I am saying we should be crowd sourcing our collective anger and ADHD or Autism or whatever (…) and instead focus on collection of the worst bot infestations.

That’s what “being a moderator” is, mate. You want hundreds of thousands of moderators.

There are patterns. Bots are not random enough that they can’t be identified with large crowd sourced efforts

You’re wrong.

It becomes obvious there is a script only when you collect the data and begin to analyze it.

You just said:

I am not saying we need to build our own bot detection

So, which is it?

It becomes obvious there is a script only when you collect the data and begin to analyze it.

There’s a massive difference between local news stations receiving a script to read out, and a bot farm having a “be negative, unfriendly, sow chaos” instruction.

At the start it won’t be accurate

So, it just won’t work? Got it.

But as more data is collected it’ll become obvious

I don’t think you undersand what you’re talking about. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not trying to be contrarian here, I just honestly think that your idea of “AI bots” is kind of like “we have prepared one million sentences, and now our bots will be picking between them to generate whole posts on social networks”.

I mean, sure, there can be patterns - like the whole “LinkedIn post” style, where most of the time it’s fairly obvious that you’re reading an AI-generated slop… But that’s not what state-entities or even just hackers use. They have access to much more sophisticated content.

If the bots were that good, these websites would have left their APIs open.

Reddit’s API is no longer open. Didn’t do a thing to stop bots.

But they closed them so we can’t collect this data

You don’t need however many API keys to collect that kind of data. At least not from Reddit.

Our inaction to do anything when the greatest opportunities are right in front of us but slipping away is a tragedy of this generation.

Your proposed action is the equivalent of Sisyphus and his stone. Because you really seem to be forgetting that the AI tech is getting better all the time. And that any AI-detection actions you take feed that process. “Oh, they’ve detected these posts? OK, let’s tweak the algo until we get through and then flood them with our content”.

Let’s even assume that you somehow pull it off and get a 100% detection rate as of right now. Six months down the line that will go down to 20%. Etc. etc. And you’ll be catching thousands of legitimate users in the crossfire.

An anonymous “proof of humanity” token solves all AI issues without anyone having to spend billions on research and manpower.