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.
This is already happening.
Bots are being used to astroturf the protests on Reddit. You can see at the bottom how this so-called “user” responds “as an AI language program…”
Oh wow, that’s simultaneously hilarious, awesome, and terrifying.
…and fake. The “AI” user admits further down that they are just trolling.
It’s funny tho.
Or its another form of a human-monitored bot account. Those have existed for years
Or its just another bot response. I’ve had arguments with bots that I have banned from my subreddit before. Some of their response mechanisms are quite creative.
I never fully trust users with automated usernames and this just proves my paranoia.
Then again someone who calls subreddits “subReddit” is automagically a bot in my eyes anyways.
Glad it wasn’t just me. It wasn’t often I paid attention to usernames on the big subs, but it seemed like at some point they were absolutely flooded with “Adjective_Noun_1234” users, and I couldn’t stop seeing it once I noticed. Those and the comment-reposting bots (which probably won’t be called out by other bots anymore without a usable API) made me wonder how many actual humans I was interacting with.
There was also some very good and valid reasons why real people wound up with those usernames - mainly, that the signup process (from the App I think? maybe also in New Reddit?) both downplayed, and obstructed changing, the default username during the process - and instead led the user to believe that only the “display name” selected later would appear to other users on the site.
Completely omitting the fact that anyone on old reddit or accessing through an app would only see the username, as “display names” don’t seem to have ever been served via the API.
To many of those users, they had no clue that what people were seeing attached to their comments or submissions was “extravagant_mustard_924” and not “Cool Dude Brian” or whatever they’d put in as their display name. They were led to believe that the latter was all that would display, and that signing up with a default account name would only determine what they entered in the top box while logging in.
This is me learning display names were even a thing. I didn’t stray much from the Apollo app.
It’s amazing how half-assed everything about Reddit is.
TIL Reddit has display names. Why on earth would I know them is beyond me, but thanks for restricting your API ig ¯\(ツ)/¯
I’m finding out only just now that reddit even has display names.
It would have helped Reddit, or at least the user experience on Reddit, majorly if they had just disabled API access for all but a select few bots (Like automod for example).
Also on the NSFW side of Reddit those automated username “users” are the ones spamming their, or someones, OF on every NSFW subreddit, even unrelated ones to the content they’re posting. Or so a friend told me, of course.
Holy fucking shit I’m dying. That’s fucking hilarious.
I now want to make a bot that detects bots, grades their responses as 0% - 100% bot, posts the bottage score, and if they determine bottage, engage the other bot in endless conversation until it melts down from confusion.
We can live stream the battles. We’ll call the show Babblebots.
Any devs interested?
This sounds hysterical, and reddit’s corpse is a great battlefield.
This would actually be hilarious. I wish I had the skills to help with it.
anyone else remember how historically youtube comments were always pure garbage? i wonder if that was just a very primitive a.i. spamming posts on popular videos?
They still are. That’s just “average and below” humans commenting.
Or as a park ranger would put it once: “there is a large overlap between the smartest bears and the dumbest humans”
Yeah I’ve replied to a post here too about bots taking over.
I used ChatGPT to “reply to the post as if you were a robot”
Made it a pretty funny response and then people were asking if I was a bot.
Who knows, maybe I am.