AI bots on Reddit reaching the front page? I absolutely believe it

Way too many...

I was born before the Internet. The Internet is always lumped into the "entertainment" part of my brain. A lot of people that have grown up knowing only the Internet think the Internet is much more "real". It's a problem.

Man, sometimes when I finish grabbing something I needed from Reddit, I hit the frontpage (always logged out) just out of morbid curiosity.
Every single time that r/AmIOverreacting sub is there with the most obvious "no, you're not" situation ever.

I never once seen that sub show up before the exodus. AI or not, I refuse to believe any frontpage posts from that sub are anything other than made up bullshit.

If it's well-written enough to be entertaining, it doesn't even matter whether it's real or not. Something like it almost certainly happened to someone at some point.

ESH

Typical AITA post:

"I want to do what I want with my own life. AITA?"

Everybody Sucks Here

I'm thinking of pulling the plug on Reddit (at least for a while). My tipping point has become how the "drone" story is becoming popular. At first it was intriguing and mysterious (the airport shutdowns and reports of large vehicles at low levels was fascinating), but I'm getting the vibe it's a misinformation campaign to distract the US from how we are about to be changed.

I was actually permabanned in the "News" sub for an innocuous comment. All it was is that I noted the federal authorities are likely correct for saying most of the reports of "UFOs" are likely airplanes and manmade drones, and to play devil's advocate I mentioned there were likely legitimate reports of UAPs, but since the majority were probably mistaken planes the Federal agencies' reactions were technically truthful.

It's "reality television" on a discussion forum to karma farm and help push other kinds of misinformation.

Look at that, the detection heuristics all laid out nice and neatly. The only issue is that Reddit doesn't want to detect bots because they are likely using them. Reddit at one point was using a form of bot protection but it wasn't for posts; instead, it was for ad fraud.

They're pretty much declaring a war on VPNs also

Also doesn’t fix the problem at all, I can still just use AI to post to my main account

you could try to cook up some kind of trust chain, without totally abandoning privacy.

Get a government-certified agencies minting master key tied to your id. You only get one, with trust rating tied to it.

With that master key you can generate infinite amount of sub-ids that dont identify you but show your trust rating(fuzzed).

Have a cross-network reporting system that can lower that rating for abuses like botting.

idk Im just spitballing

I wonder where people in the future will get their information from. What trustworthy sources of information are there? If the internet is overrun with bots, then you can't really trust anything you read there, as it could all be propaganda. What else to do, though, to get your news?

let me scan your eyeballs. it’s the only way

I dunno, part of me is ok with it. It's clear to me how bad things are going to get. So having certain platforms or spaces with some level of public identity validation seems like it might be ok....

Yeah, a real problem solver would probably be to remove the incentive for someone to do this.

It would probably be far less likely for someone to do that on lemmy, as there is no karma and you dont get paid for upvotes or something. (Still there are incentives, like creating credibility, celebrity accounts, maybe influence public opinion, self-pleasure from seeing upvotes to "your" posts/comments etc., but they arent such potent incetives as directly monetary incetives.)

there isnt so much incentive. No advertisement. Upvote counters behave weirdly in the fediverse (from what i can see).

There are no virtual points to earn on Lemmy. So hopefully it will resist the enshitification for while.

I politely disagree.

At least I know to blame Claude.

There are at least 37 of us. Unless a bot posted this...

At least one of you is real.

The other guy is me.

It's ultimately about ad money. They haven't cared it's humans or bots either. They keep paying out either way. This predates long before the LLM era. It's bizarre.

It's pretty much a case of the POSIWID. The system is meant to be genuine human engagement. What the system does is artificial at every step. Turns out its purpose is to fabricate things for bots to engage with. And this is all propped up by people who for some reason pay to keep the system running.

It's like reality TV & soap operas in text form. You can somewhat easily spot the AI posts though, which are plentiful now. They all tend to have the same "professional" writing style and a high tendency to add mid sentence "quotes" and em dashes (—) which you need a numpad combo to actually write out manually - a casual write-up would just use the - symbols, if at all. LLMs also make a lot of logic errors that may pop up. Example from one of the currently highly upvoted posts:

He pulled out what looked like a box from a special jewelry store. My heart raced with excitement as I assumed it was a lovely bracelet or a special memento for our wedding day. But when he opened the box, I was absolutely stunned. Inside was a key to a house he supposedly bought for us. I was taken aback because I had no idea he was even looking for real estate. My first reaction was one of shock and confusion, as I thought it was a huge decision that we should have discussed together.

As I processed the moment, I realized the house wasn’t just any house—it was a fixer-upper on the outskirts of town. Now, I get that it can be a great investment, but this particular house needed a ton of work. I’m talking major renovations and repairs, and I honestly had no desire to live there.

Aside from the weird writing (Oh jolly! Expensive gifts! How exciting!), this lady somehow realized & identified this house, location and its state just by looking at some random key in that moment. Bonus frustration if you read through the comments who eat all of this shit up, assuming they aren't also bots.

Two weeks ago someone on one of those story subs, I think it was amioverreacting, was milking off karma making updates. They made 5 posts about the whole thing and even started to sell merch to profit in real life until they took the last post down.

The truly valuable data is the stuff that was created prior to LLMs, anything after this is tainted by slop. Any verifiable human data would be worth more, which is why they are simultaneously trying to erode any and all privacy

These days the LLMs feed the LLMs so you can model models unless you're excluding any public data from the last decade. You have to assume all public data based on users is tainted when used for training.

Or getting this shit after you comment somewhere:

"Excuse me but could you please send a direct message to our admins to verify your account before placing a comment? Everyone has to do it."

I replied "go fuck yourself" and they banned me instantly and I never even submitted anything lmao.

If your statement was true, then it should be disclosed in a visible manner, which it isn't.