AI Bros were really like “Reddit is one of our very few sources of usable data. What if we poisoned it too ? 🤪”
Way to go guys ! Have fun with your degenerate data sets, and the resulting consanguine models that are 100% unusable as a result 😘
Reddit is not dying fast enough
What is Clawdbot farm?
Clawdbot is an AI that takes full control of the PC, can open browsers, read pages, send an email, delete files, operate the CLI, install programs, anything you can do on a PC they can do. A farm is a group of PC’s/servers.
So this is a group of AI ran computers, being use for content manipulation on reddit.
Why don’t Reddit ban them? On Lemmy even vote manipulation is a ban reason
Money, Reddit makes money by selling advertising.
They don’t care if it’s quality or not, more comments/posts equal more money. Capitalism 101.
They’re not making money off these bots though.
there’s a significant overlap between the most advanced AI bots and the most dull humans.
I sometimes wonder how prevalent bots are on Lemmy. On one hand, the barrier for entry might be lower / the effectiveness of bans harder to gauge. On the other, I’d think we’re a smaller target, less attractive as a target.
Either way, the potential to accuse dissenters of being bots or paid actors is a symptom of the general toxicity and slop spilling all over the internet these days. A (comparatively) few people can erode fundamental assumptions and trust. Ten years ago, I would’ve been repulsed by the idea of dehumanising conversational opponents that way (which may have been just me being more naive), but today I can’t really fault anyone.
In terms of risk assessment (value÷effort), I’m inclined to think something with the reach of Ex-Twitter or reddit would be a more lucrative target, and most people here actually are people—people I disagree with, maybe, but still a human on the other side of the screen. Given the niche appeal, the audience here may overall be more eccentric and argumentative, so it’s easy to mistake genuine users for propaganda bots instead of just people with strong convictions.
But I hate that the question is a relevant one in the first place.
We are the web. There is no web without the we.
It is ultimately humans who add value to the internet. We can make decisions, take action, have bank accounts, bots for the most part still can’t. If we keep growing, there will come a time where swaying opinions, impressing advertisements or driving dissent will reach that value/effort threshold, especially with the effort term shrinking more everyday
I think that we are genuinely witnessing the end of the internet as we know it and if we want meaningful online contact to persist after this death, then we should come up with ways that communities can weather the storm.
I don’t know what the solution is, but I want to talk and think about it with others that care.
On the individual level we can maybe fortify against the reasons that might make someone want to extract that value.
- Being a principled conscious consumer makes you a less likely target for advertisement
- Avoid ragebait and clickbait, and develop a good epistemic bullshit filter along with media literacy, this makes it more difficult to lie to you, or to provoke outrage.
- Unfortunately, be selective with your trust. How old is the user account? are the posting hours normal? does the user come across as a genuine human being that values discussion and meaningful online contact?
- Be authentic and genuine. I don’t know how else to signify that I am real (shoutout to the þorn users)
I would love to hear what others think.
This guy just openly admitted to shitting in the global punch bowl.
It would really be a shame if
someoneeveryone sent an army of bots to antagonize him at every waking moment of the day.What does this asshole do with these bots, run influence operations? For whom? What do we know about which influence operations are hired for which interests? Forget the government ones for a moment, what about commercial interests?
Toxic chemicals for instance, if you mention one it flags it and sends it to agents that cycle through fake accounts, backed up by bots to vote with them, to argue endlessly.
It’s like mentioning voldemort. Try it, talk trash about aspartame on reddit, or roundup, or atrazine, or god forbid nuclear energy, they’ve lots of real world dupes on the latter there, the decades long influence operations have borne fruit, but they have influence agents for all of those things, on keyword, the worst are on fluff pieces, propaganda pieces their PR firms or whatever make and they post it, those will be overrun, and the agents will mass flag you if you strongly argue against their bullshit.
What does this asshole do with these bots, run influence operations? For whom? What do we know about which influence operations are hired for which interests? Forget the government ones for a moment, what about commercial interests?
If it’s the same guy that was posted about a while ago, they do it for (blackhat) marketing. The bots mostly post comments in threads that look like a normal discussion, but where the goal is to move people away from one solution to another one. Imagine if somebody asks whether a piece of software is good, a bot then replies that they have not heard good things about it, and another bot chimes in and says “yeah I have been using <other software> instead”.
They’ll probably also make manual posts claiming how good something is, put it in their control panel and a single bot will post it, while the other bots chime in with upvotes and discussion.
Add a bit of logic to chime in on unrelated posts to make the account look more legit and you got yourself an army.
“Reddit is just you, me, and /u/Karmanaut”
I never thought I’d see the day when this adage would become true again, let alone in this way 😂
Everyone is cooked because a bot can write a comment on a bot platform and not get banned? LOL
it maybe 0.5% now but reddit will catch up and ban all the bots eventually, they find bots pretty easily. but the ones that they do not go hard ban on are propaganda ones.
No they don’t. They’re pretty good at gatekeeping humans though
Everyone is cooked, you are all cooked
Thanks for making the problem worse, fuck you too man.
Every*
And yet I get constantly shadowbanned there just for using a VPN…
I think reddit likes bots more than it likes real users.
Bots nowadays use residential proxy networks. When people use a free VPN or other shady software, they might become part of the network, and bad actors can route traffic trough their devices.
Well why not, bots inflate their numbers more.
🛜💀🛜
Reddit has shown through its actions that it’s more interested in banning real users than bots, and wants to protect bots from being identified and called out by users, so it’s not that surprising they’ve been able to do this.
The days of having arguments with Internet strangers and knowing that aren’t a bot are officially over. It’s hard to tell exactly when the period ended, but it’s definitely done now.
No bro LLMs are not that smart, maybe some low IQ Reddit/TikTok people can’t see the difference but We do
Yeah, what I do right now is just join a Discord servers and argue with people on voice chat. YMMV tho, I accidentally made some lifelong friends this way.
I’d like to argue with you about that, but alas…
I did that only twice and it never did it again. Arguing with people on the internet is pointless to begin with.
Depands on how you define “Argue”
I find it the best feeling to click off an aggressive reply then never think about it again.
No its not!
Pfft, you would think that wouldn’t you? /s
according to his own claim, and he’s selling his super secret methods. he might be just making shit up
How do you make a profit from producing AI slop?
You sell how-to guides to other producers of AI slop.
i think this one was purest form of it to date https://www.404media.co/inside-the-world-of-tiktok-spammers-and-the-ai-tools-that-enable-them/
