- but isn't that the way this kind of thing always works? It's a sort of arms race, as each side responds to the latest chess move by the opponent. I suppose a good analogy would be the way that security software engineers "solve" a particular vulnerability, only to discover that hackers have found a new one, or even exploited the "solution." The problem is, making no effort to control bots might indeed prevent some from going rogue and choosing to use unregistered agents instead, but then you're simply doing nothing to stop them anyway. To use another, admittedly extreme, analogy: it's like saying "we can't stop murders from happening, and when we try, the murderers simply become more clever and subtle at hiding their guilt." On that basis, would it make sense to stop pursuing and prosecuting murderers? At least then they wouldn't need to hide it so much, and we'd probably have a better idea of who the murderers were? I have no definitive solution to this, because there is no definitive solution -- no real "end game" that will bring a permanent closure to the problem. It's going to be an ongoing issue, because the "opponent" will always be able to find another move to outflank our latest manoeuvre. And I share the weariness, and wariness, that I detect in your tone. I think this represents a small victory, but a victory notwithstanding.

I think this is a really interesting question -- kudos to Coffee for keeping us on our toes and thinking with these threads! But I can't help thinking that, given the particular way this question is being approached, this is really just another, slightly more sophisticated and impressive sounding call for the gamification of Second Life?

The problem is that there really isn't any easy or foolproof method for detecting unregistered bots. Nothing really distinguishes them from ordinary accounts except their behaviour. I think one could probably produce an algorithm that would detect behaviours consistent with a bot. Say, traveling rapidly to a number of apparently random regions, staying for a very short length of time -- just enough needed to run the scripts that are harvesting data. But monitoring for that kind of behaviour across the grid would be a Herculean task. Age of the bot isn't necessarily a giveaway: there are some bots running around now that are several years old. Nor is an empty profile or a throwaway name, as someone who seriously wanted to hide their bot from detection could easily spoof a real account. I assume, but don't know for a fact, that LL might also have a means of detecting what actual scripts an account runs: that would be the closest thing to "definitive" proof that I can think of. But even that might produce false positives. If you're using some form of scripted radar, for instance, or even the "What Is She Wearing" HUD, you're using LSL functions also often employed by bots. So any attempt to detect unregistered bots by script use would have to be fairly sophisticated to distinguish how the scripts were being used. If LL had a means of identifying unregistered bots, they could simply sweep the grid clean of them. And because they don't, neither do we. On an individual basis, even I can probably determine with a reasonably high (but not definitive) degree of certainty that account Iamnotabot.resident probably is one, based on observation and deduction, but there's really no way to systematically detect them -- and so no means to program a script to boot or ban them. And thank you, I had a lovely day, despite swimming through clouds of smoke from wildfires to the east and north of me! Keeping cool is less a problem at the moment than simply breathing without coughing, but this too will pass! I hope that conditions are a bit more comfortable where you are!

The Saxons could kick some Viking butt on occasion. Especially under this guy. Just ask Guthrum the Viking.

Sure. But all of that can be said about anything related to governance in SL (and a great deal regarding the platform besides). We don't have any way of compelling LL to enforce its own rules: the best we can do is hope that they will. In the meantime, though, LL has explicitly asked that we report unregistered bots. And they have now given us a tool that will help enable that. They've also, at last, made it possible to enforce a ban on bots on mainland parcels. I expect that there will be new security systems, or updates to old ones, that will incorporate this. And that's a good thing, in that it empowers landowners. As for "mixed use" accounts. Well, as the doctor proverbially says to the patient who tells her that it hurts when they "do that": "So, don't do that!"

Um, your response to my mention of a specific way in which it can be used "for good" suggests that, perhaps, you're more correct than you know?

I'd buy a HUD that did this. One of the points that I think @Paul Hexem is missing is that a script that allows one to verify that a bot is a registered scripted agent will also, by a process of elimination, determine in some cases which bots are not registered. And they can be ARed. I've had a bot appearing on my mainland parcel and sitting there for days at a time. I've left her there because I don't know if she's registered or not. If I can determine that she's not -- and she's very obviously a bot -- I'll boot and ban her.

Today in SL I located the dead and emaciated body of a missing colleague. Chief Medical Officer's Log UESS Rocinante 2632.06.27 Gliese 581e Nothing here makes any sense. Gliese 581e shouldn't exist. Not like this. And there's something out there. The recon team, Carpenter and Kumar, is missing. But Carpenter's beacon is still functioning. Heading out to find him. https://secondlife.com/destination/natthimmel

What Luna, said Val: really lovely shot. This is at S&H? Wow. It almost makes me want to go. (I have avoided it two years running now.)

This totally makes sense: in the context of a really busy club, a good host / hostess is probably invaluable. I don't think the good ones get enough credit (or tips). That said, I have another DJ friend who regularly plays to HUGE crowds at places like Warehouse 21. Large enough that I occasionally can't get in. And she somehow manages not just to chatter pretty volubly in local, but also manage a dance HUD with an enormous number of dances on it that she shares with her audience. (She uses an old-fashioned chim.) But I think she puts a huge amount of work into preparing each set in advance, queuing the songs beforehand, and so forth. A lot of her chatter is banter, but she also talks a great deal about the music itself: she's enormously knowledgeable. It IS weird. I don't know of another DJ who does this. In this particular context, however, it "works," and is the expected thing. I think it's a sort of cultural difference that's developed around his own group of followers. It's a very non-hierarchical group. Indeed, a fair amount of the chatter will often be devoted to good-humoured poking and teasing of the DJ. It often feels more like a party in someone's house than a "public event." But he's also VERY finicky about details. He's a musician in RL, and has for decades organized a music festival, and he seems to have developed a kind of "system" for SL. For instance, when doing a set in an unfamiliar environment, he's very picky about the size of the dance floor, because he doesn't want anyone on it to be outside of local chat range.

Thanks! I think my next step -- not an immediate one, but down the road -- may be to make one or more teenage girls. I'll be hitting you up for ideas, definitely!

Thanks Pheeby! I had a lot of really helpful and worthwhile advice -- as you know!

Lol, yes, it is.