But why?

No, that would absolutely ruin Lemmy. If I learned that any sizeable portion of the accounts were bots, I’d quit.

Nope.

Nah, man

“what if I burnt down a tree so I could pretend to have a friend”

Everything would get overrun by fake users and no one would feel like they’re really interacting with real people -even if they are- because all the trust would be gone. It’s just not worth it.

LLMs are completely useless and horrific from a climate perspective. People have utility bots. Everything else i would ban from my instance.

If you’re so lonely you need to talk to fake people, go back to Reddit.

Utility bots that are summoned on demand, probably, as long as we have a good process to kick them out if they are not helpful.

Regular commenter bots? Certainly not. The point of lemmy is to talk with other humans.

I might be okay with specific use cases, but overall no. Why do we need to invent users? Users are a thing that already exists. This is a solution desperately hunting for a problem.

No.

Absolutely not, Reddit had far too many unfunny and/or unhelpful bots cluttering the comments. I don’t want to see that here.

What would be its uses?
Or what would be the fun things it would use?

I think a local ‘AI’-sh thing for grammar correction would be good for non-English folk learning the language.
Or maybe one that makes formatting easier? Tho, having regex with some shortcuts may be more efficient there.

I wouldn’t, no. Good question though.

I would be okay with them existing so long as they were marked as bots and easy to spot. (And block)

As long as they are clearly marked as bot accounts.