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

An anonymous reader shares a report: For years, people who have found Google search frustrating have been adding "Reddit" to the end of their search queries. This practice is so common that Google even acknowledged the phenomenon in a post announcing that it will be scraping Reddit posts to train its AI. And so, naturally, there are now services that will poison Reddit threads with AI-generated posts designed to promote products.

A service called ReplyGuy advertises itself as "the AI that plugs your product on Reddit" and which automatically "mentions your product in conversations naturally." Examples on the site show two different Redditors being controlled by AI posting plugs for a text-to-voice product called "AnySpeech" and a bot writing a long comment about a debt consolidation program called Debt Freedom Now. A video demo shows a dashboard where a user adds the name of their company and URL they want to direct users to. It then auto-suggests keywords that "help the bot know what types of subreddits and tweets to look for and when to respond."

Moments later, the dashboard shows how Reply Guy is "already in the responses" of the comments section of different Reddit posts. "Many of our responses will get lots of upvotes and will be well-liked." The creator of the company, Alexander Belogubov, has also posted screenshots of other bot-controlled accounts responding all over Reddit. Begolubov has another startup called "Stealth Marketing" that also seeks to manipulate the platform by promising to "turn Reddit into a steady stream of customers for your startup."

Poisoning Reddit

[Anonymous Coward]

LOL. You're too late.

Re:

[Dr. Tom]

They said, trying to provoke fear, "This will change the Internet as we know it!"
And I said, "GOOD! There's too many fucking hitlers on there"

Re:

[Opportunist]

Pretty much this.

The internet has been turned into a cesspool of rubbish. If anything, something that "changes the internet as we know it" can't really make it much worse anymore.

Or rather, if it does, maybe even the muggles finally realize it.

Yet another reason to avoid reddit

[PThompson509]

The amount of spam was bad before this, I'm glad I'm not on there anymore.

Re:

[dwywit]

Between pihole, and firefox extensions noscript and "redditadremover", I don't see ads on reddit, and very few ads elsewhere (distrowatch is one that server ads from its own domain). Pihole is also useful for blocking Microsoft telemetry.

Now, reddit content is another matter. You're supposed to be able to "mute" subreddits from the "all" feed, but I still keep seeing far too many cats and dogs.

not on reddit..

[wyHunter]

Not on reddit, but anymore Google searches are mostly useless. If you want info you find what feels a lot like AI generated trash pages, or "buy this product!" pages. Meh.

Re:

[Seven Spirals]

You want to be further shocked and disappointed by Google's fall? Go do a parallel search for something political on Google and Yandex. Yes, fucking Yandex. It's pathetic how badly they will beat Google. Freakin' Yandex is better now. SMH.

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[ls671]

Nice tip, thanks, I'll try it!

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[smooth wombat]

Go do a parallel search for something political on Google and Yandex.

The reason is two fold. First, with Yandex being Russian, they want every political story about the West out there for people to read. They probably even promote the stories to higher rankings so they are seen. However, try putting in a query about the thoudands of Russian losses in Ukraine or Russian ships being sunk or the oil refineries in Russia being attacked or the Belgorod region being shelled by Russian forces and see what

Re:

[jythie]

The third reason though : they are not work gaming. The more popular something is, the more there is to be made for figuring out how to twist the results into something you can package and sell..

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[bill_mcgonigle]

On my Firefox Nightly I have an extension to set Yandex as an allowed default search engine. Makes it easier to pop up another browser for a session.

Somebody fix that extension to work on mobile, eh?

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[ljw1004]

Not on reddit, but anymore Google searches are mostly useless.

Me: "what happens when milk turns sour?"

Google's first five results: "WHY DOES MILK TURN SOUR? Section 1: Milk is a fascinating beverage that is drunk by every single mammal. Did you know ...? Section 2: we love drinking nice cold milk on a warm day with cookies! Here's more about ... Section 3: milk is produced ... Section 4: You have to be careful about milk going sour; FDA recommends ... Section 5: Why does milk turn sour? ..."

Only in the final section, after pages and pages of inane self-evident drivel,

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[ChatHuant]

...pages and pages of inane self-evident drivel...

I know this is going to go against the Zeitgeist here, but I asked Copilot (the one in Bing) "why does milk turn sour" and got a response of about half the page, with no ads and very little filler. It also matched what I knew (lactose, bacteria, lactic acid, protein folding, whey, lactobacillus etc). There were no hallucinations I could see, and it also added the links it got the data from. Much better than Google search, at least in this case.

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[darkain]

I tried the same, but for a technical subject. Copilot entirely made up bullshit that didn't exist. When I informed it as such, it did the usual bot apology, and then literally repeated the same made up bullshit.

For things it can essentially "search" wikipedia for, its fine. For anything else, its dogshit bad just the same as everything else.

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[timeOday]

Interesting that AI is being used to accomplish this, yet if you ask ChatGPT4 itself what happens when milk turns sour, you get nothing but a straight answer:

When milk turns sour, it is undergoing a process of fermentation, primarily due to the action of bacteria. Here's what happens in more detail:

1) Bacterial Growth: The primary bacteria in milk that cause souring are lactic acid bacteria. These bacteria are naturally present in the environment and can find their way into milk from the air, from milki

Re:

[newbie_fantod]

I want sources, not answers. Only fools accept un-sourced information.

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[sg_oneill]

The ones that drive me around the bend are when I'm looking for technical stuff, and I find a tutorial that looks like its human written, isnt on medium, and and isn't on something thats pre-fucked like MS help forums. I'll get quarter way through when I start noticing that something about the language is a bit .... off.... and then some absolute gibberish turns up and only after wasting 10 minutes of my life do I realise I'm just reading cGPT generated content farm gibberish.

A GP friend found a classic tho

Re:

[vbdasc]

A GP friend found a classic though the other day that had a serious article about some heart condition and mid paragraph towards the end the classic line "As a chatbot from OpenAI it would be unethical to.....". On closer inspection the entire article was apparently nonsense. But even he as a medical doctor, brain bigger than almost anyone else I knew , had been strung along for quite a few paragraphs before it literally said it was chatgpt. If he can be suckered , what hope for us mere mortals.

Then we'll simply wait until patients start dying due to AI's "helpful" advice, and then the lawsuits will fly and there will be hell to pay.

inane self-evident drivel

[byronivs]

Nailed it. Presumably they to each other like that, the people behind it, that is. Sounds like a butter-up or the fact that many words means that you don't know comes to mind. The output tone is smarmy and amateurish, much like that of a "What I did last summer" paper by a child. Now the insta-pages created for answers to these questions never have any need of being or sounding legit. I dunno, I keep my adblocker on and scripts off.

Re:

[La Gris]

I asked startpage.com, here are the top results:

First 2 results on topic but likely sponsored or SEO optimized (AI-Generated copypasta)
1. As we can see from the composition, the lactic medium contains various types of bacteria
2. Milk, when left for a long time, becomes sour due to Lactobacillus in the milk that converts the lactose in the milk to lactic acid.

Result 3 off-topic
3. Soured milk denotes a range of food products produced by the acidification of milk. Acidification, which gives the milk a tart tas

Re:not on reddit..

[jythie]

Sadly, we can not have nice things. As soon as something gets popular enough, people figure out how to ruin it for their own profit.

Re:

[vbdasc]

Unfortunately, there are no free things, especially not free nice things (and nice things tend to be more expensive than non-nice ones!). If something is nice and it looks free, it's because somebody has absorbed the cost. For example, I shudder when I think about what will happen to Linux when Linus retires, or, God forbid, passes away.

Re:

[AmiMoJo]

Try adding "before:2023" to your search query. That should tide us over until search engines get a handle on it.

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[wyHunter]

That's interesting, I didn't know it was possible. I'll give it a try though I may go before 2020 :)

Re:

[Travelsonic]

Write an algorithm that detects it (tricky but doable)

Definitely tricky - current "AI detection" is IMO inconsistent-to-dogshit in terms of accuracy, then there is issue of counter-measures being useds to train smarter systems that try to beat them.

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[Opportunist]

Google has access to one of the biggest data pools, if they're not the biggest aggregators of data altogether. They also have a bunch of incredibly talented statisticians and pattern recognition systems in place.

If there is a way to detect AI generated bullshit, they have the means to do it.

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[jacks smirking reven]

It would be funny if Microsoft, despite their connection with CoPilot and OpenAI if they programmed Bing to do just that to get a leg up over Google

Seriously Microsoft, consider it, Google search is on the backfoot, now is the time to strike (they wont because they are terribly myopic in regards to AI)

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[MikeDataLink]

Google have the ability to wipe out AI-generated content. Write an algorithm that detects it (tricky but doable)

We're going to be in a never-ending war. Each time we create an algorithm to detect it, they'll just get better. The same war has been raging on with CAPTCHA for years. At some point humans and AI are going to be indistinguishable. It WILL happen. Then what?

The solution is going to be to figure out how to verify that new accounts are indeed humans, that requires some form of identity verification. This has privacy implications and will not be easy.

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[Linux Torvalds]

Write an algorithm that detects it (tricky but doable),

How to say, "I don't understand the first thing about AI, really," without saying, "I don't understand the first thing about AI, really."

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[timeOday]

You think you can tell. Experimentation does not bear that out. I'm not claiming you can never tell. But you said 95%... not a chance, not even close:

https://www.timeshighereducati... [timeshighereducation.com]

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[jythie]

I would not really call it 'tricky but doable', more like 'arms race google has been in for a long time'. Every time they come up with a way to improve search results, SOE companies adjust till they find a new pattern that gets ranked well. AI content and detecting AI content are both the same stats game, and never underestimate sketchy companies with a profit motive.

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[dhasenan]

Right now, AI detection bots misidentify English language text from neurodivergent people and people using English as a second language as AI. I suspect it's much worse in other languages -- too many Anglophones pretend that English is the only language worth supporting.

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[vbdasc]

If (when) the Web finally becomes unusable, we can always recreate Gopher, with WAIS, Veronica and other goodies, to get useful content. These addicted to social networks can migrate to IRC.

Reddit has some supremely cringeworthy plugs..

[Junta]

So many posts are clearly marketing campaigns, not sure that AI is needed to make it much worse.

degradation

[ErikKnepfler]

so Google's gonna scrape reddit, train its AI, which is already full of AI generated slop lol good luck? long term I wonder how they all plan to deal with this i reckon that untainted early version of resources like The Pile may become extremely valuable once they can no longer be improved upon easily due to everything being poisoned

Re:

[HBI]

The presumption that throwing more data and more processing power at LLMs will result in subjectively better performance has little data to back it up. I'm intrigued as to when the tipping point is reached and the valley of despair looms for this technology.

Re:

[mysidia]

The presumption that throwing more data and more processing power at LLMs will result in subjectively better performance ..

One thing that is true is it will result in greater Cost; likely with a low ratio of performance improvement to compensate for the added cost of just throwing more and more resources at it.

The improvements aren't that much.. The world seemingly has lost its mind in terms of over-investing hastily in a small number of technologies.

Unfortunately it seems like Detection and Spam preve

Re:

[alvinrod]

I've been told the models start to go to shit when they start consuming their own output. Apparently it's akin to a feedback loop that the model can't deal with because it doesn't have any real understanding of what it's doing. I suppose even humans are susceptible to that as well to a degree, but humanity as a whole seems to be able to correct for it over time. I suppose humanity will also apply selective pressure on AIs, but that's over a much longer time period.

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[Stormwatch]

Good. I very much would like search results free from Reddit, Quora, or Pinterest.

This

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

This is how M5 and Mycroft start killing each other >:-(

Here's the deal

[Maxo-Texas]

if a youtube or reddit post mentions an amazing financial, or spiritual, or etc. advisor quickly in response to someone's story. And the story has too many upvotes in too short a time, I recognize it as spam.

IMHO, with spam like that, you go after the cloud of accounts upvoting it. Track their behavior, see if they are posting, see if they regularly vote for spam. Then shadowban or kill the accounts (let them upvote but don't show the upvotes). The advertiser can create *an* account quickly. But th

"Parasite SEO" = repeating one's self.

[nightflameauto]

SEO has been a parasite since inception, and as it penetrates the web deeper and deeper, more and more used to be informational sites fall to its stupidity.

The one question this story brings up for me is just how bad does Google intend to make its results? I mean, it's already on the cusp of completely useless. How much worse does it need to get?

Re:

[codebase7]

You are not the customer, the advertiser is.

As long as it's your only option, the results will continue to get worse. Let me reemphasize that for the low reading comprehension folks: As long as you keep using advertiser driven crap, the enshitification will continue. Your opinion isn't wanted nor considered.

It will take a complete hollowing out of Google's bank account into the red to get them to stop. Given how many fingers they have in various industries, that's not going to happen short of massive g

Reddit is going to shit

[waTR]

Everyone who has been using reddit since 2013 has seen how the platform has co pletely gone to shit... It started out as a link sharing site, and these days you can't even do that freely... On a positive note, alternatives are starting to come along...a bunch of other old redditors and I are building one for stocks called fnchart.

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[StealthPanda]

Is parent an AI bot posting to slashdot using natural language in which to promote a product? Well played, sir.

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[codebase7]

Doesn't matter if the GP is or not, their product will also be subject to enshitification along side reddit. How this ends in the US is people just giving up on the internet in mass because of it's uselessness.

Re:

[vbdasc]

people just giving up on the internet in mass because of it's uselessness.

I can't wait to see this. End of Web's Eternal September, hooray!

And we shall have... peace.

AI is getting help from me to poison Reddit

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

Since Reddit announced it was going to sell "its" data (i.e. the data it was given for free by all the redditors), I've been busy deleting most of my posting history, and pumping old posts I left there full of technical idiocies and fake facts,

Why you ask?

Because 1/ it hurts Reddit and 2/ it trains AI on bad data.

I have no intention of helping business models based on mooching off people's contributions.

We're Doomed

[JustAnotherOldGuy]

We're all doomed to drown in a bottomless pit of AI-generated horseshit, brought about by AIs endlessly ingesting and regurgitating other AI-generated horseshit.

Reality will become nebulous, and the only thing you'll be able to trust is whatever was committed to paper before ~1990 or so. After that, everything else and all other 'records', will be suspect.

Maybe you want a formula for some chemical process, will you really be able to trust the information you get online, even if you check multiple sources? Who's to say that they haven't become contaminated or rewritten? How would you know?

They took ur juuuuuub!

[Opportunist]

And another set of professions, this time astroturfers and SEO bullshitters, losing their job to AI.

This time around, though, it's hard to feel sorry.