Reddit @lemmy.ml ylai @lemmy.ml 8 mo. ago

AI Is Poisoning Reddit to Promote Products and Game Google With 'Parasite SEO'

www.404media.co AI Is Poisoning Reddit to Promote Products and Game Google With 'Parasite SEO'

A market for manipulating Reddit using AI have emerged.

36 comments

How do we keep the bots out of Lemmy? Eventually all the AI rot will spread to the fediverse.
- Defederate/ban them, defederate instances that don't adequately stop them from their instances.
  
  That might work for now, but AI bots can easily create more content faster than human moderators can go through. We will need mechanisms to prove humanness.
  
  That's how you dismantle the current network in it's entirety
- Realistically, you don't. You can't really.
  
  The only way would be to verify each account somehow.
  
  Yea, it will be a hard problem to solve. There’s no good solutions right now. Hopefully someone with the creativity and skill will come up with something.
- Are AI bots really the true problem, or is the problem product promotion? Humans can do that too.
  
  Yea, but AI bots do it at an unprecedented scale. The price of generating bullshit is practically 0. There is already cheap AI content every where and people are already getting tired of it. It’s true that human actors has done something similar for a long time, but now AI will make the process so easy that AI junk will be everywhere. Look at Google search results, it’s already filled with blogspam generated by AI. Blogspam was a problem before, but now it’s insufferable. Cheap midjourney “art” is showing up in search results even when you search for real classic artist, you get these ugly AI copies. Generative AI is the ultimate bullshit and spam machine.
  
  Bots aren't the problem. You mistake the tool for its operator by cursing a bot. If I had a specific purpose for a bot, I'd use one. The difference between my using a bot and a clickfarmer using a bot is that I wouldn't treat Lemmy instances as a resource to be exploited (and ultimately ruined). Such an attitude would inform the how and the what behind my bot use.
  
  The problem as always comes back to bad incentives, bad design and bad behaviour.
- I identify with your problem as we are similarly, human people. Have you thought as I have in the past, "Why not let AI solve this problem for me?" I have used BotRemoverAI.co for this issue and the results have been highly acceptable!
  
  Thank you for your suggestion kind stranger take my gold sir edit this blew up thank you for the award
- We are a community. The community will find a way as we can do anything. We have faith of the heart and everything.
  
  That sounds more like a prayer than a plan.
- I can see the measures we currently take for ads (large user-maintained subscribable blocklists) being part of the solution. That, and some form of privacy-respecting POW scheme.
It was like that before I left
And it couldn't have happened to a nicer website.
Not surprising they've been social marketing with corporate accounts and purchased accounts for years because the know it's effective.

This is just the natural evolution of that.
- Yeah this is one instance where I don't care that the human bots are being replaced with AI bots. I mean, it's even worse than before, but those "workers" don't have my support here.
  
  Astroturfers losing their jobs to AI. I imagine some poor guy coming home after a long day of warmongering and promoting nuclear energy, hanging up his coat: „honey, I’m home“. And the wife has prepared a beautiful dinner, it could be a wonderful day. „How was work today?“, the wife asks. And the guy has to tell her how he lost his job to the evil twin brother of ChatGPT because corporate has done the math and they realized that a bot can replace possibly hundreds of humans. It’s a tragedy really, how is the guy going to pay for his mortgage? How’s he gonna feed his family? I think astroturfers should unionize to combat this kind of automation. It creates harm to society.
Capitalism sure is having fun with AI
I'm not a regular there any more, but I feel like there's more "natural" spam posts nowadays. They're not natural enough that they haven't prompted me to check the account's post history (all mention product x, of course).

Edit: e.g. this one

If this is an example of the AI, it's not very good.
- LLMs don't generate that sort of templated response for conversation (although they do for software code).
  
  It's more likely a traditional ad, using some classical algorithms perhaps.
Bitch, reddit is poisoning reddit.
What is dead can never die
- And in strange memory caches, even death may die.
Any summary bot ?

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