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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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!
Tired of reading about Twitter dying and then it not happening.
Tired of reading about Twitter.
It’s Xwitter now.
Leave the w out and pronounce it with a Chinese X.
Xitter? Are you xitting me?
Yes, Xitter, I xit you not!
I will never call it anything but Twitter. Twitter is a pile of shit.
Xhit…
Xitter
My corner of Twitter seems to have been left relatively untouched. 99% porn and 1% cat videos.
I do get a ton bot followers but when I browse my follow list there’s hardly any there so I guess those accounts do get removed relatively quickly but new ones just keeps popping up. It’s nothing but whack-a-mole on twitter’s part.
One thing I never quite understood are all of the seemingly real people using their personal accounts to follow me and like my posts. When I open their profile it’s often some right-wing person for example who posts a ton of political news articles and such but when I open their follow list it’s full of accounts like mine that post mainly gay porn. Don’t these people realize that anyone can see who they follow and that their likes are often displayed to their friends aswell? You’d think they had alt-accounts for that.
Those followers (or anccount) were either purchased, or they gained followers via follow back posts.
Theres groups of people that do this all day long, they post lists of users(which are also mixed with bot accounts) of people who follow back. You add them, they add you. Rinse repeat til your looking at a few thousand followers.
Then you cull your following list by removing a ton of em.
Now you’re left with thousands of followers(junk, bots, spam accounts) and a few following.
Yes, your gay porn accounts are likely automated post bots.
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!
Now, was this the 5 minute argument or did you pay for a full half hour?
Nice reference!
🫡🫡🫡🫡
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.
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.
This is really low quality bot, nowadays they can use artificial inteligence run locally to output content that you would never think was written by a bot. It’s just that we don’t see it. i’m going to ask chatgpt 3.5 to answer your first comment while denying there is a bot issue, just check if you would be able to spot it and what would happen if hundreds of accounts ran by a single bot were to downvote you and give similar comments.
LOL, you really think there’s a bot issue? Sounds like someone’s been watching too many sci-fi movies. Get real, dude.
(Following my previous comment, generated by chatgpt 3.5 in very few seconds).
I feel like at some point we’ll see a headline about how the Internet economy has become companies throwing money back and forth at each other without realizing all the content engagement is bots engaging with other bots and generating all the ad revenue from views and clicks.
Well we keep trying to tell them that if you give money to people who aren’t as well as off as the 1% they actually spend that money in the economy and keep businesses running. Maybe this is just their way of testing the theory out? (But, you know, in a way that doesn’t actually benefit the rest of us).
Kind of fitting that the only response until I posted was a bot.
Dead internet theory coming to pass.
Didn’t he claim he would be getting rid of all the bots?
Drain the swamp!
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.
