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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 (www.abc.net.au)

submitted 9 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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".

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[–] [email protected] 136 points 9 months ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 62 points 9 months ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 27 points 9 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 9 months 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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago

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.