Reddit Migration

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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, sa (kbin.social)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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.

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[+] [email protected] 24 points 1 year ago (18 children)

[deleted]

[–] [email protected] 38 points 1 year ago (13 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago (6 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

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.

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