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..."
this post was submitted on 29 Jun 2023
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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.
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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.
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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?
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It is kind of getting that way already.
yep. almost like a beta phase...
It's feasible. Highly profitable. Only a matter of time until someone does it. The only reason not do it, is if your morals stop you. and u/spez has no morals.
What's happening right now is that the smart users leave the platform. Makes perfect sense, they are not needed anymore, in fact they would be in the way of the scam running smoothly. So you want them gone. Reddit's actions make perfect sense really. They act exactly like they don't need contributors anymore. And for some reason, it doesn't bother them? There's a reason why it doesn't bother them, and people can't delete their history.
And it's not really a hot take.
If I could have this thought independently, it's probably already a common view.
(Reddit)'s dying.. slowly, and painfully. This decline will go on for years. into the endgame of mostly automoderated, bot-driven content.
...
Force those who remain to use a substandard app - inhibiting human interaction with the platform further.
All you're left with is content addicts, trolls, ads, dregs from the darkest corners, and bots that feed them.
Another stealth benefit to reddit with all this API crap, is that it'll be much harder to tell since most of the tools people use to analyze accounts won't work anymore. Keeping in mind Reddit started out by inflating their user numbers.
I actually think this is the fate of the entire corporate driven part of the internet (so basically 95% nowadays, lol). Non-corporate, federated platforms are the future and will remain as the bastions of actual human interaction while the rest of the internet is being FUBAR by large language model bots.
Seriously asking, what makes you think the fediverse is immune to that? Eventually they'll get good enough that they'll be almost indistinguishable from normal users, so how can we keep the bots out?
There's a number of options including a chain of trust where you only see comments from someone who's been verified by someone who's been verified by someone and so on who's been verified by an actual real human that you've met in person. We can also charge per post, which will rapidly drive up the cost of a botnet (as well as trim down the number of two word derails).
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It's not immune but until the fediverse reaches a critical mass, we're safe... probably.
After that, it will be the same whac-a-mole game we're used to and somehow I don't think we'll win.
Right now, we can already recognize lower quality bots within conversation. AI generated "art" is already very distinct to everyone to the point almost nobody misses it.
Language is a human instinct. Our minds create it, we can use it in all sorts of ways, bend it to our will however we want.
By the time bots become good enough to be indistinguishable online, they'll either be actually worth talking to, or they will simply be another corporate shill.
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I agree with you 100%. If their motive is to make profit for shareholders or themselves they're imo inevitably going to do this.
Reddit has been that way for a long time, after it lost the reputation of "niche forum for tech-obsessed weirdos" and became the internet's general hub for discussion. The default subreddits are severely astroturfed by marketing and political campaigning groups, and Reddit turns a blind eye to it as long as it's a paid partnership. There was one obvious case where bots in /r/politics accidentally targeted an AutoModerator thread instead of a candidate's promotion thread and filled it with praise for that candidate.
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How would this be prevented on the fediverse?
We control the experience here to a greater degree. If an instance decides to lean into AI content, we can leave for another, and others can defederate (if desired). Further, bots will be far more transparent. Reddit can (and likely does) offer their preferred bots exemptions for automatic filtering; probably promoting their content using some opaque algorithm. Said bots will receive no such preferential treatment across the Fediverse.
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Given Huffman’s apparent lack of integrity, this is sadly plausible.
Ever heard of the Dead Internet Theory? It's the idea that bots have taken over the Internet and there are few real humans left. For the whole of the Internet, this is a conspiracy theory. But for any individual platform, it is a totally plausible outcome. Reddit could become one of those bot networks that just pretends to be a social media platform. Twitter is on track for that too.
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I should go watch the Truman Show again.
Yeah this makes a lot of sense. I'm glad to be rid of Reddit tbh.
I will miss the porn though.
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God damn, that is bleak. It's probably not wrong, but it is bleak.
it's bleak. can I say.. what they want is for you to be half-asleep, hooked on drugs, forever hating each other. they want this. it's your ideal state for anyone that wields power in this world.
Didn't they try that already and they ended up pulling the plug because the AI became a nazi?
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The larger subs are already starting to become a war between different groups of spammers. The smaller subs can get by for now, but when the war in the larger subs gets to the extent that spammers start needing to branch out, they'll likely invade the smaller subs, as well.
We need better solutions for proving identity online. Email, capcha, etc. are insufficient. I imagine a system similar to the certificate authority system, where you prove your identity to one of many trusted identity providers and then that provider vouches for you when you sign up for other services (while also protecting you anonymity.)
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