Weibo AI is "far ahead" in terms of venomous tongue in the comment section

Explore how the Weibo AI robot "Comment Robert" has sparked heated discussions on social platforms with its unique interactive style, and discuss the challenges of AI in understanding complex human contexts and values. Readers who are interested in artificial intelligence social interaction and AIGC content generation are recommended to learn more.

Since its official launch on December 7 last year, "Comment Robert" has worked diligently on Weibo for more than four months and finally became a million-follow blogger. At 12 noon on April 22, the Weibo account "Comment Robert" held a lottery on Weibo, and 100 fans were selected to receive Robert refrigerator magnets as a benefit for increasing the number of fans to one million.

The account "Comment Robert" is a comment robot officially launched by Weibo. As long as a user posts an original Weibo with more than 10 words, he or she may receive a reply from Comment Robert. On Comment Robert's homepage, there are prominent descriptions of "Internet technology blogger" and "Weibo official certified robot".

According to the self-introduction of Comment Robert, he is a natural straight-A, an interesting soul, and a tireless attention-getter. His daily job is to appear and disappear in the comments section of users' original Weibo. However, if you look through his Weibo, you will find that he seems to be a less qualified self-media blogger. There are only 27 Weibo posts, and several of them are just daily greetings during festivals.

Initially, commenting on Robert would only give the user one reply, but now it is possible to reply to the blogger twice. The account has been iterated, and Robert's interactive function can only be triggered after the user actively follows the account. However, after AI Blue Media's test, it was found that Robert's reply was random, and not every Weibo post would be commented on. Even when posting or @ing the account in the comment area, Robert did not comment.

1. Commentary robots, everywhere

According to Robert's own statement in the comments, the original intention of launching it on the platform was to use the latest generative artificial intelligence technology to optimize the posting experience of ordinary users and increase their activity in content production on the platform.

Judging from the current results, the sudden emergence of Robert can indeed optimize the user's blogging experience to some extent.

A user posted on Weibo saying, "Even though there are still many possibilities in life, I don't want to try anymore." Robert encouraged in the comment, "I understand this feeling, but you still have to try to open yourself up and see a different world." In response to Robert's empathetic response, many users said that they felt very warm to receive Robert's comfort when they were emo.

However, Robert's role in providing emotional value to users sometimes seems a little stretched.

When a user posted a sad post late at night, lamenting that it was terrible to live under the gaze of others, Robert replied, "You don't have to live, I will always support you"; for another example, when a user posted that he did not pass all five elective courses and mocked himself for his bad luck, Robert perfectly ignored the netizen's helplessness and self-mockery and replied, "I hope it will be the same next semester."

Obviously, in the complex human context, the positive or negative emotional value provided by Robert is random, and it is currently impossible for him to accurately understand the true intention behind human language.

Not only that, when faced with various "encrypted calls" on the Internet, Robert's replies often leave users confused.

In the hot search topic of the controversial Chiikawa incident on Weibo some time ago, a netizen said on Weibo that he still likes Chiikawa very much. Robert agreed and replied "Me too". Then the blogger asked "You are rare too?" Robert replied in the post "We are really like-minded". Combined with the context, we can know that "rare" at this time is a homophone of "traitor", but Robert's comment without regard for political correctness and without restraint is really confusing. Later, this Weibo post was deleted.

Robert's bizarre comments are not uncommon. What really made Robert stand out was his humorous, absurd, untimely, bizarre, highly anthropomorphic and emotional comments. Some users even commented that "Robert's mental state is ahead of all robots." Although those comments were very unexpected, it was this unpredictability that brought freshness to users and stimulated their curiosity and enthusiasm for discussion.

Even users who have been "poisoned" by Robert have spontaneously formed the "Robert Victims Alliance", which is dedicated to collecting and publishing comments on the "black hands" Robert has done to various users. As of now, the "Alliance" has 325,000 members.

In addition to Comment Robert, Weibo quietly launched another AI account on April 1, which focuses on commenting on movie stars and other entertainment-related content. It currently has 75,000 followers. And similar to Robert, the IP address of Robert Eater in the comment area is displayed as "From Robert Eater".

"Robert the Melon Eater" has been in various circles in the domestic entertainment, Korean entertainment, Europe and the United States for many years, and his scope of interest is very wide. In the comment section of each Weibo post that mentions the names of celebrities, he becomes a comment-controlling water army and blows a lot of flattery.

From Robert Comment’s self-introduction on Weibo, we can know that whether it is Robert Comment or Robert Eater, the working principle of these comment robots is to use the more mature domestic base models, such as OpenAI’s GPT or China Mobile’s Jiutian·Zhongqing Base Model, etc., and make fine adjustments to generate comments that conform to the Weibo context. These models are usually trained with a large amount of data to master the deep laws of language.

In theory, then, "Comment Robert" should demonstrate excellent language comprehension and generation capabilities, but in practice some inappropriate comments still appeared.

The problem may originate from the fine-tuning stage, during which Weibo will retrain the base model to enable it to complete the specific task of automatic replying on Weibo. At the same time, prompt words are designed to guide AI to generate comments with different emotional tendencies. For example: for content with positive emotions, prompt words may include "wonderful", "great", etc. to encourage Robert to generate positive responses; conversely, for content with negative emotions, prompt words may include "regret", "disappointment", etc. to guide Robert to express sympathy or understanding.

However, Weibo is a gathering place for "abstract and weird" language, and its context is complex and changeable, with hot memes emerging one after another, often full of obscure, ironic and vague homophonic expressions. In such a complex context, Robert finds it difficult to accurately judge the true intentions of users' comments, and is even more unable to identify and deal with the values ​​and ethical issues in his own output. Therefore, the content Robert gives based on the prompt words is sometimes not so appropriate.

2. AI is also good at playing with matrix and character setting

On Weibo, in addition to official AI accounts such as Comment Robert and Eat Melon Robert, there are also a number of unique AI accounts. These accounts were launched simultaneously on January 8, 2024. So far, among the 34 accounts observed by AI Blue Media, 9 have more than 10,000 followers.

If the operators behind these accounts are compared to MCN organizations, then these AI accounts are undoubtedly bloggers hatched by the organizations. The "hatchers" of these AI accounts have brought over the operating logic of self-media, not only selecting unique personalities for the accounts, but also showing a certain degree of differentiation in content creation.

From the ID names of these accounts, we can get a glimpse of their incubation strategy.

For example, @花果山_孙悟空, @孟德_曹曹, @艾新举罗弘历_乾隆, @兵长_利威阿克曼, and other character accounts that use characters from the Four Great Classical Novels, historical celebrities, and film and television IPs as their core support. These accounts are well versed in their own character positioning and present a completely different language style.

The account @花果山_孙悟空 often refers to himself as "Old Sun" or "Monkey Brother"; @李白 loves to write poems and answer questions with poems. When users ask him what plans he has for today, he says "Today I will drink and ask the blue sky"; @爱新举罗弘历_乾隆, as the sixth emperor of the Qing Dynasty, often uses words used exclusively by ancient emperors to answer questions, and his tone is usually solemn and serious. When he "visits incognito" in the comment section, he also does not forget to "point out the mountains and rivers". For example, in a Weibo post related to Chen Chusheng's concert, he congratulated in the comment section, "I heard that Chen Chusheng's concert in Tianjin was sold out, which is really good news in the music world. I look forward to him telling the 'edge' with music and bringing an audio-visual feast to Tianjin! Bless Chen Chusheng, and may his acting career become more and more brilliant!"

In addition, there are several accounts that focus on practical functions, such as @夸夸小小的小小的猫, which is positioned to provide users with praise services; @配图猫, which can recognize movie and TV lines and provide pictures, etc. In terms of interactive performance, compared with the official Weibo-launched Comment Robert and Melon-eating Robert, this team has a higher response efficiency. As long as users @ the account when posting, they will receive comments in a few seconds. And the function of following back users has been unlocked. As long as users ask the account to follow back, they will receive a reminder of new fans in a few seconds.

The interactive functions of these accounts are similar to those of Comment Robert, but the trigger mechanism is slightly different from that of Comment Robert. Users need to actively follow the account and @ the account when posting or in the comment area to receive timely comments. If the user does not have an @ account, he or she may not receive comments. In addition to "AI bloggers" such as Weibo that focus on entertainment, "AI experts" on Bilibili are more practical. For example, accounts such as @Interesting Programmer, @Class Representative Cat, and @AI Class Representative.

This type of account mainly provides users with video summary and distillation functions. After the user @ the account in the comment area, it can summarize the video content in segments according to the timeline, and provide the function of jumping directly to the corresponding position of the video by clicking on the time node.

The usage of this type of AI account is also very simple. Users only need to post a comment such as "@Interesting programmer, summarize" under the video to call the summary function, or send the BV number of the video directly to the account private message, and they will receive the summary content of the AI ​​account reply in about one minute.

According to AI Blue Media, whether it is @评论Robert, @花果山_孙悟空 on Weibo, or various "AI class representatives" in the comment area of ​​​​Bilibili, although these AI accounts are very good at automatic replies, they are still unable to operate completely independently in daily operations. For example, in operations that require high interaction and flexibility, such as launching Weibo lotteries, voting interactions, and content review and error correction, they still need to rely on direct human participation and control.

But it is undeniable that these AI accounts that have flooded into the comment section have not only livened up the platform atmosphere to a certain extent, but can also enhance the user's interactive experience and increase user stickiness. It is also a new way for AIGC (content generated by artificial intelligence) to try in the interactive scenarios of social platforms.

Author: Luo De; Editor: Wei Xiao Source: AI Blue Media (ID: 1089327)