Comment on Reddit will tighten verification to keep out human-like AI bots

• glimse@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  Is it? Reddit has been full of bots for years.

  And if the r/CMV thing didn’t make it apparently, the recent wave of them weren’t “caught in the act” and only became a “problem” when the researchers announced their shitty experiment.

  If realistic chat bots can fool the masses, why on earth would reddit get rid of them? It helps their metrics. “Look at how active our site is! Buy stock!”

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  • HobbitFoot@thelemmy.club ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    Meta is paying to make its bots, Reddit gets it for free!

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    • werty@sh.itjust.works ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      A metabot walked into a subreddit…

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  • Ledericas@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    half of thier site are bots, RUSSIA probably makes a majority of those bots, something reddit isnt doing anything about

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    • glimse@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      You’re not wrong but what does Russia have to do with anything here?

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  • FreedomAdvocate@lemmy.net.au ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    when the researchers announced their shitty experiment.

    Shitty experiment? On the contrary, it was an amazing experiment.

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  • doodledup@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    I know you enjoy hating on Reddit but what you’re saying doesn’t make any sense. Reddit is an advertising business. Bots don’t view advertising but adds infrastructure cost. Additionally, humans are way better at engagement with the platform and people than bots.

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    • glimse@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      Bot activity brings “engagement” which generated more page views from actual humans. Literally the only downside of this announcement is the optics of having bots in the first place.

      The bots were already indistinguishable from humans on reddit, do you really think that this recent scrutiny is going to lead to fewer bots? Or might it actually lead to better bots?

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    • zarkanian@sh.itjust.works ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      Additionally additionally, as it says in the article, reddit sells its content to OpenAI, and in order to do that, they need it to be organic. If you feed AI output back info AI, it makes the output worse, not better. So, there’s another financial incentive to ensure that the people talking on reddit are actually human.

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      • glimse@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

        If openai kept buying reddit data after 2022, they are idiots. They let the cat out of the bag.

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      • atrielienz@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

        I would like to remind you of two things. The first is that reddit user to have a mod tool called “BotDefense”. It’s shutdown in July of 2023 directly lead to a major uptick in Spam Bots.

        The second is that part of the ad revenue is “impressions”. Impressions are just an account (bot or human) “viewing” the ad and they do not require a click-through. The platform hosting the ad still gets paid for those.

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      • FreedomAdvocate@lemmy.net.au ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

        If you feed AI output back info AI, it makes the output worse, not better.

        Yeh but feeding reddit user output into AI is part of the reason why AI is so confidently incorrect so often.

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• CmdrShepard42@lemm.ee ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  No it isn’t and they have openly talked about doing this practice back in the early days of reddit to make the site appear more active than it really was. Nothing has changed.

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• MonkderVierte@lemmy.ml ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  Only their own bots are allowed.

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• Merva@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  Where on Earth have you gotten that bizarre idea? It is in their interest to promote engagement, human or not, by any means necessary.

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