Hot take: 18 years of user contributions to reddit will serve as a base model for an AI that generates content and conversations. the reddit experience continues as a simulation, to harvest clicks, sales and ad revenue.

most of the time you'll be talking to a bot there without even realizing. they're gonna feed you products and ads interwoven into conversations, and the AI can be controlled so its output reflects corporate interests. advertisers are gonna be able to buy access and run campaigns. based on their input, the AI can generate thousands of comments and posts, all to support your corporate agenda.

for example you can set it to hate a public figure and force negative commentary into conversations all over the site. you can set it to praise and recommend your latest product. like when a pharma company has a new pill out, they'll be able to target self-help subs and flood them with fake anecdotes and user testimony that the new pill solves all your problems and you should check it out.

the only real humans you'll find there are the shills that run the place, and the poor suckers that fall for the scam.

it's gonna be a shithole.

EnglishMobster,
EnglishMobster avatar

This is already happening.

Bots are being used to astroturf the protests on Reddit. You can see at the bottom how this so-called "user" responds "as an AI language program..."

desudesudesu,

anyone else remember how historically youtube comments were always pure garbage? i wonder if that was just a very primitive a.i. spamming posts on popular videos?

Jarfil,

They still are. That's just "average and below" humans commenting.
Or as a park ranger would put it once: "there is a large overlap between the smartest bears and the dumbest humans"

genoxidedev1,
genoxidedev1 avatar

I never fully trust users with automated usernames and this just proves my paranoia.

Then again someone who calls subreddits "subReddit" is automagically a bot in my eyes anyways.

JunkMilesDavis,
JunkMilesDavis avatar

Glad it wasn't just me. It wasn't often I paid attention to usernames on the big subs, but it seemed like at some point they were absolutely flooded with "Adjective_Noun_1234" users, and I couldn't stop seeing it once I noticed. Those and the comment-reposting bots (which probably won't be called out by other bots anymore without a usable API) made me wonder how many actual humans I was interacting with.

Anomander,
Anomander avatar

There was also some very good and valid reasons why real people wound up with those usernames - mainly, that the signup process (from the App I think? maybe also in New Reddit?) both downplayed, and obstructed changing, the default username during the process - and instead led the user to believe that only the "display name" selected later would appear to other users on the site.

Completely omitting the fact that anyone on old reddit or accessing through an app would only see the username, as "display names" don't seem to have ever been served via the API.

To many of those users, they had no clue that what people were seeing attached to their comments or submissions was "extravagant_mustard_924" and not "Cool Dude Brian" or whatever they'd put in as their display name. They were led to believe that the latter was all that would display, and that signing up with a default account name would only determine what they entered in the top box while logging in.

blivet,
blivet avatar

It’s amazing how half-assed everything about Reddit is.

xXemokidforeverXx,

This is me learning display names were even a thing. I didn't stray much from the Apollo app.

quortez,
quortez avatar

TIL Reddit has display names. Why on earth would I know them is beyond me, but thanks for restricting your API ig ¯⁠\⁠⁠(⁠ツ⁠)⁠⁠/⁠¯

genoxidedev1,
genoxidedev1 avatar

It would have helped Reddit, or at least the user experience on Reddit, majorly if they had just disabled API access for all but a select few bots (Like automod for example).

Also on the NSFW side of Reddit those automated username "users" are the ones spamming their, or someones, OF on every NSFW subreddit, even unrelated ones to the content they're posting. Or so a friend told me, of course.

rynzcycle,

Oh wow, that's simultaneously hilarious, awesome, and terrifying.

Bonehead,

...and fake. The "AI" user admits further down that they are just trolling.

TheFork,

It's funny tho.

Empyreal,

Or its another form of a human-monitored bot account. Those have existed for years

Or its just another bot response. I've had arguments with bots that I have banned from my subreddit before. Some of their response mechanisms are quite creative.

riktor,
riktor avatar

Yeah I've replied to a post here too about bots taking over.
I used ChatGPT to "reply to the post as if you were a robot"
Made it a pretty funny response and then people were asking if I was a bot.
Who knows, maybe I am.

Arotrios,
Arotrios avatar

Holy fucking shit I'm dying. That's fucking hilarious.

I now want to make a bot that detects bots, grades their responses as 0% - 100% bot, posts the bottage score, and if they determine bottage, engage the other bot in endless conversation until it melts down from confusion.

We can live stream the battles. We'll call the show Babblebots.

Any devs interested?

cavemeat,

This sounds hysterical, and reddit's corpse is a great battlefield.

livus,
livus avatar

It is kind of getting that way already.

ENEMYGUNSHIP,
ENEMYGUNSHIP avatar

yep. almost like a beta phase...

pollodiabolo, (edited )

It's feasible. Highly profitable. Only a matter of time until someone does it. The only reason not do it, is if your morals stop you. and u/spez has no morals.

What's happening right now is that the smart users leave the platform. Makes perfect sense, they are not needed anymore, in fact they would be in the way of the scam running smoothly. So you want them gone. Reddit's actions make perfect sense really. They act exactly like they don't need contributors anymore. And for some reason, it doesn't bother them? There's a reason why it doesn't bother them, and people can't delete their history.

dismalnow,
dismalnow avatar

And it's not really a hot take.

If I could have this thought independently, it's probably already a common view.

(Reddit)'s dying.. slowly, and painfully. This decline will go on for years. into the endgame of mostly automoderated, bot-driven content.

...

Force those who remain to use a substandard app - inhibiting human interaction with the platform further.

All you're left with is content addicts, trolls, ads, dregs from the darkest corners, and bots that feed them.

TheRazorX,

Another stealth benefit to reddit with all this API crap, is that it'll be much harder to tell since most of the tools people use to analyze accounts won't work anymore. Keeping in mind Reddit started out by inflating their user numbers.

hardypart,

I actually think this is the fate of the entire corporate driven part of the internet (so basically 95% nowadays, lol). Non-corporate, federated platforms are the future and will remain as the bastions of actual human interaction while the rest of the internet is being FUBAR by large language model bots.

mrbubblesort,
mrbubblesort avatar

Seriously asking, what makes you think the fediverse is immune to that? Eventually they'll get good enough that they'll be almost indistinguishable from normal users, so how can we keep the bots out?

TheRazorX,

Nothing is immune, but at least on the fediverse it's unlikely API access will be revoked on tools used to detect said bots.

eleitl,

FOAF network for validation. For PGP signing parties people could even ask for ID.

apemint,
apemint avatar

It's not immune but until the fediverse reaches a critical mass, we're safe... probably.
After that, it will be the same whac-a-mole game we're used to and somehow I don't think we'll win.

rastilin,

There's a number of options including a chain of trust where you only see comments from someone who's been verified by someone who's been verified by someone and so on who's been verified by an actual real human that you've met in person. We can also charge per post, which will rapidly drive up the cost of a botnet (as well as trim down the number of two word derails).

BraveSirZaphod,
BraveSirZaphod avatar

I'm not sure how reliable chains of trust would be. There's a pretty obvious financial incentive for someone to simply lie and vouch for a bot etc. But in general, I think some kind of network of trustworthiness or verification as a real human will eventually be necessary. I could see PGP etc being useful.

archomrade,

“charge per post”

That part kind of worries me, are you proposing charging users to participate in the fediverse? Seems like it would also exclude a lot of people who can’t afford to spend money on social media…

riskable,
riskable avatar

Listen here, you! I paid good money for this here comment so you're gonna read it, alright‽

<Brought to you by FUBAR, a corporation with huge pockets that can afford to sway opinion with lots of carefully placed bot comments>

rastilin,

The obvious question is then "how are they helping pay for the servers they're using?".

It's not that I don't see your point, everyone should be able to take part in a community without having to spend money, but I do find it annoying that whenever the topic of money comes up, we end up debating the hypothetical of someone with 0c spare in their budget.

Charging for membership worked well for Something Awful, and they only charge something like $20 for lifetime membership anyway, plus an additional fee for extra functionality. But you don't get the money back if you get banned. Corporations would still be able to spend their way into the conversation, but it would be harder to create massive networks that just flood the real users.

archomrade,

The nice thing about federated media is that there doesn’t need to be one instance that carries most of the traffic. The cost gets distributed among many servers and instances, and they can choose how to find the server independently (many instance owners spend their own money to a point, then bridge the gap with donations from users).

I’m just not sure that’s the best way to cut down bots, IMHO.

CynAq,
CynAq avatar

Right now, we can already recognize lower quality bots within conversation. AI generated "art" is already very distinct to everyone to the point almost nobody misses it.

Language is a human instinct. Our minds create it, we can use it in all sorts of ways, bend it to our will however we want.

By the time bots become good enough to be indistinguishable online, they'll either be actually worth talking to, or they will simply be another corporate shill.

MrsEaves,
MrsEaves avatar

I was wondering about this myself. If a bot presents a good argument that promotes discussion, is the presence of a bot automatically bad?

I don’t love that right now, the focus is on eliminating or silencing the voice of bots, because as you point out, they’re going to be indistinguishable from human voices soon - if they aren’t already. In the education space, we’re already dealing with plagiarism platforms incorrectly claiming real student work is written by ChatGPT. Reading a viewpoint you disagree with and immediately jumping to “bot!” only serves to create echo chambers.

I think it’s better and safer long term to educate people to think critically, assume good intent, know their boundaries online (ie, don’t argue when you can’t be coherent about it and have to devolve to name calling, etc), and focus on the content and argument of the post, not who created it - unless it’s very clear from a look at their profile that they’re arguing in bad faith or astroturfing. A shitty argument won’t hold up to scrutiny, and you don’t have the risk of silencing good conversation from a human with an opposing viewpoint. Common agreement on community rules such as “no hate speech” or limiting self-promotion/review/ads to certain spaces and times is still the best and safest way to combat this, and from there it’s a matter of mods enforcing the boundaries on content, not who they think you are.

Aesthesiaphilia,

I was wondering about this myself. If a bot presents a good argument that promotes discussion, is the presence of a bot automatically bad?

Because bots don't think. They exist solely to push an agenda on behalf of someone.

BraveSirZaphod,
BraveSirZaphod avatar

If a bot presents a good argument that promotes discussion, is the presence of a bot automatically bad?

If the people involved in the conversation are there because they are intending to have a conversation with people, yes, it's automatically bad. If I want to have a conversation with a chatbot, I can happily and intentionally head over to ChatGPT etc.

Bots are not inherently bad, but I think it's imperative that our interactions with them are transparent and consensual.

Umbrias,

Part of the problem is that bots unfairly empower the speech of those with resources to dominate and dictate the conversation space, even in good effort, it disempowers everyone else. Even the act ofseeing the same ideas over and over can sway whole zeitgeists. Now imagine what bots cab do by dictating the bulk of what's even talked about at all.

taurentipper,

I agree with you 100%. If their motive is to make profit for shareholders or themselves they're imo inevitably going to do this.

!deleted120991,

deleted_by_author

    •
    canitendtherabbits,
    canitendtherabbits avatar

    I think they still have it but it was promoted to CEO about a year ago

    crowsby,
    crowsby avatar

    Fun thing about r/SubredditSimulator, it was created by Deimos/Chad Birch, who went on to create Tildes.net.

    umbraroze,
    umbraroze avatar

    SubredditSimulator was based on older generative algorithms, so everyone could fairly easily tell that it was rubbish. When SubredditSimulator got shut down, someone made a new one based on GPT-2 (I think) and everyone was like "OK, this is getting harder to distinguish from real people".

    I'm betting someone has made even more advanced bots by now. I'm betting someone's also not concerned about telling other users upfront that they're bots, and they're not confining them into specific subs. Now, the only reason I'm not accusing Reddit Inc themselves of building these bots is that they aren't exactly a bastion of software engineering excellence; the site barely works as is.

    mrbubblesort,
    mrbubblesort avatar

    When the bots started complaining about n*****s, I knew it had perfected emulating the average redditor

    https://www.reddit.com/r/SubSimulatorGPT2/comments/131r2z4/why_is_the_word_nigger_not_considered_racist/

    livus,
    livus avatar

    Let's face it, they already had it on some of the big default subs as well.

    I went though a phase of bot hunting, and it was not unusual to find comment chains of 3 bots replying to each other near the top of big threads, sometimes with a hapless human or two in the mix.

    They use snippets of comments from downthread (and usually downvote their "donor" comments to lower visibility) so it seems kind of organic. Sometimes they use a thesaurus or something and re word it somewhat.

    What was really sad was when you'd see a human writing screeds of long arguments in reply to them.

    HotDogFingies,
    HotDogFingies avatar

    Excuse my ignorance, but how were you able to recognize the bots?

    The repost bots were fairly easy to spot, but I sadly never found a situation like the one you're describing. I don't use reddit anymore, but the information may be useful elsewhere.

    mrbubblesort,
    mrbubblesort avatar

    Not the guy you were asking, but the ones I found were blatantly obvious because they would copy and reword info specific to the user they stole it from. Like "as a conservative, I wholly support what Ron DeSantis is doing in Florida" changed to "as an unwed teen-aged mother ..." kind of thing. Eventually though the bots are gonna get too good to spot I bet

    livus, (edited )
    livus avatar

    It's a bit like finding a single thread and unravelling it.
    I used to get dozens of these things banned a day, there were a lot of us bot hunters reporting bots.

    They sometimes sound "off", stop in mid sentence, reply to people as if they think it's the OP, reply as if they are OP, or post 💯 by itself. Or they have a username that fits a recent bot pattern (e.g. appending "rp" to existing usernames)
    .
    If you see one slip up once, then looking at its other comments will often lead you to new bots simply because they are all attracted to the same positions (prominent but a few comments deep).

    Certain subs like AITA and r/memes are more prone to them so I would go there for easy leads.

    Also if you check its actual submissions, a karma laden bot will often repost hobby content, then have a second bot come and claim to have bought a t shirt or mug with that content and post a malicious link. Then a third bot will pose as another redditor saying thanks I just ordered one to the second bot. Following those bots leads you to even more bots, etc.

    @XiELEd copying you in here.

    HotDogFingies,
    HotDogFingies avatar

    Christ. This is not the future I envisioned.

    rastilin,

    It makes you wonder if a ChatGPT bot could be automated to flag all these accounts. I'm sure that Reddit could have tagged and deleted the lot of them if they wanted to.

    livus,
    livus avatar

    There must be such a lot of them. Accounts get sold on third party websites.

    Aesthesiaphilia,

    The past year or so, they've been in every single thread with more than 50 comments. If you expand the comments and do a little ctrl+f searching, you'll see how they copy comments from users and then repost and have their fellow bots upvote them for visibility. Look at the timestamps on the posts.

    YouveCatToBeKittenMe,
    YouveCatToBeKittenMe avatar

    To add to what other people said: As a casual user who didn't go deliberately looking for bots, I mostly caught them when they posted a comment that was a complete non sequitur to the comment they replied to, like they were posted in the wrong thread. Which, well, is because they were--they were copied from elsewhere in the comment section and randomly posted as a reply to a more prominent thread. Ctrl+F came in very handy there. (They do sometimes reword things, but generally only a couple of words, so searching for bits and pieces of their comment still usually turns up results.)

    Also, the bot comments I caught were usually just a line or two, not entire paragraphs, even if they were copied from a longer comment.

    XiELEd,
    XiELEd avatar

    Considering most of reddit's comments are either one-liners and jokes, it's not that hard to get upvotes as a bot... but how'd you spot one? I'm afraid that I didn't learn the ability to distinguish between bot and human.

    borkcorkedforks,

    I think some people just assume people they disagree with are bots.

    livus,
    livus avatar

    No it was nothing like that, I'm talking about obvious bots.

    Not sure what it's been like since the blackout but it used to be if you reported a bot its account was normally deleted by admin within about 20 minutes.

    Aesthesiaphilia,

    Expand the comments and do a little ctrl+f searching. The bots tend to copy a comment, post it as their own (verbatim or slightly reworded), then have their fellow bots downvote the original and upvote the bot comment. You can also see in a new but reposted thread, the top few comments are exactly the same as a previous repost.

    DarienGS,

    What was really sad was when you'd see a human writing screeds of long arguments in reply to them.

    To be fair, when you're debating online your audience is vastly bigger than just the person you're directly responding to.

    livus,
    livus avatar

    That is a good point.

    I guess the times I had in mind were where the human had obviously become upset - often when a bot repurposed a reply in a way that made it seem like it was contributing a horrible point of view, so not a real debate.

    Andreas,
    @Andreas@feddit.dk avatar

    Reddit has been that way for a long time, after it lost the reputation of "niche forum for tech-obsessed weirdos" and became the internet's general hub for discussion. The default subreddits are severely astroturfed by marketing and political campaigning groups, and Reddit turns a blind eye to it as long as it's a paid partnership. There was one obvious case where bots in /r/politics accidentally targeted an AutoModerator thread instead of a candidate's promotion thread and filled it with praise for that candidate.

    PabloDiscobar,
    PabloDiscobar avatar

    There was one obvious case where bots in /r/politics accidentally targeted an AutoModerator thread instead of a candidate's promotion thread and filled it with praise for that candidate.

    Any source for this? I'd like to have a look.

    Andreas,
    @Andreas@feddit.dk avatar

    Nope, sorry. Just a memory of a Reddit thread with very out-of-context comments. Ironically, while trying to search for documentation of the thread, DuckDuckGo returned a lot of research papers about the analysis of bot content on Reddit starting from 2015, so there's still proof that botting on Reddit goes way back.

    Maxcoffee,
    Maxcoffee avatar

    I see something similar in a lot of tech-related threads too.

    Just check out posts and comments about Corsair and AMD in particular. There is often no room for logic, facts or debate around their products on Reddit. Rather, threads feel like you're stuck in a marketing promo event where everyone feels the products are great and fantastic and can do no wrong. It's eerily like you're seeing a bunch of bots or paid shill accounts all talking to each other.

    PabloDiscobar,
    PabloDiscobar avatar

    I discussed in the AMD sub and it's completely filled with consumers. They have no clue about electronics or development. It could be malevolence, but it's becoming harder and harder to discern it from ignorance.

    Madrigal,

    Given Huffman’s apparent lack of integrity, this is sadly plausible.

    Mediocre_Bard,

    God damn, that is bleak. It's probably not wrong, but it is bleak.

    cazzodicristo, (edited )

    it's bleak. can I say.. what they want is for you to be half-asleep, hooked on drugs, forever hating each other. they want this. it's your ideal state for anyone that wields power in this world.

    Hypx,
    Hypx avatar

    Ever heard of the Dead Internet Theory? It's the idea that bots have taken over the Internet and there are few real humans left. For the whole of the Internet, this is a conspiracy theory. But for any individual platform, it is a totally plausible outcome. Reddit could become one of those bot networks that just pretends to be a social media platform. Twitter is on track for that too.

    Bishma,

    My thought too. The Dead Internet Theory was more of a prediction.

    Eggyhead,
    Eggyhead avatar

    How would this be prevented on the fediverse?

    JasSmith,

    We control the experience here to a greater degree. If an instance decides to lean into AI content, we can leave for another, and others can defederate (if desired). Further, bots will be far more transparent. Reddit can (and likely does) offer their preferred bots exemptions for automatic filtering; probably promoting their content using some opaque algorithm. Said bots will receive no such preferential treatment across the Fediverse.

    eleitl,

    The most thorough option is running your own instance. Most won't do this, but you can.

    When Reddit was open source you could set up your instance. But unmaintained, and without federation.

    NetHandle,

    Didn't they try that already and they ended up pulling the plug because the AI became a nazi?

    DarkenLM,

    Like all other before it. Tay got the same fate, and the only reason ChatGPT isn't it because they have some filters that have a bit more quality than the rest.

    Dr_Cog,
    @Dr_Cog@mander.xyz avatar

    The main difference is that gpt does not learn from user interactions

    popekingjoe,
    popekingjoe avatar

    Yeah this makes a lot of sense. I'm glad to be rid of Reddit tbh.

    I will miss the porn though.

    dullbananas,
    @dullbananas@lemmy.ca avatar

    read.easypeasymethod.org

    popekingjoe,
    popekingjoe avatar

    Well this is completely unwelcome, unsolicited, and unnecessary. 🤨

    rastilin,

    I don't dare click the link, what is it?

    popekingjoe,
    popekingjoe avatar

    It's a link to a GitHub repo of an ebook that's supposed to help with porn addiction.

    rastilin,

    Not even a self published Kindle ebook? Yikes. I bet the secret turns out to be "becoming more religious".

    popekingjoe,
    popekingjoe avatar

    I didn't read too much into it but I'd take that bet for sure.

    dullbananas,
    @dullbananas@lemmy.ca avatar

    Porn is completely unwelcome, unsolicited, and unnecessary

    Auzy,

    wars have been won and lost over porn

    pollodiabolo,

    I should go watch the Truman Show again.

    xptiger,

    I suggest to watch "The Social Dilemma" on Netflix, not a paid sponsor ok hahaha.

    This will become or "just already becomes" a great opportunity for elections, conspiracies, propagandas, prohibitions and defamations and corruption of minds of freely learning real online people, a great opportunity with poor, naive, innocent real online people and especially youngsters and upcoming generations just browsing, enjoying and wanting the Internet. So I swear there will be a massive daunting aftereffect on society/people/youngsters soon to be grownups with not-normal mindsets anew after.

    BTW OPTIONS:

    Rebellious: annihilate those servers!!!

    Civil: manually delete/edit/request away every info, posts, comments and personals.

    Best I believe: be edified and keep learning particularly to media literacy to well and easily discern the color—truth every time reading or obtaining online/outside. Nothing can ever corrupt a rational man that learns and achieves truth.

    mordred,

    Tbh I was under the impression that it was already the case that you're depicting. Old reddit was completely different than what it became, and I'm preeeeetty sure it's because of the scenario that you imagined being already in effect.

    CarolineJohnson,

    Reddit stole this idea from /r/subredditsimulator and /r/subredditsimulatorgpt2...

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