If you know some tells if AI speech, then it, to me, becomes a little bit of a coin flip on who’s real and who isn’t. Some of my favorite tells are grammar that is just way too perfect or using words/phrases you would never hear someone talk about ( for example with Claude: “furrowed brows” or “brows furrowed” seems to be used any and almost all times anything related to a task you concentrate on comes up ).

As for how to tell for other instances, absolutely no clue. It’s a toss-up as to whether another instance will allow bots and if so, will the instance you’re on defederate with said instance? Also, what happens if we somehow end up in a future where AI is somehow miraculously able to mimic humans to a degree where not even the smart folk can tell the difference? These questions need solutions that we clearly don’t have yet, at least for federated services.

This type of stuff is a problem for any public instance anybody can federate with. I’m just glad that if I set up a private Mastodon instance for certain people at the college I attend that I can hopefully blacklist all instances from connecting and require PII like a valid college ID/some form of voucher from an active member to be able to sign up. Ironic considering it’s the fediverse, but whatever. Gotta do what you gotta do to reduce the risk of bots interacting with your instance if you don’t want them.