- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.ml
documentingourdecline.substack.com
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.ml
An investigation into the AI bots that appeared on Reddit after they partnered with OpenAI.
Key points:
- The bots post a lot of links to products and services which appear to be adverts but are not marked as such.
- Many of these links are for Sam Altman’s World ID.
- Reddit added terms on AI advertising to their business page around the time the bots appeared.
- The bots also make up stories about dead mothers, depression, drug addiction, eating disorders, medical conditions and mental health issues.
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This post makes some really, really compelling points for AI bots being brought intentionally onto Reddit. All the coincidental features like being able to hide your post history. Seems like a terrible idea for long-term profits even. After all, if you’ve helping third-party bot spammers to hide their behavior too, how are you going to keep selling your content to OpenAI? They’re like a zombie, they need real people to feed off.
And I don’t think this article even touches on a separate mistake: letting people monetize their content. This is a goldmine for people who want to create emotionally manipulative content: sympathy bait, ragebait, whatever works, no matter how underhanded.
ETA: if people haven’t read this post yet, the section you mention here
Reddit added terms on AI advertising to their business page around the time the bots appeared.
has some of the most suspicious stuff tied to it. In other words, this was a great read.
It makes a lot of sense that they would.
Especially since I believe other major social media companies (Facebook; the service formerly known as Twitter) don’t care at all about bots and seem to want to use them as valid replacements for swathes of users or content generators.
I suspect there is a strong likelihood that this is what has happened. At the very least Reddit clearly is not doing enough to combat them given how easily I was able to find so many bots.
I was trying to investigate it further as I had found some older banned accounts which were doing something similar and which I could provably connect to a marketing firm. So they are another potential suspect for the newer bots however in the midst of trying to browse accounts and connect the dots Reddit went and patched the workaround I was using to search the hidden posts.
Now when these bots hide their post history there is no way of finding it on Reddit and it really wouldn’t be obvious to casual users that they are bots so this form of marketing could be extremely effective and very predatory. If they aren’t behind the bots they sure do seem to be making a lot of changes which actively empower them.
Before they patched it I saved a lot of bot posts containing links for a few smaller companies which had previously tried to promote their business on Reddit themselves. So I suspect those companies have signed up for an advertising package but it’s just a question of whether that package is with Reddit themselves or with another company. If I can get enough attention on this I might try contacting them to ask.
Yep. Hiding post history pretty much makes Reddit useless as anything but a propaganda / astroturfing tool targeting idiots. It used to be pretty easy to identify shills and bots, and the only thing they achieved here is making it hardier to do that. Clearly that was the intent.
I go there for specific sports subs and my city sub, and I sometimes check the home page just to see what’s going on. There are a lot of posts that look innocent, then usually someone will comment “If <company> was smart, they would use this to market their product”, then the next reply is always “they just did” or “look again”. At least some people notice, but that’s not stopping those posts from reaching the front page and getting a ton of engagement.
Examples:
- A video of a UPS driver properly relocating packages left haphazardly (and tossed carelessly) by the Fedex driver and USPS driver who coincidentally delivered packages earlier on the same day.
- Video of the burger king CEO actually taking a huge bite of his burger. It was made to look like the video was taken randomly, and the post title didn’t have any indication that it was made to ride the wave with the trending mcdonald’s CEO. And there were tons of comments suspiciously talking about BK’s burgers being better anyway, etc.
- Feel good and made-me-smile videos that suspiciously have branding prominently displayed on an item in the video and comments that talk about the product.
I left Reddit after it became clear that every other post on every cute animal subreddit was a dead pet sympathy karma farm bot post. That and the relationship-panic gossip trash.
There’s nothing genuine left there.
People on reddit always make the assumption that bots are all going to be angry divisive posts or posts advertising products but this is by far the most common form of reddit bot I see: the kind that just posts a bunch of one sentence generic positivity comments for easy upvotes where every post has the exact same grammatical format. My favorite is when like four of them post in the same thread with barely reworded versions of the same comment. I’ve gotten a good read on them at this point and I notice them constantly.
Yeah, the general-purpose or “default” subs were always terrible. I haven’t completely left reddit yet because of some very specific communities that don’t have, and probably never will have, a fediverse equivalent, and they don’t seem to be too much of a target for AI bots, but I am starting to notice how social media influencers are affecting the population as a whole. But maybe that’s just the cloud I’m shaking a fist at.
Browsing the relationship subs on reddit will affect your mental health. Disfunctional people writing hate fanfics of fake versions of themselves.
wat
The bots also make up stories about dead mothers, depression, drug addiction, eating disorders, medical conditions and mental health issues.
I was under the impression that most of the content submitted to Reddit was made up though.
True, but it used to be made up by people looking for an ego boost. Now there’s an additional monetary incentive behind it. Look no further than Twitter for an example of that.
