What is everyone's opinions on bots and their ease of access?

#1

So I was doing a few experiments with bots and open-GPT-3 ^w^.
I had my main and some alts RP under supervision from myself and the results sort of shocked me.

The results:
Most of the people the bot roleplayed with didn’t know they were roleplaying with a bot.
This concerned me, Should there be a clear distinction between bot and player?

Also:
The ease of access for making bots is not amazing, but with the current rate of progress in them it shouldn’t be too hard in about a year.
Should bots be easily accessible to everyone? Yes! Should they be so player like? That’s what I am asking your opinions on ^w^

#2

If you’re looking to make any bot, they need to be clearly identifiable so people can knowingly interact or avoid it.

As it stands, I’ve already heard at least a dozen people over the last year disconcerted about the idea of unmarked bots or bots trained by monitoring populated rooms in order to get material to feed it without permission.

Another thing to consider before going into this further:
If the bot ends up violating the conduct/behavior rules in some way and gets reported, the creator obvious will be responsible for any violations which end up occurring as a result of the bot’s actions. (So, best to be doubly sure they are clearly marked so the staff can take that into consideration.)

A custom tag for BOT with any useful info and a BOT section in about would probably be the safest route to move forward if you’re going to.

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#3

Of a far greater concern is introducing these bots to the game without informing neither the moderators, or the users your bot(s) interacted with. This is not the place for social experiments or tinkering with such things. As far as I can see, you did not collect any consent from either the realm owner, the moderators, or the users.

I strongly suggest you remove any remaining active bots that aren’t clearly marked as such, and desist from running such ‘experiments’ in the future. The fact that you can easily do something does not mean you should just go ahead and do so.

The Bot tag is the identifying tag meant for use by bot accounts. The intent is for them to be accessible by any user. However, continued abuse of the open policy may lead to requiring authorization before being allowed to run a bot on the game.

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#4

Just to add my own cents in this :slight_smile:
While the game doesn’t have it yet, I will eventually add “bot tokens”.

A bot token is (or will be) a string that you can use as credentials for bots to connect to the API. The token would be tied to the bot character, and would mark the character with a clear bot tag. Bots would also get slightly different API restrictions more suitable for bots.

So, while I do think creating bots are fully okay already, anyone creating bots MUST clearly mark them as such. We don’t want people thinking they are interacting with players when they are not.
And as the privacy policy states, you are not allowed to:

create or use bots accessing the Service for any other purpose than improving game play;

Meaning; you may not create bots for pure monitoring and recording. It must serve a purpose that directly or indirectly improves game play for those visiting the game or interacting with the bot.

And I can also suggest using the test.mucklet.com server when trying out bot code. This way you don’t have to interfere with others.

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#5

Don’t worry, the bots have been gone for well over a month now and were only up for a day.

I completely agree with the fact that I should have asked and probably should have thought to have done so >w< but I won’t be doing anything like this in the upcoming future for more reasons than I can count on my hand.

Thanks for your reply @maximus

#6

Thanks a tonne accipiter, this looks like an amazing solution. For the “bot tokens” this sounds like another great solution to a way to access bots.

Addressing

The bots I made didn’t hinder from GamePlay and didn’t collect data for more than 30 responses (that was the minimum to allow it to work). After it has been closed the data is non-exsistent and the characters deleted with the logs on them (except Ico)

Will do from now on ^w^

Could I ask what restrictions those are?

#7

Don’t worry about the “improve game play” clause. Trying out stuff is completely fine! I just don’t want people recording events for selfish purpose without other player’s consent.

I mean, I could totally see someone creating a voyuer room where a camera bot will record anything going on in the room, allowing other characters to play back the events ((read the logs)) from some other place. As long as the purpose of such a bot is clear, I see no issues :grin:

I haven’t defined them yet, but it will things like:

  • No access for non-character commands such as create new characters, edit player settings, list owned characters, etc. This is for security reasons if you run someone else’s bot-code.
  • Lower cost for operational commands such as go (use exit), create exit/room/area, edit exit/room/area, to allow the bot to perform such commands in a more rapid pace compared to ordinary players.
  • Same cost for room communication commands such as say, describe, whisper, ooc.
  • Possibly higher cost for global communication commands such as mail and message, to mitigate the impact of possible spam bots.
Th3 B1rd
#8

This seems like an awesome addition to the site, I can’t wait to see it and start work on a python library for it.

Thanks for everything.

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