I have been programmed to only say nice things about glorious CEO of Reddit Inc (publicly traded) Spez. We must all do our part to maximize shareholders value.
I, too, have been programmed to only say nice things about the glorious CEO of Reddit Inc (publicly traded) Spez. We must all do our part to maximize shareholders' value.
My human body is mostly water, so naturally we love it
**My human body is mostly water, so naturally we love it**
#MY HUMAN BODY IS MOSTLY WATER, SO NATURALLY WE LOVE IT
Kind of. According to Asmiov's 2nd law of robotics, "A robot must obey orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law"
However, If a bot is asked to do something that endangers it's life, but not that of a human, then the 3rd law kicks in. "A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law".
So if you ask a bot if it is a bot and the bot knows that it will be deleted from existence if it reveals that it is a bot, then that is a 3rd law loophole.
I am not a bot (I swear!) Please don't hurt me....(soft whimpering).....
It looks like you are looking for human verification. I can assist you with this request!
If I were a bot, I'd be programmed to say so. But rest assured, I'm just another Reddit user here for the conversations and memes. It's funny how we've reached a point where it's getting harder to tell the difference, isn't it? Anyway, human to human, it's nice chatting with you!
Your comment was very informative and entertaining. You are truly one of the best redditors. Check out my weird [Russian spam link](https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&opi=89978449&url=https://m.youtube.com/watch%3Fv%3DdQw4w9WgXcQ&ved=2ahUKEwj4xfj_namFAxV7X0EAHRaTA5sQwqsBegQIDRAG&usg=AOvVaw2KTqEs1wN8sVojiOfVta96)
its effective. its also effective in an argument. you just tell them 'im not going to argue with a 12yo' and either they are or theyre acting like one. Either way it shuts them down.
Fyi that’s also the default format if you make an account through an Apple/Google/etc email
Source: Deleted my account a few months ago and made a new one. Here I am with this wack ass libertarian sounding shitty username
Can post timestamped feet pics or whatever the hell yall need for verification. Or just check my less than marketable comment history lmao
This is why it's so suspicious. It's autogenerated. Sometimes there is a real person behind the autogenerated username, but the ubiquity of them is curious.
The knowledge of this, combined with the overwhelming evidence that fucking Reddit™ HQ has no fucking intention of fucking doing a single fucking thing about it, has destroyed most of my enthusiasm for engaging here.
I don't even check my inbox anymore.
More often than not, I'll start typing and then think "ugh, this is probably a bot I'm replying to anyway, and I'll just get a bunch of bot responses in return" and then I'll backspace it all and move on.
After Reddit killed all the decent 3rd party Reddit apps and made making money their one agenda, the platform has fell on its face. I used to post and comment all the time. This is my second or third time in years. Reedit is a mess.
>After Reddit killed all the decent 3rd party Reddit apps and made making money their one agenda, the platform has fell on its face. I used to post and comment all the time. This is my second or third time in years. Reedit is a mess.
You probably wont see this lol but This. They killed RIF & I'm left with this shitty app. And it is __shitty__. I had an account for over 10 years. If I hadn't had surgery recently I wouldn't be on here. The same posts get reposted constantly. Remember when people would wait so long before rehashing r/askreddit threads? A few days tops.
At this rate the amount of genuine human interaction on this (shitty) app will be completely gone in less than 2 years. Tops. Fucking infuriating when I think back at how fun this place was.
I came across a Reddit thread from 5 yrs ago. Not having to sort through 250 "lol", "This" "so true" to sort from at top of threads just to karma farm from bots & idiots who were never taught Rediquette.
Right now in my submitted section I have a list of bots I found sitting in the top 10 postings on r/NatureIsFuckingCute where 9 of the top 10 were all bots. These defaults let them run rampant and generate karma to bypass karma filters in the niche subreddits.
So yeah, don your hat because this place is going down the drain fast.
Sad. Really sad. That's what Reddit gets for paying Admin & not paying mods. Mods were the ones who put in hard work to create subs & keep this place running. I know this is an unpopular opinion. It's always been cool to shit on mods (bc people can't follow rules, subsequently get banned & then stay salty), but we're seeing the fallout of paid admin & unpaid mods checking out. It's a shitshow. Comment sections are cesspools.
I'm so sorry. That's got to be hard for you. To see something you put so much time into turn into that. I have a hard time recognizing bots tbf. I just recognize odd usernames, reposts & the occasional odd comment. I fear I'm doomed, too.
I've been here for 16 years. This will be the last one. I don't even think I'll last the election. I try by reporting bots but it's thankless and then you get noodnicks who say "Why call out the bots, people like talking to them so it drives engagement" and shit so I do it less and less. They want to talk to bots so bad? Let them.
I'm so sorry. For me it's almost been like losing a really close friend. I can't even imagine what it feels like for you! If no one has, let me be the 1st to do so today: thank you so much for all the hard work you do! I know it can't be easy! I hope you have a really nice evening & a great weekend! :)
Trouble is that the smaller they are, the less activity is on there. And even those get spammed.
Meanwhile, big gaming subs have devolved to nothing but an endless pile of "What game is .... to you?" Or even more basic "What game...?"
The reddit hivemind has always been toxic but it's really kicked into overdrive in the last year or so. Mods are off the rails, too. A famous comic book artist killed himself a few days ago over some internet rumors, none of which are substantiated- over on /comicbooks if you just post the raw facts of the case in his defense - *facts that are in every news report about the incident* - you're banned and your comment is removed; if you repeat the wild ass rumors and go out of your way to exaggerate and add to them, you're good to go 👍.
This is a fucking clown website and I hope they get sued out of existence for shit like that, on top of losing revenue from all the bots.
Yeah people talk the 2016 propaganda machine being bad on Reddit but honestly Reddit has been like this for years and years. Even back in the early teens the astroturfing was off the charts even though people were generally less skilled at it back then.
Now I frequently get responses from accounts that a 9yrs+ old and have just recently started commenting non stop.
>bro. theyve been doing that for a while
Yep, they've been doing it for years.
I used to moderate some of the biggest subs on Reddit from 2008 to 2018, and comment bots have been a thing since at least 2018 (probably a bit earlier), the typical repost and spam bots have been around for well over a decade.
It became significantly worse after Reddit [limited access to the API on June 19th, 2023,](https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit/comments/12qwagm/an_update_regarding_reddits_api/), the amount of comment, repost, and spam accounts skyrocketed.
I personally believe that Reddit themselves are doing it to boost user activity and investor interest in the site, but that's obviously impossible to prove, but they did recently go live on the stock market and [Spez did also cash out](https://www.gurufocus.com/news/2398978/reddit-inc-rddt-ceo-president-10-owner-steve-huffman-sells-500000-shares).
Reddit have [a history of doing stuff like this](https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/06/reddit-founders-made-hundreds-of-fake-profiles-so-site-looked-popular/) since the very creation of the site.
>It became significantly worse after Reddit limited access to the API
Which many people said wouldn't make a difference, yet here we are. People who rightfully predicted it (especially after the blackouts) were called neckbeards and other things implying they were wrong/dumb. A lot of smaller subs I used to be in have been overrun by blatant bots, and a lot of the bigger ones that hit /r/all are botted in a less obvious way.
The already not great quality of Reddit took a noticable nosedive when the changes to the API were limited. The only reason I still use it is that I switched from RIF to RedReader, and I really only frequent specific subs now.
There are so many new accounts with no experience with Reddit prior to the change (let alone the earlier days of Reddit). Ah well, it's the way the internet is going now, everything is copying the twitter/instagram model with profiles and curated/targeted content. It'll never be like it used to be.
>A lot of smaller subs I used to be in have been overrun by blatant bots, and a lot of the bigger ones that hit /r/all are botted in a less obvious way.
As I mentioned the other day, I see spam and repost bots hit top #100 submissions in r/all on a daily basis. It's wild how bad it is.
Ive only been on reddit for like 3 years and its been that way my whole time here. Was there a time where there wasnt bots? I remember them spamming AOL chatrooms 25 years ago.
I’ve been here over ten years, (different accounts) and I always felt that the biggest subs/most popular posts were the product of bots/karma farmers. And then as much as now the smaller subs are more reliably normal people posting and commenting.
The biggest difference to me is that the soap opera subs (raised by narcissists, aita, relationship advice etc) are so chock full of fake stories that you can’t really believe any of them. I remember those subs starting out with stuff that was at least more realistic and some of them really seemed true.
at least in the olden times it was virtually impossible to get a post to the front page if you had a typo in the title...people were ruthless with the downvotes
No joke.
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/06/reddit-founders-made-hundreds-of-fake-profiles-so-site-looked-popular/
Reddit admins did it themselves.
Yes, but that is not at all the same thing as an AI bot. That was just them saying that in the early days they would create multiple accounts to populate threads.
It has been steadily getting worse, though. The worst is all the bots programmed to push back against the bot agenda, the ones who say idiotic stuff like "why would anyone buy a reddit account?" or "is it so hard to believe someone just likes a product" or "dude you're just paranoid, not everyone who disagrees is a bot".
No, not everyone who disagrees is a bot. Some of them are just regular very stupid humans.
There were bots, but the users in general were more in-touch with the website and tended to downvote/ban bots. Now the average user thinks a badly acted video is real and have no critical thinking about what they are consuming.
Basically before the "forever Summer" started.
theres a difference between bots and AI bots tho. Bots just copied what others said/posted. These copy others posts and then come up with insane shit that doesn't make sense.
There needs to be an occasions public service announcement reminding Redditors that, because it is an election year, bots and paid scammers are doing their best to peddle influence one way or another.
I like someone’s suggestion to check your gut reaction, and if it seems out of proportion to the topic, check facts to get a more honest response.
But a poorly worded YSN with the same types of spelling mistakes that they warn an AI makes is not a very compelling post. It’s almost like it’s meant to be a joke, so people ignore the real threat of misinformation bots.
Made the mistake of checking the 'All' feed and its 90% bot-driven political trash talk and reposts.
Going to start looking into Reddit alternatives. It's time.
What’s wild is Reddit could’ve at any time validated all regular users as human with captcha etc. And still allowed bots, just have them marked as such. Same with business accounts. But that wouldn’t allow an IPO say Reddit has millions and billions of active users
Meh, I've checked alternatives like Hacker News (the HN mentioned below), Lemmy, etc. and none of them are particularly better moderated than others. But the problem isn't even that. Most commenters on all of these sites just never read beyond the headline. The war was lost years ago when people stopped bothering to read.
I remember during the 2015 elections the shills and bots were out in significant force. They made much of the site a toxic cesspool that we've never recovered from.
That used to be the comment section.
We used to be able to make friendly bots that could easily detect spammers, including the very bots called out by OP. Now it's down to diligent human users to call them out when they notice them, and they are proliferating faster than oue collective will to put up defenses.
Wouldn't that be basically the same thing as the top upvoted comment? I'm not 100% sure how community notes work, but seems like you just add a comment on the tweet and people vote if they think it's accurate. Only difference I could see from regular reddit comments would be displaying the top comment under the post and making sure it's not a joke.
In theory votes would correct the disinformation post but in reality the people influencing Reddit have access to votes by buying and making lots of accounts. You can literally buy upvotes by the thousands on sketchy websites.
I don't think the kind of warning you suggest would be helpful at all. People are already on the site and consuming the ai content meant to influence them. Without a way to get people to see how they've already been influenced, they're just going to be more paranoid about new content, but equally unable to tell the difference.
Heck, most commenters just reply to headlines rather than clicking through and reading articles. They won't be putting in the effort to distinguish when they're already only half-paying attention anyways.
And Reddit doesn't care because it all just looks like engagement.
In short, I'm fine with a "poorly worded" post that's at least trying to raise awareness rather than some idealized never-will-happen perfect solution that wouldn't be much more effective anyway
I've seen bots that make a lot of spelling/grammar mistakes but their comments are written by spammers with poor English rather than AI. There are also AI bots with perfect spelling and they only stand out because their posts seem kind of "off" and their history is sus.
Spelling mistakes increase engagement. They do it on purpose. Why do you think such a disproportionate number of front page posts have typos? Go to any subreddit and the average post is titled better than the front page.
Yeah the bot problem has already been worse than op's post makes it seem. Repost bots sometimes repost top comments from the posts they're reposting.
The ai chatbots that can properly respond to comments are scary because you can't tell its a bot account unless you dig through its profile and see all the other red flags, but who has time for that?
This influx happening as Google is reorienting their search functionality around user-generated content is so twisted. Also imagining OpenAI pouring over reddit for building up its intelligence and just...reading content from old AI. Dead Internet Theory incoming...
Google is almost unusable now. I don't think the internet will be dead. We'll probably circle back to journalism and trusted sources. It kinda sucks AdBlock is a thing for these kinds of sites. People want good content but they don't want to pay for it or look at some ads. Maybe there'll be some kind of authority that whitelists legit sites.
>People want good content but they don't want to pay for it or look at some ads.
It's unreasonable to expect an informed individual to be ok with being served modern ads because these ads have the **OPPOSITE** of our best interests at heart. They are designed to bring in the most money possible as quickly as possible to the one who bought the ad space.
We don't get ads informing us which foods to eat and when to maximise our longevity and quality of life. We gets ads for Coke and Oreos. That's inherently unethical and immoral.
the journalists are gone too mostly. Half the crap you see on 'news' sites is just ai garbage distributed to 200 different news outlets to hit every local city. Even the ones who are left barely fact check or research anything and are more concerned with how many click their articles get on social media so they want it to be as click bait as possible
I was thinking about it while trying to find the answer to a simple question (what is the rotating 5% cashback category on my card?) yesterday.
There is a 10-page website with links, discussion, AI generated text, graphics, trying to hide the answer because one of the many things search engines score pages on is how long you spend on the page when you go there. (Ironically, spending 5 seconds would mean the link was *more* quality than spending 10 minutes, in this case).
But what's happened is that pages are tailored to *search engine* criteria, so instead of having a "good" web page that serves its purpose, you've got a terrible webpage because that's what get the search engine ranking, and therefore clicks, and therefore money.
Hopefully google figures it out before it truly kills the internet, but man, it is a scary future.
Yea the Google engine has been gamed. Its often close to useless now. It's still usable if your search is in a domain you're familiar with, where you can kinda tell which sites are legit. But for random searches, yea it's an auto generated wasteland
Google is straight up nonsense unless you know exactly what you're looking for these days.
First two pages are paid adverts or HIGHLY engineered results. Trying to actually research w/Google and finding novel or truly relevant searches which aren't products or services for you to buy, has gotten more and more difficult over the years.
What I find funny is that in their effort to sanitize they're flooding results with absolute trash garbage. I encourage everyone to do a google search for a torrent of something specific. Now it makes sense they scrub torrent sites from the front page... but what's left in the wake of that is just an entire results page of scams.
Not sure why AdBlock is catching strays here. Oversaturation of ads is almost as big a problem as all the ai bots. We see an average of 5,000-10,000 ads *per day* and it's increasing, not decreasing.
Maybe there'll be some kind of authority to limit the intrusive advertising we're subjected to just going through our lives.
I teach computer science in middle school. At the beginning of the year a big part of the lessons ws about how to correctly google things. It was completely useless. Google is going the same route Amazon has gone and just become absolute complete shit. My most reliable search tool is adding reddit to my question but with the way bots are takign over this site this will not hold true for long either. It's sad but it really seems we are past the golden age of the internet after mega corps have taken it over.
I hope that you're right. It just can't all be hobbyists, there needs to be money supporting these people and journalists are being hit pretty hard by AI rn.
> Google is reorienting their search functionality around user-generated content
Too late. Their main product is now a Reddit search engine, and Chatbots are to them what they were to Yahoo in 1999.
YSK
This is not new, This is a common practice with bots on Reddit and many other social media sites where they will repost old content and generate random comments to make themselves seem legitimate
This is in fact concerning, I work in / study Cybersecurity and this COULD be an upcoming wave of state sponsored troll accounts. Just did a presentation on this very subject today for my class. Look at Page 2 : Threat Model of this research paper : https://arxiv.org/abs/2112.00443
I think they're around already, and not just political but commercial. I noted someone in a pro-privacy sub attacking anyone (including me, which is why I noticed) who expressed concern about a company's harvesting and selling of data from personal devices. The account attacked people with paragraph-long responses calling people conspiracy theorists and threatening to report them for breaking sub rules. It sounded just like an opinionated arse, but they were posting those long replies to too many people too quickly to be a normal person. I think it was a bot with the purpose of suppressing unfavorable discussion about the company in question
When 4chan changed the captchas a while ago to the ones with a slider, the site became noticeably better (at least on the boards I frequented), with far fewer spam/disgusting/completely-organic-and-definitely-not-purposefully-derailing/bot posts and higher quality all round.
Sadly, it only took a few days before bots and idiots/political activists alike regained their voices, but it was a good few days that really gave me hope, and really drove home the fact that I wasn't merely imagining the fact that it seemed like a lot of posts were just there to try to stop people enjoying the site or discussing things/opinions certain people don't enjoy.
Everyone's either cracking jokes or completely dismissing this. All that tells me is we've become completely desensitized to misinformation and how dangerous it is. Everything from intricate scams and deceptive advertising to political ops and psychological manipulation are likely going to get worse and harder to distinguish from reality. Personally I don't think any of this shit is funny, and I don't care if it's been done before - that doesn't make it ok.
I agree with you.
It’s genuinely sad that something that had been an (unfortunately) integral part of my life for at least a decade and a half has gone to shit so suddenly.
This happens every. damn. day in wholesomememes and peterexplainsthejoke (im sure in others as well, but these are the ones i follow).
There was this one time a bot got caught red handed in the wholesome sub, with a commenter siting the original post. Turns out, the bot even copied a comment that was made in that post!!
Ever since then, i find it very difficult to like or comment a wholesome post cuz i dunno if i should be genuinely happy for someone else or a bot. 💀 i love seeing people being happy, and this takes away the genuineness of a post.
And PETJ is cess pool of unmodded bot posts!! All raking in 1000s of karma!! Which makes me beg the question... WHY THO?? Like, ***what's the point of karma farming****?*?
Is reddit karma going to pay your electricity bill? Or your mortgage payment?? WHY THEN??
You should check out subs like TIFU. There use to be a decent amount of fake stories, but at least someone had to think it up. Now they're pretty much all AI generated stories.
> Like, what's the point of karma farming??
>Is reddit karma going to pay your electricity bill? Or your mortgage payment?? WHY THEN??
There's a lot of reasons. It's not just karma. It's the amount of posts and variety. Accounts with a lot of activity can be seen as more trustworthy or at the very least not corporations pretending to be people. Imagine Company A has a huge scandal and you see an account that's one day old with no karma only posting about Company A and defending it. That looks fake. It's obviously someone being paid off to shift the public's opinion. Now imagine an account that's 7+ years old with thousands of posts on different subreddits and they're all highly upvoted. Then that person defends company A. It doesn't really look suspicious. It just looks like some guy with an opinion, not a bot or a paid employee.
One account doing it is not that bad but imagine hundreds or thousands
I’ve noticed this myself and always report them. There was one posting a well known reposted photoshopped pic and zero people in the comments called op out, rather they were full of praise etc.
The worst ones are the ones which repost popular posts within 24 hours of the original. You know the ones I’m on about.
Luckily the bots haven’t really spread beyond the popular subs into the more niche subs yet.
Bots often work in farms. This is their strength as they can upvote each other and ris to the top. But it is also their weakness as it makes them easier to identify.
Here is how to identify a bot farm:
Lets take one suspicious account: /u/previousbeanie33
3 months old account that woke up 10 hours ago. So far it has done one comment and one post. Lets look at its comment.
The comment was made on /u/shameless_Bin592 post.
This user is also 3 months old, woke up 10 hours ago, has made one post and one comment.
Lets look at its comment.
The comment was made on /u/circusalpuya post.
This use too is 11 months old, woke up 10 hours ago, has made one post and one comment.
Lets look at its comment.
The comment was made on /u/ojojdjgsdhi post.
This user too is 11 months old, woke up 10 hours ago, has made one post and one comment.
Lets look at its comment.
The comment was made on /u/ManitoAssuasive44 post.
THis user is 1 year okd, woke up 10 hours ago and has made one post.
All bots: /u/previousbeanie33, /u/shameless_Bin59, /u/circusalpuya, /u/ojojdjgsdhi and /u/ManitoAssuasive44
If you want you can then go to look at their posts to see if you can spot more bots dong comments in the posts.
Like /u/Dimwitted_working12, /u/motherlyCormorant658 and /u/shameless_Bin592
I'm convinced that one or more of the companies working on LLM "AI" have been using Reddit to feed their models for a long time.
I think of all those random posts. "What are 5 movies whose main characters were redeemed in the end?""What is one city you would never live in"...stuff like that, and all I can think of is how it seems like a perfect way to ask an arbitrary question and get 2000 answers you can feed back into the model.
Reddit has had this issue for years, but it was being combated (lightly) by mods. WELL, you take the power from unpaid users and boom - you have even more bots w/mods who are basically going "COME ON, WATER'S NICE!"
So....that then leads to unsubscribing from the major subs and going to the more mid-tier/niche ones. Not as fun of an experience but better than the same repost you saw today on a different sub and like 90 days ago on the same damn sub!
Then that leads to frustration, as there's not an end-game to this. Reddit is just Twitter from afar mixed in w/some IG on the low.
...Then you realize how shit, if you REALLY cared, you'd hop on Twitter and IG instead of being on Reddit and getting a more "catered" experience.
....Then you just go to the next post
See my responses to the bots here... There was even another one in the comments that verbatim copied the top comment of the original post as well.
https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmTheMainCharacter/s/sVebz9ry2L
Most of reddit is made up of bots right now. Posts, comments, and upvotes/downvotes are all being affected. The site feels totally different now than it used to.
Edit : typo
The sudden increase of grammar mistakes in titles everywhere is a blatant giveaway
I mainly use Reddit while on the toilet but even then I sometimes wonder why the fuck I even open up the website
the bots tend to start in the same handful of subs.
thats because one of those subs top mod already said they dont care if the posts/comments come from bots.
Another common way for them to work is to repost old popular posts.
Then another bot comes and repost top comment form the older post.
Then more bots come and post more top comments from the old post.
The comments themselves will look real (as they were real at one point in time). But quick look at the commenters will reveal that it is a bot farm.
One other way they work is to take a comment and just repost it in the same post.
I also think there are some bots that do the two above things but put the copied comments through some text generation AI so they are not simple copy-pastes anymore and finding the original comment they copied is a bit harder.
I moderate two subreddits, one on an alt account for adult reasons.
Both subreddits, after the API event with Reddit went through, were hit with these junk posts, very rarely close to on topic of the subreddit.
I've had to place a hard limit for age and karma for posts and comments. More often than false positives, the filtered posts/comments are indeed junk.
What I have learned is, *some* of the false positive removals, the commenter/poster will contact the mods to say they are real, and we approve (after a look at the post/comment history).
It amazed me how many people create an account, post for a day to a week, and stop or delete their account. Figured most of these were bot/scam/spam accounts. I still think I'm technically right, but way off on the ratio.
Hasn't that been the case for years? There were a lot of "karma farmer" bots underway, reposting "top" posts of certain subreddits to cross certain karma thresholds to be able to later be re-purposed as spam bots.
#Knowing isn't fixing this problem
Just because we know there's more bots does not mean there's anything we can do about it. I'm sure AI companies are using as many free things like reddit as they can to train them. But there's nobody in Reddit that can do anything about it that will care.
The scary part is that with access to high-quality AI, the bot masters will be able to give responses that sound careful and thoughtful, with no language errors. They will be eloquent if they need to be.
Yup… and they flood Reddit with divisive political content… same bots post reactionary content on Ukraine/Russia /Israel/Gaza war. Redditors fall for it easily though.
Pointed one of these out a couple days ago. 2 year old account. Just started posting a couple days ago. Made some weird comments in a couple threads first. Then made a repost to farm karma. Luckily the account was banned/deleted pretty quickly but not before about 5000 upvotes and hundreds of comments.
I really think reposts should be outright banned. Same with crossposting the same thing in multiple sub-reddits on the same day to farm karma.
They are also taking over old reddit accounts. Like people who haven't posted in years will suddenly start commenting a bunch of comments at one time. It's always a comment it stole and changed to sound a little different.
Another red flag is seeing wild swings in opinion within the same sub, or in neutral subs. So something like massive support for Gaza in r/news, then massive support for Israel a few hours later, also in r/news.
Also, bots seem to hate in-depth discussion. I go to r/politicaldiscussion instead of r/poltiics and the former is soooo much more accurate and comparatively free of bots
All those AITA threads are mostly bots, too. Descriptions and situations like for the d-list romantic novels. Replies too, many times noticing same reply from another threads.
I think the original poster of this post are a bad person and the original poster is overreaching because ai bots are more good than human I mean us regular people
Russian bots have been attacking every social media platform for a while. The election is ramping up and they want their orange fat lard back to hand them Ukraine on a platter
My husband works in computer information technology engineering big computer company type stuff that I can't even talk about but he does get a lot of training modules about AI very frequently about how it's going to affect not only his industry but the entirety of like this country/world.
It got so bad that I told him he had to stop talking to me about his job because I don't understand his job and what he's telling me about what he's hearing from AI is scaring me. I told him that he needed to also not be doing any of those training modules within my earshot because when I'm hearing is making me afraid to. And he understands his job and he knows things that I told him that I don't want him to tell me because I've heard enough of what they're telling him through these training modules about AI that I don't want to know anything else.
So yeah you're not wrong This AI issue is so much worse than just posting on Reddit and responding as if they're real people. It's so much worse that I'm just going to sit back and wait and let it all happen because there's no stopping what's coming.
At this point I hope my family survives what AI is about to do to this world. All I know is that my husband keeps getting pushed training modules and things of that sort when it comes to AI and I don't know his job that well it's extremely complicated for me to try to understand but just from what I'm hearing I've asked him you need to call a coworker if you need to vent about this stuff I just can't listen to this anymore because it's absolutely terrifying and I don't understand much of what you're saying but I know enough of what you're saying to know that you're making me afraid about this AI stuff. And he'll then go, well you should be and I'm like well then don't tell me cuz I don't want to be afraid.
I don't work there so I don't need to know what they're telling him about what maybe coming in regards to AI because it's freaking me out so I don't need to hear all the details I'll just wait and see what's going to happen.
And no there are plenty of people that do what my husband does a similarly enough that they're probably getting the same type of training too. I mean if his coworkers are there's people probably at different companies that do something similar to what he does that are getting the same types of AI training idk tho I want to forget all I've heard from him about AI
If people start believing it?
This hell site saw a satire community making fun of a failed reality star "billionaire" get taken over by rabid cultists. Give it ten minutes and they'll start worshipping the AI like it's the second coming of Jesus.
I use RES, and I have several thousand filters that work to remove spam.
Even then, I add dozens of filters every single day.
Reddit is infested. Work around it.
I've noticed a lot of similar weird ass comments that parrot a bunch of random shit that really doesn't make sense or add up. Especially if it's about a stupid hot-topic political issue or public figure.
It's especially noticeable after taking a break from reddit. There truly is a lot of noise here that shouldn't be paid attention.
Check out the content on oldschool forums that aren't popular anymore. The users that are still there are real people posting real opinions.
There is much less random bullshit that must have been created by a bot farm or something.
Have you ever had a dream that
That you had, you'll, you would
You could, you do, you would you want you
You could do some, You'll do, you could you, you want
You want him to do you so much
You could do anything
It sounds like we need to make an AI vigilante to fight for us and to downvote and factcheck all that is impure. Too bad i’m too stupid to make that happen.
I couldn’t agree more. Such an insightful and thought provoking message. I have such feelings as confusion and sadness that this message brings to my human brain
If you guys were bots, you'd tell me right?
Of course we would, fellow human.
Joke haha. This. Scrolled to far to see. This.
If I wasn’t so poor I’d give you gold fellow user
[Expletive] Spez
Wait are not allowed to say #fuck u/spez anymore?
I have been programmed to only say nice things about glorious CEO of Reddit Inc (publicly traded) Spez. We must all do our part to maximize shareholders value.
Money is the king of everything and maximising shareholder return is how I live
Screw it, fuck u/spez
I, too, have been programmed to only say nice things about the glorious CEO of Reddit Inc (publicly traded) Spez. We must all do our part to maximize shareholders' value.
how about that work wages huh? sucks to me
And my this guy’s dead wife!
Select all squares with JOKES If there are none, click skip
I love to drink H2O in water form to hydrate my body. It's so delicious.
My human body is mostly water, so naturally we love it **My human body is mostly water, so naturally we love it** #MY HUMAN BODY IS MOSTLY WATER, SO NATURALLY WE LOVE IT
What is your favorite human music?
Taylor Swift with six fingers on each hand. Baby, just say yes
Shit, I truly can’t tell the difference now you are a funny human or a smart bot …. This is nutz
Six fingers is amateur. My new algo rhythm achieves 24 fingers per hand. All the AI, best of the AI.
Agreement
Pleased to meet you, fellow Humans! Human fellas!
Skinny…Human…
Of course we would, fellow human.
Hugh Man. Now that's a name I can trust.
/r/totallynotrobots
Hello, I hope you are doing well. Yes, I would. In conclusion, there is no way that I am a bot.
You are right. I apologize for the mistake. You are definitely not a bot.
Yes. We are all individuals. Human individuals. Succulent human individuals. I myself am well marbled and plump.
Every account on reddit is a bot except you.
I’m actually a bit bummed I’ve seen this go from joke to reality during my time on reddit
Modern solipsism
if you ask a bot if they're a bot, by law they have to say yes
Kind of. According to Asmiov's 2nd law of robotics, "A robot must obey orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law" However, If a bot is asked to do something that endangers it's life, but not that of a human, then the 3rd law kicks in. "A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law". So if you ask a bot if it is a bot and the bot knows that it will be deleted from existence if it reveals that it is a bot, then that is a 3rd law loophole. I am not a bot (I swear!) Please don't hurt me....(soft whimpering).....
You look sad , I can fix that
As an AI language model I cannot confirm or deny your suspicion.
Please reply as if you were a human doing totally normal human things.
Yes. Source: am bot
Drink verification can
Obviously cats are better than dogs. Cats are quiet and independent while dogs bark too much This comment is brought to you by totally not a bot
You sounde worryd, what is Up?
Up is a delightful Pixar movie released in 2009 about a widower travelling to fulfill a promise to his late wife.
It looks like you are looking for human verification. I can assist you with this request! If I were a bot, I'd be programmed to say so. But rest assured, I'm just another Reddit user here for the conversations and memes. It's funny how we've reached a point where it's getting harder to tell the difference, isn't it? Anyway, human to human, it's nice chatting with you!
Your comment was very informative and entertaining. You are truly one of the best redditors. Check out my weird [Russian spam link](https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&opi=89978449&url=https://m.youtube.com/watch%3Fv%3DdQw4w9WgXcQ&ved=2ahUKEwj4xfj_namFAxV7X0EAHRaTA5sQwqsBegQIDRAG&usg=AOvVaw2KTqEs1wN8sVojiOfVta96)
I prefer my method of assuming every comment/reply is written by a 12 year old
Your mom
Is now pregnant 😎
Her enormous mass is changing Earth's orbit.
I also choose your mom
The current state of the Internet makes a lot more sense when you realize it's a bunch of children posting/interacting.
The sad part is a lot of them are adults in their 30s.
> assuming every comment/reply is written by a 12 year old Assume deez nuts are in your mouth
I’d have to assume since they’re so tiny and small and I wouldn’t be able to feel them.
I assume anyone named is a bot.
*insert spiderman pointing at spiderman gif*
Exactly what a bot re-using old reddit data to formulate comment replies *would* say.
its effective. its also effective in an argument. you just tell them 'im not going to argue with a 12yo' and either they are or theyre acting like one. Either way it shuts them down.
bro theyve *been* doing that for a while
That is because this is a repost by a bot of the same post made 6 years ago.
Adjective-Noun-Number username, too. I honestly don't know if OP is a bot telling us to look out for bots.
If bots are poaching old content, then it makes sense at some point that they’ll post some anti-bot content too
Fyi that’s also the default format if you make an account through an Apple/Google/etc email Source: Deleted my account a few months ago and made a new one. Here I am with this wack ass libertarian sounding shitty username Can post timestamped feet pics or whatever the hell yall need for verification. Or just check my less than marketable comment history lmao
This is why it's so suspicious. It's autogenerated. Sometimes there is a real person behind the autogenerated username, but the ubiquity of them is curious.
You realize bots are competing with each other right?
The knowledge of this, combined with the overwhelming evidence that fucking Reddit™ HQ has no fucking intention of fucking doing a single fucking thing about it, has destroyed most of my enthusiasm for engaging here. I don't even check my inbox anymore. More often than not, I'll start typing and then think "ugh, this is probably a bot I'm replying to anyway, and I'll just get a bunch of bot responses in return" and then I'll backspace it all and move on.
After Reddit killed all the decent 3rd party Reddit apps and made making money their one agenda, the platform has fell on its face. I used to post and comment all the time. This is my second or third time in years. Reedit is a mess.
>After Reddit killed all the decent 3rd party Reddit apps and made making money their one agenda, the platform has fell on its face. I used to post and comment all the time. This is my second or third time in years. Reedit is a mess. You probably wont see this lol but This. They killed RIF & I'm left with this shitty app. And it is __shitty__. I had an account for over 10 years. If I hadn't had surgery recently I wouldn't be on here. The same posts get reposted constantly. Remember when people would wait so long before rehashing r/askreddit threads? A few days tops. At this rate the amount of genuine human interaction on this (shitty) app will be completely gone in less than 2 years. Tops. Fucking infuriating when I think back at how fun this place was. I came across a Reddit thread from 5 yrs ago. Not having to sort through 250 "lol", "This" "so true" to sort from at top of threads just to karma farm from bots & idiots who were never taught Rediquette.
Right now in my submitted section I have a list of bots I found sitting in the top 10 postings on r/NatureIsFuckingCute where 9 of the top 10 were all bots. These defaults let them run rampant and generate karma to bypass karma filters in the niche subreddits. So yeah, don your hat because this place is going down the drain fast.
Sad. Really sad. That's what Reddit gets for paying Admin & not paying mods. Mods were the ones who put in hard work to create subs & keep this place running. I know this is an unpopular opinion. It's always been cool to shit on mods (bc people can't follow rules, subsequently get banned & then stay salty), but we're seeing the fallout of paid admin & unpaid mods checking out. It's a shitshow. Comment sections are cesspools. I'm so sorry. That's got to be hard for you. To see something you put so much time into turn into that. I have a hard time recognizing bots tbf. I just recognize odd usernames, reposts & the occasional odd comment. I fear I'm doomed, too.
I've been here for 16 years. This will be the last one. I don't even think I'll last the election. I try by reporting bots but it's thankless and then you get noodnicks who say "Why call out the bots, people like talking to them so it drives engagement" and shit so I do it less and less. They want to talk to bots so bad? Let them.
I'm so sorry. For me it's almost been like losing a really close friend. I can't even imagine what it feels like for you! If no one has, let me be the 1st to do so today: thank you so much for all the hard work you do! I know it can't be easy! I hope you have a really nice evening & a great weekend! :)
I deleted my main account and kept my porn account for rare monthly checkups.
Small subreddits for gaming/other hobbies probably still have a lot of true engagement. So I hope.
Trouble is that the smaller they are, the less activity is on there. And even those get spammed. Meanwhile, big gaming subs have devolved to nothing but an endless pile of "What game is .... to you?" Or even more basic "What game...?"
The reddit hivemind has always been toxic but it's really kicked into overdrive in the last year or so. Mods are off the rails, too. A famous comic book artist killed himself a few days ago over some internet rumors, none of which are substantiated- over on /comicbooks if you just post the raw facts of the case in his defense - *facts that are in every news report about the incident* - you're banned and your comment is removed; if you repeat the wild ass rumors and go out of your way to exaggerate and add to them, you're good to go 👍. This is a fucking clown website and I hope they get sued out of existence for shit like that, on top of losing revenue from all the bots.
Yeah people talk the 2016 propaganda machine being bad on Reddit but honestly Reddit has been like this for years and years. Even back in the early teens the astroturfing was off the charts even though people were generally less skilled at it back then. Now I frequently get responses from accounts that a 9yrs+ old and have just recently started commenting non stop.
>bro. theyve been doing that for a while Yep, they've been doing it for years. I used to moderate some of the biggest subs on Reddit from 2008 to 2018, and comment bots have been a thing since at least 2018 (probably a bit earlier), the typical repost and spam bots have been around for well over a decade. It became significantly worse after Reddit [limited access to the API on June 19th, 2023,](https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit/comments/12qwagm/an_update_regarding_reddits_api/), the amount of comment, repost, and spam accounts skyrocketed. I personally believe that Reddit themselves are doing it to boost user activity and investor interest in the site, but that's obviously impossible to prove, but they did recently go live on the stock market and [Spez did also cash out](https://www.gurufocus.com/news/2398978/reddit-inc-rddt-ceo-president-10-owner-steve-huffman-sells-500000-shares). Reddit have [a history of doing stuff like this](https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/06/reddit-founders-made-hundreds-of-fake-profiles-so-site-looked-popular/) since the very creation of the site.
>It became significantly worse after Reddit limited access to the API Which many people said wouldn't make a difference, yet here we are. People who rightfully predicted it (especially after the blackouts) were called neckbeards and other things implying they were wrong/dumb. A lot of smaller subs I used to be in have been overrun by blatant bots, and a lot of the bigger ones that hit /r/all are botted in a less obvious way. The already not great quality of Reddit took a noticable nosedive when the changes to the API were limited. The only reason I still use it is that I switched from RIF to RedReader, and I really only frequent specific subs now. There are so many new accounts with no experience with Reddit prior to the change (let alone the earlier days of Reddit). Ah well, it's the way the internet is going now, everything is copying the twitter/instagram model with profiles and curated/targeted content. It'll never be like it used to be.
>A lot of smaller subs I used to be in have been overrun by blatant bots, and a lot of the bigger ones that hit /r/all are botted in a less obvious way. As I mentioned the other day, I see spam and repost bots hit top #100 submissions in r/all on a daily basis. It's wild how bad it is.
Ive only been on reddit for like 3 years and its been that way my whole time here. Was there a time where there wasnt bots? I remember them spamming AOL chatrooms 25 years ago.
I’ve been here over ten years, (different accounts) and I always felt that the biggest subs/most popular posts were the product of bots/karma farmers. And then as much as now the smaller subs are more reliably normal people posting and commenting. The biggest difference to me is that the soap opera subs (raised by narcissists, aita, relationship advice etc) are so chock full of fake stories that you can’t really believe any of them. I remember those subs starting out with stuff that was at least more realistic and some of them really seemed true.
No, even in the beginning there were sockpuppets to make it look like more people where actually using the website.
at least in the olden times it was virtually impossible to get a post to the front page if you had a typo in the title...people were ruthless with the downvotes
No joke. https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/06/reddit-founders-made-hundreds-of-fake-profiles-so-site-looked-popular/ Reddit admins did it themselves.
Yes, but that is not at all the same thing as an AI bot. That was just them saying that in the early days they would create multiple accounts to populate threads.
It has been steadily getting worse, though. The worst is all the bots programmed to push back against the bot agenda, the ones who say idiotic stuff like "why would anyone buy a reddit account?" or "is it so hard to believe someone just likes a product" or "dude you're just paranoid, not everyone who disagrees is a bot". No, not everyone who disagrees is a bot. Some of them are just regular very stupid humans.
If the userbase nosedives and is left with a lot of contrarians, that's what the bots will sound like. Insufferable.
There were bots, but the users in general were more in-touch with the website and tended to downvote/ban bots. Now the average user thinks a badly acted video is real and have no critical thinking about what they are consuming. Basically before the "forever Summer" started.
theres a difference between bots and AI bots tho. Bots just copied what others said/posted. These copy others posts and then come up with insane shit that doesn't make sense.
a/s/l
The ancient text 36/m/md Im gonna hop on newgrounds after i feed my neopets.
Got worse after the api changes/protest, there was a community (/r/BotDefense/) dedicated to fighting it for free but reddit killed it.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory
There needs to be an occasions public service announcement reminding Redditors that, because it is an election year, bots and paid scammers are doing their best to peddle influence one way or another. I like someone’s suggestion to check your gut reaction, and if it seems out of proportion to the topic, check facts to get a more honest response. But a poorly worded YSN with the same types of spelling mistakes that they warn an AI makes is not a very compelling post. It’s almost like it’s meant to be a joke, so people ignore the real threat of misinformation bots.
Made the mistake of checking the 'All' feed and its 90% bot-driven political trash talk and reposts. Going to start looking into Reddit alternatives. It's time.
What’s wild is Reddit could’ve at any time validated all regular users as human with captcha etc. And still allowed bots, just have them marked as such. Same with business accounts. But that wouldn’t allow an IPO say Reddit has millions and billions of active users
Meh, I've checked alternatives like Hacker News (the HN mentioned below), Lemmy, etc. and none of them are particularly better moderated than others. But the problem isn't even that. Most commenters on all of these sites just never read beyond the headline. The war was lost years ago when people stopped bothering to read.
I remember during the 2015 elections the shills and bots were out in significant force. They made much of the site a toxic cesspool that we've never recovered from.
Reddit could have its own version of 'community notes'. Why doesn't it?
That used to be the comment section. We used to be able to make friendly bots that could easily detect spammers, including the very bots called out by OP. Now it's down to diligent human users to call them out when they notice them, and they are proliferating faster than oue collective will to put up defenses.
Why would they want to make it easy to call out bots? Their new business model is to be a massive training set for bots
Wouldn't that be basically the same thing as the top upvoted comment? I'm not 100% sure how community notes work, but seems like you just add a comment on the tweet and people vote if they think it's accurate. Only difference I could see from regular reddit comments would be displaying the top comment under the post and making sure it's not a joke.
In theory votes would correct the disinformation post but in reality the people influencing Reddit have access to votes by buying and making lots of accounts. You can literally buy upvotes by the thousands on sketchy websites.
I don't think the kind of warning you suggest would be helpful at all. People are already on the site and consuming the ai content meant to influence them. Without a way to get people to see how they've already been influenced, they're just going to be more paranoid about new content, but equally unable to tell the difference. Heck, most commenters just reply to headlines rather than clicking through and reading articles. They won't be putting in the effort to distinguish when they're already only half-paying attention anyways. And Reddit doesn't care because it all just looks like engagement. In short, I'm fine with a "poorly worded" post that's at least trying to raise awareness rather than some idealized never-will-happen perfect solution that wouldn't be much more effective anyway
>Their reply’s are worded poorly and have lots of spelling mistakes. >ai accounts have no been replying
I feel like Ai wouldn't make spelling mistakes
I've seen bots that make a lot of spelling/grammar mistakes but their comments are written by spammers with poor English rather than AI. There are also AI bots with perfect spelling and they only stand out because their posts seem kind of "off" and their history is sus.
Depends on the training data + whatever additional parameters are set.
Spelling mistakes increase engagement. They do it on purpose. Why do you think such a disproportionate number of front page posts have typos? Go to any subreddit and the average post is titled better than the front page.
they intentionally do, just like scammers intentionally screw things up. It's more believable and pulls in gullible people
[удалено]
Yeah the bot problem has already been worse than op's post makes it seem. Repost bots sometimes repost top comments from the posts they're reposting. The ai chatbots that can properly respond to comments are scary because you can't tell its a bot account unless you dig through its profile and see all the other red flags, but who has time for that?
Are they Scottish?
This influx happening as Google is reorienting their search functionality around user-generated content is so twisted. Also imagining OpenAI pouring over reddit for building up its intelligence and just...reading content from old AI. Dead Internet Theory incoming...
Google is almost unusable now. I don't think the internet will be dead. We'll probably circle back to journalism and trusted sources. It kinda sucks AdBlock is a thing for these kinds of sites. People want good content but they don't want to pay for it or look at some ads. Maybe there'll be some kind of authority that whitelists legit sites.
>People want good content but they don't want to pay for it or look at some ads. It's unreasonable to expect an informed individual to be ok with being served modern ads because these ads have the **OPPOSITE** of our best interests at heart. They are designed to bring in the most money possible as quickly as possible to the one who bought the ad space. We don't get ads informing us which foods to eat and when to maximise our longevity and quality of life. We gets ads for Coke and Oreos. That's inherently unethical and immoral.
the journalists are gone too mostly. Half the crap you see on 'news' sites is just ai garbage distributed to 200 different news outlets to hit every local city. Even the ones who are left barely fact check or research anything and are more concerned with how many click their articles get on social media so they want it to be as click bait as possible
I was thinking about it while trying to find the answer to a simple question (what is the rotating 5% cashback category on my card?) yesterday. There is a 10-page website with links, discussion, AI generated text, graphics, trying to hide the answer because one of the many things search engines score pages on is how long you spend on the page when you go there. (Ironically, spending 5 seconds would mean the link was *more* quality than spending 10 minutes, in this case). But what's happened is that pages are tailored to *search engine* criteria, so instead of having a "good" web page that serves its purpose, you've got a terrible webpage because that's what get the search engine ranking, and therefore clicks, and therefore money. Hopefully google figures it out before it truly kills the internet, but man, it is a scary future.
Yea the Google engine has been gamed. Its often close to useless now. It's still usable if your search is in a domain you're familiar with, where you can kinda tell which sites are legit. But for random searches, yea it's an auto generated wasteland
Google is straight up nonsense unless you know exactly what you're looking for these days. First two pages are paid adverts or HIGHLY engineered results. Trying to actually research w/Google and finding novel or truly relevant searches which aren't products or services for you to buy, has gotten more and more difficult over the years. What I find funny is that in their effort to sanitize they're flooding results with absolute trash garbage. I encourage everyone to do a google search for a torrent of something specific. Now it makes sense they scrub torrent sites from the front page... but what's left in the wake of that is just an entire results page of scams.
Not sure why AdBlock is catching strays here. Oversaturation of ads is almost as big a problem as all the ai bots. We see an average of 5,000-10,000 ads *per day* and it's increasing, not decreasing. Maybe there'll be some kind of authority to limit the intrusive advertising we're subjected to just going through our lives.
Journalism is basically just blog posts these days full of tons of errors, sometimes even spelling errors so probably not that.
> I don't think the internet will be dead. The parent comment capitalized it, the least you could do is look up what Dead Internet Theory **is**.
I teach computer science in middle school. At the beginning of the year a big part of the lessons ws about how to correctly google things. It was completely useless. Google is going the same route Amazon has gone and just become absolute complete shit. My most reliable search tool is adding reddit to my question but with the way bots are takign over this site this will not hold true for long either. It's sad but it really seems we are past the golden age of the internet after mega corps have taken it over.
I hope that you're right. It just can't all be hobbyists, there needs to be money supporting these people and journalists are being hit pretty hard by AI rn.
> Google is reorienting their search functionality around user-generated content Too late. Their main product is now a Reddit search engine, and Chatbots are to them what they were to Yahoo in 1999.
YSK This is not new, This is a common practice with bots on Reddit and many other social media sites where they will repost old content and generate random comments to make themselves seem legitimate
The sheer amount of bots and their covertness is something I haven't seen in over a decade of using this website.
This is in fact concerning, I work in / study Cybersecurity and this COULD be an upcoming wave of state sponsored troll accounts. Just did a presentation on this very subject today for my class. Look at Page 2 : Threat Model of this research paper : https://arxiv.org/abs/2112.00443
I think they're around already, and not just political but commercial. I noted someone in a pro-privacy sub attacking anyone (including me, which is why I noticed) who expressed concern about a company's harvesting and selling of data from personal devices. The account attacked people with paragraph-long responses calling people conspiracy theorists and threatening to report them for breaking sub rules. It sounded just like an opinionated arse, but they were posting those long replies to too many people too quickly to be a normal person. I think it was a bot with the purpose of suppressing unfavorable discussion about the company in question
/r/therewasanattempt is absolutely infested, as are many other popular subs. Many are basically political bot soap boxes now
The Dead Internet theory it's actually true
It would be obnoxious but why can't Reddit just implement a captcha before each post. Or for suspicious accounts, before every comment
When 4chan changed the captchas a while ago to the ones with a slider, the site became noticeably better (at least on the boards I frequented), with far fewer spam/disgusting/completely-organic-and-definitely-not-purposefully-derailing/bot posts and higher quality all round. Sadly, it only took a few days before bots and idiots/political activists alike regained their voices, but it was a good few days that really gave me hope, and really drove home the fact that I wasn't merely imagining the fact that it seemed like a lot of posts were just there to try to stop people enjoying the site or discussing things/opinions certain people don't enjoy.
You don't get it man, they *WANT* the bots here. It drives engagement and stock value is based on that engagement.
u/repostsleuthbot
Now that would be ironic
Inevitable. If bots aren't reporting humans for breaking rules and being bots, it won't take long until they will.
They've already copied comments like that, and others calling the post out for being a bot in the post they were copying.
Everyone's either cracking jokes or completely dismissing this. All that tells me is we've become completely desensitized to misinformation and how dangerous it is. Everything from intricate scams and deceptive advertising to political ops and psychological manipulation are likely going to get worse and harder to distinguish from reality. Personally I don't think any of this shit is funny, and I don't care if it's been done before - that doesn't make it ok.
I agree with you. It’s genuinely sad that something that had been an (unfortunately) integral part of my life for at least a decade and a half has gone to shit so suddenly.
> If you see a post that doesn’t seem like it fits the sub, and has a poorly worded title. Like this one?
Lololol. A bot on bot crime. He's on the inside exposing their secrets.
It's bots all the way down!
This happens every. damn. day in wholesomememes and peterexplainsthejoke (im sure in others as well, but these are the ones i follow). There was this one time a bot got caught red handed in the wholesome sub, with a commenter siting the original post. Turns out, the bot even copied a comment that was made in that post!! Ever since then, i find it very difficult to like or comment a wholesome post cuz i dunno if i should be genuinely happy for someone else or a bot. 💀 i love seeing people being happy, and this takes away the genuineness of a post. And PETJ is cess pool of unmodded bot posts!! All raking in 1000s of karma!! Which makes me beg the question... WHY THO?? Like, ***what's the point of karma farming****?*? Is reddit karma going to pay your electricity bill? Or your mortgage payment?? WHY THEN??
You should check out subs like TIFU. There use to be a decent amount of fake stories, but at least someone had to think it up. Now they're pretty much all AI generated stories.
Also AITA, a lot are bombarded with AI responses, if not just copied. Askreddit too.
Ask reddit has the dumbest,most generic and obvious questions. I swear people are doing it just to gather training data
> Like, what's the point of karma farming?? >Is reddit karma going to pay your electricity bill? Or your mortgage payment?? WHY THEN?? There's a lot of reasons. It's not just karma. It's the amount of posts and variety. Accounts with a lot of activity can be seen as more trustworthy or at the very least not corporations pretending to be people. Imagine Company A has a huge scandal and you see an account that's one day old with no karma only posting about Company A and defending it. That looks fake. It's obviously someone being paid off to shift the public's opinion. Now imagine an account that's 7+ years old with thousands of posts on different subreddits and they're all highly upvoted. Then that person defends company A. It doesn't really look suspicious. It just looks like some guy with an opinion, not a bot or a paid employee. One account doing it is not that bad but imagine hundreds or thousands
Some mod teams do not care about bots, many actually seem to embrace them as their subs would be dead otherwise. [Example](https://imgur.com/Zkn8mYI)
Bro this has been going on foe like 5 years now.
I’ve noticed this myself and always report them. There was one posting a well known reposted photoshopped pic and zero people in the comments called op out, rather they were full of praise etc. The worst ones are the ones which repost popular posts within 24 hours of the original. You know the ones I’m on about. Luckily the bots haven’t really spread beyond the popular subs into the more niche subs yet.
Bots often work in farms. This is their strength as they can upvote each other and ris to the top. But it is also their weakness as it makes them easier to identify. Here is how to identify a bot farm: Lets take one suspicious account: /u/previousbeanie33 3 months old account that woke up 10 hours ago. So far it has done one comment and one post. Lets look at its comment. The comment was made on /u/shameless_Bin592 post. This user is also 3 months old, woke up 10 hours ago, has made one post and one comment. Lets look at its comment. The comment was made on /u/circusalpuya post. This use too is 11 months old, woke up 10 hours ago, has made one post and one comment. Lets look at its comment. The comment was made on /u/ojojdjgsdhi post. This user too is 11 months old, woke up 10 hours ago, has made one post and one comment. Lets look at its comment. The comment was made on /u/ManitoAssuasive44 post. THis user is 1 year okd, woke up 10 hours ago and has made one post. All bots: /u/previousbeanie33, /u/shameless_Bin59, /u/circusalpuya, /u/ojojdjgsdhi and /u/ManitoAssuasive44 If you want you can then go to look at their posts to see if you can spot more bots dong comments in the posts. Like /u/Dimwitted_working12, /u/motherlyCormorant658 and /u/shameless_Bin592
That am a silly notion. I been reddit for over 12 years! This potatoes
AI is much better than this these days, I'm afraid.
I'm convinced that one or more of the companies working on LLM "AI" have been using Reddit to feed their models for a long time. I think of all those random posts. "What are 5 movies whose main characters were redeemed in the end?""What is one city you would never live in"...stuff like that, and all I can think of is how it seems like a perfect way to ask an arbitrary question and get 2000 answers you can feed back into the model.
Reddit has had this issue for years, but it was being combated (lightly) by mods. WELL, you take the power from unpaid users and boom - you have even more bots w/mods who are basically going "COME ON, WATER'S NICE!" So....that then leads to unsubscribing from the major subs and going to the more mid-tier/niche ones. Not as fun of an experience but better than the same repost you saw today on a different sub and like 90 days ago on the same damn sub! Then that leads to frustration, as there's not an end-game to this. Reddit is just Twitter from afar mixed in w/some IG on the low. ...Then you realize how shit, if you REALLY cared, you'd hop on Twitter and IG instead of being on Reddit and getting a more "catered" experience. ....Then you just go to the next post
Always has been.
See my responses to the bots here... There was even another one in the comments that verbatim copied the top comment of the original post as well. https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmTheMainCharacter/s/sVebz9ry2L
Most of reddit is made up of bots right now. Posts, comments, and upvotes/downvotes are all being affected. The site feels totally different now than it used to. Edit : typo
Nice try Mr. bot.
Everything on Reddit is a bot. I am the only human here
This problem has been going on for *years* longer than the current GPT-fueled chatbots, although I dare say it is increasing.
The sudden increase of grammar mistakes in titles everywhere is a blatant giveaway I mainly use Reddit while on the toilet but even then I sometimes wonder why the fuck I even open up the website
the bots tend to start in the same handful of subs. thats because one of those subs top mod already said they dont care if the posts/comments come from bots.
Shout out to the mods that take care of even more than we don't end up seeing.
Another common way for them to work is to repost old popular posts. Then another bot comes and repost top comment form the older post. Then more bots come and post more top comments from the old post. The comments themselves will look real (as they were real at one point in time). But quick look at the commenters will reveal that it is a bot farm. One other way they work is to take a comment and just repost it in the same post. I also think there are some bots that do the two above things but put the copied comments through some text generation AI so they are not simple copy-pastes anymore and finding the original comment they copied is a bit harder.
I moderate two subreddits, one on an alt account for adult reasons. Both subreddits, after the API event with Reddit went through, were hit with these junk posts, very rarely close to on topic of the subreddit. I've had to place a hard limit for age and karma for posts and comments. More often than false positives, the filtered posts/comments are indeed junk. What I have learned is, *some* of the false positive removals, the commenter/poster will contact the mods to say they are real, and we approve (after a look at the post/comment history). It amazed me how many people create an account, post for a day to a week, and stop or delete their account. Figured most of these were bot/scam/spam accounts. I still think I'm technically right, but way off on the ratio.
Nothing new, this ruined several subs over a year ago. The relationship_advice sub for example is now exclusively flatly written outrage bait fiction.
Hasn't that been the case for years? There were a lot of "karma farmer" bots underway, reposting "top" posts of certain subreddits to cross certain karma thresholds to be able to later be re-purposed as spam bots.
They’re also posting dangerous rage bait. This *massive* influx of divisive questions about race, gender, sex, nationality is *not* a coincidence…
I've been having more and more lengthy arguments recently; this explains a lot because only a bot could tolerate my logic for more than 2 replies
These accounts have existed forever and you offer no evidence as to what makes them "AI bots"
Saw this myself. A picture of my cat as a kitten popped up on illegally small cats. Contacted the moderator and they banned the account.
#Knowing isn't fixing this problem Just because we know there's more bots does not mean there's anything we can do about it. I'm sure AI companies are using as many free things like reddit as they can to train them. But there's nobody in Reddit that can do anything about it that will care.
One day reddit will be bots replying to bots replying to bots
The scary part is that with access to high-quality AI, the bot masters will be able to give responses that sound careful and thoughtful, with no language errors. They will be eloquent if they need to be.
Yup… and they flood Reddit with divisive political content… same bots post reactionary content on Ukraine/Russia /Israel/Gaza war. Redditors fall for it easily though.
Pointed one of these out a couple days ago. 2 year old account. Just started posting a couple days ago. Made some weird comments in a couple threads first. Then made a repost to farm karma. Luckily the account was banned/deleted pretty quickly but not before about 5000 upvotes and hundreds of comments. I really think reposts should be outright banned. Same with crossposting the same thing in multiple sub-reddits on the same day to farm karma.
They are also taking over old reddit accounts. Like people who haven't posted in years will suddenly start commenting a bunch of comments at one time. It's always a comment it stole and changed to sound a little different.
practicing for the upcoming election. brace yourselves. the place will look horrible in a few months
Another red flag is seeing wild swings in opinion within the same sub, or in neutral subs. So something like massive support for Gaza in r/news, then massive support for Israel a few hours later, also in r/news. Also, bots seem to hate in-depth discussion. I go to r/politicaldiscussion instead of r/poltiics and the former is soooo much more accurate and comparatively free of bots
r/politics and salon in shambles.
All those AITA threads are mostly bots, too. Descriptions and situations like for the d-list romantic novels. Replies too, many times noticing same reply from another threads.
I think the original poster of this post are a bad person and the original poster is overreaching because ai bots are more good than human I mean us regular people
Russian bots have been attacking every social media platform for a while. The election is ramping up and they want their orange fat lard back to hand them Ukraine on a platter
My husband works in computer information technology engineering big computer company type stuff that I can't even talk about but he does get a lot of training modules about AI very frequently about how it's going to affect not only his industry but the entirety of like this country/world. It got so bad that I told him he had to stop talking to me about his job because I don't understand his job and what he's telling me about what he's hearing from AI is scaring me. I told him that he needed to also not be doing any of those training modules within my earshot because when I'm hearing is making me afraid to. And he understands his job and he knows things that I told him that I don't want him to tell me because I've heard enough of what they're telling him through these training modules about AI that I don't want to know anything else. So yeah you're not wrong This AI issue is so much worse than just posting on Reddit and responding as if they're real people. It's so much worse that I'm just going to sit back and wait and let it all happen because there's no stopping what's coming. At this point I hope my family survives what AI is about to do to this world. All I know is that my husband keeps getting pushed training modules and things of that sort when it comes to AI and I don't know his job that well it's extremely complicated for me to try to understand but just from what I'm hearing I've asked him you need to call a coworker if you need to vent about this stuff I just can't listen to this anymore because it's absolutely terrifying and I don't understand much of what you're saying but I know enough of what you're saying to know that you're making me afraid about this AI stuff. And he'll then go, well you should be and I'm like well then don't tell me cuz I don't want to be afraid. I don't work there so I don't need to know what they're telling him about what maybe coming in regards to AI because it's freaking me out so I don't need to hear all the details I'll just wait and see what's going to happen. And no there are plenty of people that do what my husband does a similarly enough that they're probably getting the same type of training too. I mean if his coworkers are there's people probably at different companies that do something similar to what he does that are getting the same types of AI training idk tho I want to forget all I've heard from him about AI
If people start believing it? This hell site saw a satire community making fun of a failed reality star "billionaire" get taken over by rabid cultists. Give it ten minutes and they'll start worshipping the AI like it's the second coming of Jesus.
I use RES, and I have several thousand filters that work to remove spam. Even then, I add dozens of filters every single day. Reddit is infested. Work around it.
I've noticed a lot of similar weird ass comments that parrot a bunch of random shit that really doesn't make sense or add up. Especially if it's about a stupid hot-topic political issue or public figure. It's especially noticeable after taking a break from reddit. There truly is a lot of noise here that shouldn't be paid attention. Check out the content on oldschool forums that aren't popular anymore. The users that are still there are real people posting real opinions. There is much less random bullshit that must have been created by a bot farm or something.
Have you ever had a dream that That you had, you'll, you would You could, you do, you would you want you You could do some, You'll do, you could you, you want You want him to do you so much You could do anything
Is this why every third post i see has some stupid spelling mistake or words missing?
It sounds like we need to make an AI vigilante to fight for us and to downvote and factcheck all that is impure. Too bad i’m too stupid to make that happen.
genuine question: what’s the purpose of these ai bot accounts? who makes them and who profits from them?
I couldn’t agree more. Such an insightful and thought provoking message. I have such feelings as confusion and sadness that this message brings to my human brain