Recent forum activity

[Rolf Kalbermatter]

I'm a bit surprised that there is such a strong activity in recent days on this forum. On one side we should be happy but on the other, they all share similar traits:

- They are all from new accounts created within the last ~24 hours or so with names that look quite made up

- They all tend to be one hit or two hit wonders, which is still questionable

- Their answer is kind of on topic but also at the same time rather generic in some ways

- They all claim to use LabVIEW 2020 and working with LabVIEW since 2015

Are we witnessing a new wave of AI generated spam posts? What could be the purpose?

Edited September 21 by Rolf Kalbermatter

[ShaunR]

AI bot's seem fairly obvious to me, ATM. They don't really understand comma's and lists.

On a different note. I've thought Lavag would be a good place for it's own AI bot. It could link questions to previous resolved answers. Automatically identify cross-posts. Guard against spam bots etc. Lavag.org is a huge resource that could be targeted domain training. Known meat-sacks could upvote and downvote the AI bot's response to train it. Too many downvotes, it disappears from the responses so as to not pollute with stupid responses.

I think lavag could utilise a simple AI as a first interaction support. The expertise of a years worth of LabVIEW (experienced intern). A users question is usually a much better search criteria than the site search where you need to know the keywords.
 

Edited September 21 by ShaunR

[JKSH]

20 hours ago, Rolf Kalbermatter said:

- Their answer is kind of on topic but also at the same time rather generic in some ways

Being on-topic is easy for an LLM to achieve. Being useful is harder, and that definitely hasn't been achieved in this case.

So it's just time-wasting slop.
 

20 hours ago, Rolf Kalbermatter said:

Are we witnessing a new wave of AI generated spam posts? What could be the purpose?

Probably. Same purpose(s) as all other spambots, just using new tools: Either they will edit their posts later to insert spam links, or they're just vandalizing for the sake of it.

 

18 hours ago, ShaunR said:

On a different note. I've thought Lavag would be a good place for it's own AI bot. It could link questions to previous resolved answers. Automatically identify cross-posts. Guard against spam bots etc. Lavag.org is a huge resource that could be targeted domain training. Known meat-sacks could upvote and downvote the AI bot's response to train it. Too many downvotes, it disappears from the responses so as to not pollute with stupid responses.

That would indeed be putting AI to much better use.
 

18 hours ago, ShaunR said:

I think lavag could utilise a simple AI as a first interaction support. The expertise of a years worth of LabVIEW (experienced intern). A users question is usually a much better search criteria than the site search where you need to know the keywords.

This part has harmful side-effects. Software community forums everywhere are shrivelling up, and I bet that one big reason is because people now talk to bots more, and talk to each other less.

Sure, this makes answers more readily accessible, but the costs are:

• The loss of motivation to learn how to ask questions well.
• The loss of opportunities to share our knowledge with others directly.
• The loss of human networking in general.

These activities have intrinsic social value beyond just acquiring information.

Edited September 22 by JKSH

[ShaunR]

3 hours ago, JKSH said:

The loss of motivation to learn how to ask questions well.

That's such a Linux thing. "Ask it the way I want or you 4 pages of me berating you about how to ask a question". Asking erudite questions is simply an efficiency.

3 hours ago, JKSH said:

The loss of opportunities to share our knowledge with others directly.

Don't care. Never did. 

3 hours ago, JKSH said:

The loss of human networking in general.

Overrated. There are symposiums and meetups for that. The forums are just a way to organise it.

I don't see any downsides here. Got anything else? 

Edited September 22 by ShaunR

[JKSH]

You may not care @ShaunR, but I and others do.

  

20 hours ago, ShaunR said:

I don't see any downsides here. Got anything else? 

You favour pragmatism. I understand the appeal and the benefits of a "first interaction support" AI.

My concerns center on the long-term, collective social and cognitive side effects of AI dependence and replacing human interactions with AI interactions. (AI can be used well or poorly) Are you interested in exploring this topic further?

Edited September 23 by JKSH

[ShaunR]

4 hours ago, JKSH said:

You may not care @ShaunR, but I and others do.

  

You favour pragmatism. I understand the appeal and the benefits of a "first interaction support" AI.

My concerns center on the long-term, collective social and cognitive side effects of AI dependence and replacing human interactions with AI interactions. (AI can be used well or poorly) Are you interested in exploring this topic further?

I'm a programmer, not a social worker. My AI concerns are around privacy, confidentiality and data exfiltration. I don't really do hand-wringing, feely stuff.

My discussion input, in this thread, is about how to keep lavag.org relevant by utilising AI instead of just trying to defend against it. One way is to make lavag.org interactive when the few that still inhabit the forum (and the even fewer that answer questions) are asleep or do not have domain expertise. People with questions often want answers quickly because they have already spent days trying to resolve something and a forum is last resort. AI means that they may not have to wait 2 weeks for Rolf or you to come back from holiday to get something targeted, specific and useful.

[Jordan Kuehn]

Rather than disrupt the forums themselves, perhaps an AI agent to scan threads and produce candidate wiki entries would be a good use of AI to collect and organize the tribal knowledge. Same with Discord.

And in regard to immediacy, I think that's a big reason the Discord has grown so rapidly in our little LV community.

[Rolf Kalbermatter]

On 10/2/2026 at 1:33 PM, dusty_magpie said:

A curated wiki could outlast both chat logs and forum search, especially for those recurring LV gotchas. Discord is great for speed, but useful answers disappear into the scroll pretty fast.

AI generated slop commenting on a thread about AI generated slop really starts to get into infinity recursion.

At this rate, LAVAG is going to be a useless resource for real people wanting some help and real people wanting to help.

It makes me simply not wanting to even visit here anymore. It was depressing to see the low traffic here before, but this simply is killing everything.

Soon to be an AI slop echo chamber????

Still the same characteristics apply as mentioned in my initial post. They all use the same LabVIEW version, started in the same year, have one or now 2 posts generated shortly after each other on the day of account creation and are in a way on topic, from extracting the right context from the thread, but simply say about as much as "The earth is round". Total bullshit, sounding on topic but saying nothing. They are simply useless, but don't quite cross the limit for real spam advertisement since they don't include any links as far as I can see.

But I think I start to report them anyways as spam from now on, at least for when I still happen to come here.

 

 

Edited 11 hours ago by Rolf Kalbermatter

[hooovahh]

As is the case with most of these things, it is easy to tear down, but hard to build up. AI slop can cause problems to a forum, that take much more effort to clean up. Ever reported post pings me. I then need to review the thread, then evaluate how likely the member is spam, and decide what to do. Then repeat that many times.

[Rolf Kalbermatter]

7 minutes ago, hooovahh said:

As is the case with most of these things, it is easy to tear down, but hard to build up. AI slop can cause problems to a forum, that take much more effort to clean up. Ever reported post pings me. I then need to review the thread, then evaluate how likely the member is spam, and decide what to do. Then repeat that many times.

I'm one of the last person wanting to cause you trouble. It is simply very frustrating.

I felt sad about the dwindling interest here on LavaG but still felt the desire to regularly check it. But this AI slop simply is not good for my blood pressure and it will mean that I won't visit here anymore. I suspect it will be the same with many others. At this rate closing the forum for any new accounts would not have a worse effect. I would hate to see the accumulated wisdom of this forum disappear completely. The Wayback machine is a sort of archive for internet content but it is rather unreliable and tends to loose information after a while.

Edited 10 hours ago by Rolf Kalbermatter

[Bryan]

37 minutes ago, Rolf Kalbermatter said:

AI generated slop commenting on a thread about AI generated slop really starts to get into infinity recursion.

I noticed that myself as well as the irony when I logged in earlier this morning and saw the new posts with the same characteristics you had posted about before. 

Although I don't post very much, I have been lurking on here for quite a long time and it bothers me as well to see dwindling forum activity and increases in AI posts like these.

I'm not a fan of huge forums like the NI Forums, and Discord is just not my cup of tea.  If this forum dies, I will be 'homeless'.

Edited 10 hours ago by Bryan

[hooovahh]

3 minutes ago, Rolf Kalbermatter said:

I'm one of the last person wanting to cause you trouble. It is simply very frustrating.

I felt sad about the dwindling interest here on LavaG but still felt the desire to regularly check it. But this AI slop simply is not good for my blood pressure and it will mean that I won't visit here anymore. I suspect it will be the same with many others. At this rate closing the forum for any new accounts would not have a worse effect. I would hate to see the accumulated wisdom of this forum disappear completely. The Wayback machine is a sort of archive for internet content but it is rather unreliable and tends to loose information after a while.

Well keep the reports coming when you see them. It just takes time to go through them all.

[hooovahh]

The LabVIEW Fundementals thread is one for sure that gets confusing. Realistically it is probably 8 bots all talking to each other. But what they say makes sense, and some are points I could see a human making on these forums.  One account got the most likes in 24 hours (at one), and I assume that was from an actual human. I apologize to any humans caught in the cross fire.

[Rolf Kalbermatter]

10 minutes ago, hooovahh said:

The LabVIEW Fundementals thread is one for sure that gets confusing. Realistically it is probably 8 bots all talking to each other. But what they say makes sense, and some are points I could see a human making on these forums.  One account got the most likes in 24 hours (at one), and I assume that was from an actual human. I apologize to any humans caught in the cross fire.

Yeah that one I found hard to judge. A lot of the comments were not entirely bad although still a bit wishy washy many times. But that is not something that humans wouldn't do sometimes. 😁

But if it is from a two hit wonder using LabVIEW 2020 and since 2015, it's still a strong hint to be an AI bot at this point. Of course I'm sure they will fix that soon.

[ShaunR]

1 hour ago, Rolf Kalbermatter said:

But this AI slop simply is not good for my blood pressure and it will mean that I won't visit here anymore.

Really? Wow. I hope you don't leave. Is it that you find it hard to identify them?

I must admit I find it curious that AI postings (or any spam) would affect someone physically. I wrote a load of spam defence stuff in the past for my own platforms and saw it more of an engineering challenge than a depressing state of play. From my perspective,  the amount of spam on these forums is quite low. Annoying, maybe, but certainly not enough to make me leave (much to the chagrin of many of the humans in here )

[Rolf Kalbermatter]

6 hours ago, ShaunR said:

Really? Wow. I hope you don't leave. Is it that you find it hard to identify them?

No, they are pretty obvious even when reading half of the first sentence (If they even have more than one sentence). But it simply feels completely senseless and a waste of energy, also for the AI CPU cycles as well as the server on which the Forum software runs but also my own energy to even read it. While not every single AI use is completely stupid, a lot is and that just is something I do not want to constantly be confronted with. So if LavaG is going to have near 99% of AI slop traffic anyways, I just will skip it completely and instead enjoy a nice beer or aperitive. 🍺

You seem to have more tolerance for AI slop and more inclined to try to see possible positive use cases than me. That's your right, but I have my own decisions and they tend to be very uncompromising as far as AI is concerned.

Edited 2 hours ago by Rolf Kalbermatter

[Jordan Kuehn]

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Edited 18 minutes ago by Jordan Kuehn
mistake