The one thing AI LLMs seem to be actually quite good at is generating lots of quite ‘real’/‘genuine’ sounding comments and replies, so it really could be bots. It probably doesn’t actually take that much effort either in relative terms, if you decide you want to AstroTurf an online space.
It’s a shame because it could basically kill discussion on the internet as we know it. It’s mad to think it, but in a few years we could be telling younger generations of a time when we wrote words to each other online and it was reasonable to assume that we were talking to a real person…