To Spam AI Chatbots, Companies Spam Reddit with AI-Generated Posts (9to5mac.com) 24
The problem? "Companies want their products and brands to appear in chatbot results," reports 9to5Mac. And "Since Reddit forms a key part of the training material for Google's AI, then one effective way to make that happen is to spam Reddit."
Huffman has confirmed to the Financial Times that this is happening, with companies using AI bots to create fake posts in the hope that the content will be regurgitated by chatbots:
"For 20 years, we've been fighting people who have wanted to be popular on Reddit," Huffman said... "If you want to show up in the search engines, you try to do well on Reddit, and now the LLMs, it's the same thing. If you want to be in the LLMs, you can do it through Reddit."
Multiple ad agency execs confirmed to the FT that they are indeed "posting content on Reddit to boost the likelihood of their ads appearing in the responses of generative AI chatbots." Huffman says that AI bots are increasingly being used to make spam posts, and Reddit is trying to block them: For Huffman, success comes down to making sure that posts are "written by humans and voted on by humans [...] It's an arms race, it's a never ending battle." The company is exploring a number of new ways to do this, including the World ID eyeball-scanning device being touted by OpenAI's Sam Altman.
It's Reddit's 20th anniversary, notes CNBC. And while "MySpace, Digg and Flickr have faded into oblivion," Reddit "has refused to die, chugging along and gaining an audience of over 108 million daily users..."
But now Reddit "faces a gargantuan challenge gaining new users, particularly if Google's search floodgates dry up." [I]n the age of AI, many users simply "go the easiest possible way," said Ann Smarty, a marketing and reputation management consultant who helps brands monitor consumer perception on Reddit. And there may be no simpler way of finding answers on the internet than simply asking ChatGPT a question, Smarty said. "People do not want to click," she said. "They just want those quick answers."
But in response, CNBC's headline argues that Reddit "is fighting AI with AI." It launched its own Reddit Answers AI service in December, using technology from OpenAI and Google. Unlike general-purpose chatbots that summarize others' web pages, the Reddit Answers chatbot generates responses based purely on the social media service, and it redirects people to the source conversations so they can see the specific user comments. A Reddit spokesperson said that over 1 million people are using Reddit Answers each week.
"For 20 years, we've been fighting people who have wanted to be popular on Reddit," Huffman said... "If you want to show up in the search engines, you try to do well on Reddit, and now the LLMs, it's the same thing. If you want to be in the LLMs, you can do it through Reddit."
Multiple ad agency execs confirmed to the FT that they are indeed "posting content on Reddit to boost the likelihood of their ads appearing in the responses of generative AI chatbots." Huffman says that AI bots are increasingly being used to make spam posts, and Reddit is trying to block them: For Huffman, success comes down to making sure that posts are "written by humans and voted on by humans [...] It's an arms race, it's a never ending battle." The company is exploring a number of new ways to do this, including the World ID eyeball-scanning device being touted by OpenAI's Sam Altman.
It's Reddit's 20th anniversary, notes CNBC. And while "MySpace, Digg and Flickr have faded into oblivion," Reddit "has refused to die, chugging along and gaining an audience of over 108 million daily users..."
But now Reddit "faces a gargantuan challenge gaining new users, particularly if Google's search floodgates dry up." [I]n the age of AI, many users simply "go the easiest possible way," said Ann Smarty, a marketing and reputation management consultant who helps brands monitor consumer perception on Reddit. And there may be no simpler way of finding answers on the internet than simply asking ChatGPT a question, Smarty said. "People do not want to click," she said. "They just want those quick answers."
But in response, CNBC's headline argues that Reddit "is fighting AI with AI." It launched its own Reddit Answers AI service in December, using technology from OpenAI and Google. Unlike general-purpose chatbots that summarize others' web pages, the Reddit Answers chatbot generates responses based purely on the social media service, and it redirects people to the source conversations so they can see the specific user comments. A Reddit spokesperson said that over 1 million people are using Reddit Answers each week.
Welcome to the new Google (Score:5, Insightful)
So soon every prompt will give you back useless results due to bias from everyone doing the equivalent of SEO spam, just like how any search results from Google today are basically completely useless.
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Parent already modded up, but I hope some folks give the story some of the funny comments it deserves.
Me? I'm just waiting for the "Only McDonald's Catastrophe." Since profit maximization is the only criterion that matters, only the most profitable food source deserves to survive. If not McDonald's it could be something worse. Google's AI result put Starbucks in second place, though it's easier for me to imagine Ronald swallowing Starbucks than vice versa.
So I should explicitly ask the google "What will be
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So I should explicitly ask the google "What will be the last food source standing?"...
The answer depends. Most people think it's Taco Bell, but it was Pizza Hut in the European dub.
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Indeed. But Google fights SEO and AI Bots will do similar things. Also the Feedback loop is way longer. You can spam the search results part of a tool like Perplexity, but spamming model training has a feedback loop of at least half a year. In the meantime you have no idea if your technique for spamming was successful or not.
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End result is the same - bunch of SPAM slop being regurgitated back at you.
Robot Arms Race (Score:5, Insightful)
Your robot tried to stop me, we made a more clever robot to get around your robot blocking our robot.
Value to society is minimal, or negative. Cost is energy and environmental degradation, heating.
Glad I don't use Reddit or most of the internet. I read news, and that may stop soon as it's all moving towards propaganda. This is madness.
Moving to Montana to raise some dennal floss.
Don't follow me.
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Give my regards to Mighty Little.
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Might have to ride over to see how the bees are growing.
Poetic Justice (Score:2)
Imagine the AI industry being taken down by spam.
Next up: pr0n.
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the AI industry
Just to be a pedantic sod, "AI" isn't just LLMs and things that make images, audio, and the like, it's quite the spectrum actually - including things like medical research.
IMO treating a dynamic and complex industry as a monolith, whatever industry it is, just felt off to me, heh.
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People need to be concise, it is a lack of conciseness that is making it hard for people on all ends of the debate to at least understand what the other is talking abo
LLM, meet drain (Score:4, Insightful)
LLMs feeding LLMs is literally making it all circling the drain.
I'm already suspicious of a lot of search results from duckduckgo because the domain names look like they're coming from a marketing thesaurus and often have the same layout. Soon only Wikipedia will end up as the only (read: most reliable) "search engine" because the regular ones can only present LLM slop.
The whole of internet will be one large automated self-replicating sea of repeated nonsense with nary a real person to be found and we'll return to exchanging factual information by swapping CDs/DVDs/USB sticks via sneakernet. Read-only media of course so the local LLM instances can't change the data on them. How's that for cyberpunk becoming reality?
I think I'll keep my Encyclopedia Brittanica and programming books on my shelf for much longer.
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Would you then not consider all books & documentation produced, say before 2010, to be unaffected by AI/LLM/internet search? And therefore more reliable (or closer to the truth) than whatever was produced after 2010?
Better start supporting the analog versions of libraries again then with your patronage. Those that are still around that is.
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Better start supporting the analog versions of libraries again then with your patronage. Those that are still around that is.
And I would if there was indeed one nearby. My mother loves to read and as a kid I always went with her to one, and have been a patron until work, relationship, and hobby left me with too little time and simply buying batches of (second-hand) books was easier and more accessible.
I also write fiction and the whole LLM happening has me pondering where and how to publish the latest novel I'm working on. The question might be even if to publish it.
Same effect with Wikipedia (Score:2)
Platform holders are going to be the only ones (Score:3)
They're the only ones who will be able to do effective bot detection so that they can tell the difference between AI swap and actual human content that can be used to train an ai.
What this means is the capital that makes up ai, and it is capital like anything else you use to produce things, is going to be owned by five or six companies at most and the stocks of those companies will be owned by a few thousand people.
And then a bunch of folks will convince themselves that they own stock because they have a 401k or they do some light Day trading. None of which gives them any say whatsoever and how the company is run...
Some folks will mention the ability to do a shareholder lawsuit like what was done against Elon Musk when he tried to get that 55 billion dollar pay package. The problem with that is Elon already bribed the Delaware legislation to change the law and he's in the process of pushing his pay package through. That's why he's driving fake self-driving cars all over Austin he's trying to pump his stock before he grabs his money and runs...
On the other hand the lawyers who did that lawsuit got a ton of money out of it because of the way the law is written. But Tesla shareholders in general didn't see a dime and still don't have any meaningful way to stop Elon from getting his 55 billion...
That's just the most obvious example. The takeaway is that it's yet another market that's going to consolidate into a few players it's just going to do it much faster than we are used to.
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New technology does tend to start out in the hands of a few. AT&T once owned the telephone market. GM, Ford, and Chevy once owned the automotive market. IBM once owned the mainframe market, and then the personal computer market. Motorola once owned the cell phone market. Standard Oil once owned the petroleum market.
But every new technology soon spreads to other producers and manufacturers. It's easy to look at a marketplace like AI that is less than 10 years old, and worry that it is controlled by too f
That won't happen with AI though (Score:2)
The reason new texts spreads is because patents expire. They used to expire even quicker than they do now but even nowadays they're only good for 20 years.
But it doesn't matter if the patent expires here, most of the tech is open source and freely available because it's just math. But without the training data all that math is worthless. And unless you control a platform you are not going to be abl
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Your tale of doom and gloom gives way too little credit to human ingenuity. The current AI models went after the stuff that was *easy* to get. Even the companies that control those data sources, will soon find their own wells polluted with AI spam from their own engines. It's not like a fortress with gold in the safe, that can be locked up tight. Training data has to be refreshed and replenished from pure sources, more like a lake.
It's a big, big world. Nobody, not even the current crop of AI megacorps, wil
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Here's how the tech giants will roll out the models:
Microsoft: Releases a number of models, all with the same confusing name, they all crash in weird ways
Apple: Arrives 5 years later than the rest, with a dumb model, but they claim it's "50% faster"
Google: Releases a model in beta only, but it's so beligerent and condescending that even their greatest fans don't use it
Facebook: Invests billions into a model that completely missed the mark
reddit : Releases a chatbot that will proactively ban you from all soc
Reddit training material /s (Score:4, Funny)
“My Air Fryer is Trying to Recruit Me for an Intergalactic MLM”
“My Shadow Unionized and Is Now Picketing My Soul”
“My Wi-Fi Router Is Broadcasting the Necronomicon in 8K”
“My Goldfish Is Running a Psy-Op to Overthrow Time Itself ”
“I Hacked My Microwave and Now It’s a Portal to the Crab Dimension”
“My AirPods Are Whispering the Location of Atlantis in Binary”
Sure! (Score:3)
The company is exploring a number of new ways to do this, including the World ID eyeball-scanning device being touted by OpenAI's Sam Altman.
Because the stakes will never be high enough, and the tech cheap enough, that artificial eyeballs won't be readily available in the hundreds of thousands.
The greater the advancements in tech, the greater the rewards and incentives are for enshittifying it. We apex predators are also apex parasites, and we're very resourceful when it comes to feeding off of each other.