this post was submitted on 11 Mar 2024
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They are probably paying clickfarms.
Did you guys read the article? It’s all about how since google and Reddit penned a deal to use Reddit to train google AI models, google is now massively pushing Reddit links in search results.
And their answer, ironically, is to avoid “Gen-AI garbage.”
But you should really read the article. It pissed me the fuck off. Because that sounds…massively illegal.
Reddit probably isn’t, as that would be cooking their metrics and Huffman would get fucked by the long arm of the SEC. They might still be, Huffman loves Elon and Elon got away with tons of shit.
Advertisers are probably paying more content farms to astroturf it though.
Plus without the API, do you really think people just stopped scraping Reddit? They just run a headless Chrome instance now and I bet Reddit doesn’t look the gift horse of traffic in the mouth.
Yup, in fact we just banned ~13 accounts tonight from a subreddit I'm still involved with. That's just the ones we identified, and it's only a medium sized subreddit
A user noticed that the responses to a post sounded a little off and reported it. Turns out there was a network of bots using generative AI to mix real academic advice (ex. "Go talk to the advising office") with occasional subtle advertisements (ex. "I recommend using grammarly and (advertised service)".
Once we caught on, we looked through the history of those accounts and gathered as many as we could identify and banned them all.
I don't think this is Reddit's doing, and they're usually good about banning spam bots site wide once a mod report is made. Still, they benefit from increased activity and they have an incentive to do less of that. It was also much harder to notice the problem because of the AI generation. If a user didn't explicitly report it, I probably wouldn't have noticed
I highly suggest you ban what the were advertising and not just the account.
If advertiser's realize the shady bot farms they deal with are causing any comment that mentions their product to be automatically deleted, they will stop.
This is going to be the Idiocratizing of the internet. AI is going to be training in itself with these unidentified posts and get dumber and dumber.
Let’s hope no one lets it have access to anything important…
It feels a little like how steel from before above ground nuclear testing, called low-background (or pre-war) steel because it isn’t contaminated is prized for building some sensors.
Pre AI information need to be preserved, otherwise we might not really know if the info we’re seeking is fact based in any way.