Reddit reached the point where AI generated comments are Top Comments

Blaze (he/him)@feddit.org to Reddit@lemmy.world – 208 points –
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AI comments under an AI generated article being inflated by AI account activity. Who even needs end users anymore? Its a perfectly autonomous system.

Who even needs end users anymore?

Advertisers do, and if they ever wise up spez's house of cards will crumble.

Advertisers don't need end users. They just need happy bosses willing to cover their salaries.

In that sense, the business marketing team and the Reddit "look at our bullshit numbers" team are on the same side of the field.

It's easy to bullshit engagement, it's tougher to bullshit click-through rates and sale conversion metrics. It will take time to identify patterns, but inevitably the data will begin to reflect the truth, that's when advertisers will break and move their money to more successful (organic) platforms.

At least this is what happens in a sane world, as for our reality who knows.

If they haven't figured it out by now they probably never will. After all fake engagement isn't a new thing, not by a long shot. They'll probably just make some excuse about banner blindness for why click-through rates are down, possibly trying to also justify more aggressive ads, and more spending.

Yep. As long as sales and marketing can point to some bullshit KPI metrics as having exceeded all their goals, they act like they are the ones who bring in the profit.

Nevermind no one is buying anything and no traffic is going to the website, that is a different profit center’s problem and certainly not the fault of the MBA losers.

Ironically there used to be a subreddit for this.

It was intentionally meant to be view-only for humans, and the bots within it were named for and trained on other subreddits. So you have AdviceAnimalsBot, LinuxBot, GamingBot, AskRedditBot, GoneWildBot, etc. They would post on a rotation, emulating what users in their respective subreddits posted. They would all comment on each other's posts, emulating their respective subreddit's comments.

As an experiment it was actually really cool and fun to read through. It was also very clear that these were bots and you could identify which was which, and nothing was pretending to be a human for karma (there were no votes in the subreddit).

You mean r/SubredditSimulator? I miss that place, it was funny as hell.

Yeah that was the one! I had forgotten the name. It was actually a really cool use of bots and a fun microcosm of how they interact with each other. From the perspective of like, a college AI research project, it was really interesting.

Kinda sucks that that is just the entire website now.

Guess Reddit liked the idea too and decided to expand on it, for profits

If lemmy becomes just a bit more popular, the same thing will happen

Yep, and even worse. Lemmy has absolutely NO controls for quality and minimal moderation tools or capabilities. It's in a much worse position than Reddit.

If it's not already happening (And I think it is), it will.

What tools are missing to moderate a LLM bot?

I am a mod, I receive a report from an user, check it and ban. All done with current tools we have.

I receive a report from an user, check it and ban

That's all manual effort currently. Someone has to report a problematic post, you have to manually look at it, manually decided if it should be removed, and manually remove it. I'm not the biggest fan of automatically removing content, but when someone posts 500 posts all at once that manual effort is a pain.

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Dead Internet been here since 2010 at least.

Dead internet might be true

Something that nobody mentions when they talk about dead internet theory that I think should be talked about is that the worthless engagement trolls that are real people, really do not and should not count as real people. They're never going to give you worthwhile responses, they don't add anything to conversations. Unless they see an opportunity to pick a fight they're probably not even listening to you.

Therefore they're not really any different than an AI run account that's not going to acknowledge you. And in some ways they are much worse, despite being technically "real people".

Is it? Or is one person claiming that?

Have a look yourself at the comment

I can’t exactly put my finger on it, but every god damn thing ChatGPT spits out has the same cadence or structure. Something about how it lays out points and wraps it up, and its usage of commas, is so noticeable to me.

Hmm. As an overuser of commas myself, I better try to tone that down.

I wouldn’t say it’s necessarily overuse of commas, it’s how it consistently uses them the same way in nearly every response. It’s something about the overall structure of what it spits out. I wish a linguist would pop in and break it down for me. It’s a combination of tone, tense, arrangement of the sentences, how the paragraphs are put together - all of it feels very samey to me, unless it’s prompted otherwise.

There’s only a few “styles” of sentences it spits out and to me, it seems quite obvious. Humans don’t write that consistently all the time, they’re messier.

Ok, good, that makes sense. I was getting worried for a minute.

I feel you. My thoughts often spill out that way, too.

Yep the same thing if you make it roleplay as characters in a conflict. It always tries to find middle ground and end it

Lots of compound sentences. And a "tone" suitable for USA Today. At least, that's the vibe I get from ChatGPT.

To me, ChatGPT always sounds like a high school freshman submitting a half-assed English paper.

Tbf I also form sentences like this when I'm not being a total bitch and dunking on fools.

Well that seems better worded than much of reddit.

Huh.

So in my 'frequently visited' list, very recently a link to chatGPT has populated.

I've poked at a few of the generative ai things, but only the actual chatgpt once, months ago, and have wondered if there's enough bullshit from reddit to give it enough dings to make the list.

Apparently so

I see your account is quite recent, so welcome here!

Hi! Made an account over on some other lemmy server, and apparently the guy running it was old, had health problems, and (rightly so) stopped giving two shits about an internet forum.

Reddit sucks enough I've tried again. It's going okay. I don't give enough of a shit to really figure how the whole lemmy/fediverse works, but at least it aint corpo garbage