You can't do anything else anyway.

Yes, this is my fundamental point. The Fediverse doesn't have tools for Fediverse-wide censorship, nor should it.

That stops bots for a particular instance, assuming they guessed right about which accounts were bots. It doesn't stop bots on the Fediverse.

This is just regular moderation, though. This is how the Fediverse already works. And it doesn't resolve the question I raised about what happens when two instances disagree about whether an account is a bot.

10 hours ago over in lemmyshitpost@lemmy.world you saw a picture that you rather liked but that was getting a lot of downvotes and you didn't know why. You were told by @breadleyloafsyou@lemmy.zip that "lemmy doesn’t like AI"

Also 10 hours ago over in nostupidquestions@lemmy.world you said "I know its an unpopular opinion, but I don't agree with punching Nazis. It makes them look like a victim, and violence never works." You got a bunch of downvotes for that yourself.

Just a couple of examples of situations where an opinion that was against the consensus view of the community got "punished."

Technically, yeah. Some instances are run by tin-pot dictators with delusions of godhood, but if you get banned from one of those just switch to another one.

The communities tend to be bubblier, though, since they're small. So if your opinions don't match you'll get shouted down harder.

A major problem faced by first-mover companies like OpenAI is that they spend an enormous amount of money on basic research and initial marketing and hardware purchases to set up in the first place. Those expenses become debts and have to be paid off by the business later. If they were to go bankrupt and sell off ChatGPT to some other company for pennies on the dollar that new owner would be in a much better position to be profitable.

There is clearly an enormous demand for AI services, despite all the "nobody wants this" griping you may hear in social media bubbles. That dermand's not going to disappear and the AIs themselves won't disappear. It's just a matter of finding the right price to balance things out.

How else would this "trusted" status be applied without some kind of central authority or authentication? If one instance declares "this guy's a bot" and another one says "nah, he's fine" how is that resolved? If there's no global resolution then there isn't any difference between this and the existing methods of banning accounts.

If this is something that individual instances can opt out of then it doesn't solve the "bot problem."

Boom, centralized control of the Fediverse established.

Non-spineless snails exist, checkmate.

I just wish it wasn't via such a monstrously painful mechanism.

Whenever I've done nothing wrong, I like to make that clear by going down to the courthouse and threatening judges not to charge me with anything.