In the interest of provoking discussion: why?
If a bot can meaningfully pass and act as a productive member of the community, what does it matter?
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Because some of us go to sites like 4chan in order to learn what people really think. We want to see how they react and what they say when they are protected from consequences by the anonymous nature of the forum. We want the full spectrum of humanity, good and bad.
The opinions of bots are not just irrelevant, they are a form of consensus creation attack. They make it seem like a lot of people have an opinion when the reality might be the opposite. We are not interested in the made up realities that people pay bot operators to create. We want the truth, and the truth comes from real humans expressing their real unfiltered thoughts.
It's nice to want things. The people paying expensive programmers for bot armies to parrot their thoughts are currently paying cheaper humans sitting at a bank of beheaded cellphones to parrot amplify their thoughts instead. You're being lied to, regardless, the only difference is if it's a shell script to do the lying or a paycheck to a human to do the lying.
Who's driving phone farm?
https://www.some3c.com/blogs/news/unified-control-20-pcs-pho...
I'm aware of the risk. I try to mitigate it by also browsing smaller sites which are hopefully too small to be targeted by people with vested interests. And I know I'm being lied to. That's why I want to see every lie, every extreme. I'm especially interested in witnessing them try to debunk each other's lies. In the chaos, a synthesis is bound to emerge.
Because in the end it's up to us. We're the ones who have to draw the conclusions. At some point we're gonna have to decide whether some idea is right or wrong. This is much harder compared to just blindly taking a side at face value and just believing them and repeating what they say. I suppose it's possible that most people would prefer to be told what to think and what to say. I for one can't live like that. Things gotta make sense before I'll believe in them.
It's important to witness every possible argument and to see every single one of them viciously attacked on the proverbial ideological battleground. Then you can figure out which points remain convincing. Declaring oneself right, unwillingness to engage in debate, attempts to suppress opposing viewpoints, emotional appeals, these are all signs of authoritarianism. This is reason enough to cast everything they say into doubt. Good ideas don't need to be forced in this manner in order to convince.
Because I'm interested in what people have to say, not what machines have to say.