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.
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.
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.
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)
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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.
Christ. This is not the future I envisioned.
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.
There must be such a lot of them. Accounts get sold on third party websites.
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
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.
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.
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.
I think some people just assume people they disagree with are bots.
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.
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.
To be fair, when you’re debating online your audience is vastly bigger than just the person you’re directly responding to.
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.