X is becoming a ‘ghost town’ of bots as AI-generated spam content floods the internet — A sign of the scale is the thriving industry in bot-making::The internet is filling up with machine-generated “zombie content” designed to game algorithms and scam humans. Experts call it the “great AI flood”.
So, for that matter, is Reddit. I have an RSS subscription to /r/all (routed through a mirror) and a sizable fraction of posts hitting the front page are word-for-word reposts of old popular content by bots. Even the top comments are recycled. It was always a problem, but the loss of good moderators and the shutdown of projects like BotDefense due to the API fiasco has caused it to absolutely skyrocket.
I wouldn’t be surprised if the AI reposts are intentionally allowed by Reddit to “preserve” content in case users nuke their history. Diabolical business maneuver
I’m sure it’s a happy coincidence for the owners, but I’d hardly call it diabolical. I feel like it’s more likely they just want to preserve the impression of activity and engagement. If the bots were suddenly gone it would be that much more obvious that Reddit is something like a cross between a ruined and abandoned industrial wasteland, and an open pit toilet at the undercooked burrito festival.
I don’t even know if it’s a coincidence. I wouldn’t be surprised if Reddit ran plenty of reposting bots themselves. The R&D budget is probably spent on developing engagement bots on the platform I’d bet. They even ran an experiment where bots were trained by users on the platform via a game where you tried to decide if the user was real or not. That was run a long time ago.
I just meant it’s a coincidence that the bots reposting popular content would mean that people deleting their post and comment history would still have their most popular content preserved. I don’t think the preservation of potentially removed content is their purpose, I think the appearance of activity and engagement is the purpose.
They did when the platform was new, and they had to fake the appearance of it being busy, although that was a very long time ago now. The idea is certainly nothing new for Reddit’s leadership to do.
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Tired of reading about Twitter dying and then it not happening.
Tired of reading about Twitter.
Anybody else remember when Musk said he was buying Twitter so he could get rid of all the bots? Once again he does exactly the opposite of what he said he would.
“drain the swamp”
he lures all bots from the net into Xitter, and then shuts it down!
Just like my plan to eradicate the Mosquito population by first maintaining an enormous pool of stagnant water for them to breed in, then draining it once they’re all here!
It’s been a long time since I was invited to leave Twitter, and I left (now I’m the happiest person in the world in Mastodon). Now they invite me to leave Reddit… where am I going?
You’re here. Now play nice and we’ll all get along.
No we don’t! This isn’t argument, it’s contradiction! Yes it is! No it isn’t! Yes it is! No it isn’t!
🫡🫡🫡🫡
Is your username a Porcupine Tree reference? They’ee one of my favorite bands!
Yeah!!! Also is one of my favorite bands!!! I have all of their albums and Steven Wilson music also is lovely!!! 🤘🏼🤘🏼🤘🏼
Yeah totally. In fact, I’ll be playing a live Porcupine Tree/Steven Wilson tribute set next month so I’m thoroughly immersed in that music at the moment
I hear Omelas is nice.
I’m all for Xitter bashing but it’s the same on Youtube and pretty much everywhere else. What’s actually most striking to me is how simple these bots are. They don‘t even use AI most of the time, just spamming the same hand full of extremely vague statements while having the profile picture of a young woman, often only showing certain body parts.
I‘m suspecting that more and more scammers caught up on the pig butchering trend which has been a huge thing in China for over a decade. Until last year the African prince was still the most damaging type of online scam for the US economy until pig butchering finally dethroned it. That shows how quick it‘s growing.
That being said, platforms in general seem to follow the same pattern in that moderation is practically non-existent anymore and it will only be a matter of time until Brussels will feel inclined to really crack down on it when it inevitably becomes a much bigger problem for online discourse.
moderation is practically non-existent
It seems you’ve never called a Nazi or homophobe a piece of shit on Facebook or Reddit. That’s a sure fire way to get banned or at least a warning.
Kind of fitting that the only response until I posted was a bot.
Dead internet theory coming to pass.
Surprisingly good article. It’s getting depressing just how much of the internet is bots
I’ve almost lost complete confidence in anything I see online as true. These image filters to full on bots are distorting what reality is in very negative way. Most of the things still can be filtered out if you’re paying attention, but how long until the tech becomes indistinguishable from actual human engagement? 5-10 years is my guess.
