Reddit

We're not much better, tbh.

Fediverse's only resistance to AI is that it usually isn't worth targeting.

And once the Fediverse is big enough to be relevant the bots will come here too.

Since I used to run GPT-2 bots on Reddit (openly declared as such, in a bot-friendly sub, using LLMs so stupid/deranged nobody would mistake them for real accounts) I've been thinking about this problem for a long time. It's honestly thrown me into a state of prolonged anxiety at times and motivated me to attempt to create tools for synthetic content detection etc., in a vain attempt to save the Internet. And I've concluded that we're well past that point, and approaching the point at which we need to reconsider what, exactly, the internet really is, and that is to say that it should not be considered a source of any sort of authentic experience. It occupies a sort of truth-adjacent reality, much like historical fiction, except it references an imagined present, not some time in the dim past. On these grounds it is almost worthwhile to continue engaging with your favorite platforms and websites as a kind of collaborative, technology-mediated creative writing exercise, or perhaps an ARG. It doesn't feel quite so pointless, viewed through that lens.

I only use reddit/YouTube on desktop (Niche Hobbies).

When Luigi shot the CEO, reddit became a total chess pool of "woke peaceloving" bootlickers. Then you say something and get banned.

Fuck reddit and fuck r/de in particular...

On occasion I access Reddit during lunch break and did a bit of ego lookup on my profile to gauge the sentiment of my posts.
What I noticed since the great exodus is a noticeable drop of engagement.
At best I get 2-3 upvotes on posts that don't have that many comments.
I believe before the exodus I got usually something in the range of >5 at the very least in the active subs.

So this really checks out.

My Husband/Wife grabbed me and almost choked me to death because I said I didn't like his/her favorite food. My friends are saying I'm an asshole. AITA?

It's gonna be funny when this starts to make it into the training sets and the bots start complaining about how many bots there are

"dead internet theory" is great until the users start acting like it's not a symptom of the platforms they're using, and just the reality for all of the internet.

Reddit, Instagram, Facebook are all websites struggling to maintain user counts which bring ad revenue and investment. Since investors and ad platforms can't tell between real and fake users, there is MASSIVE incentive to allow bots on your website.

Moreso for sites like Reddit and Twitter that shit all over their user base and had to quickly mask their haemorrhaging support before the shareholders could complain.

I'm not a bot. Ask me anything, I won't be able to answer it guaranteed.

Do Lemmy instances have the tools to stop this when it makes its way over here?

The post.

I'm not linking to the Reddit garbage.

I love my sparse but botless lemmy

"Don't feed the trolls" and defaulting to skepticism were part of the old internet. I know, it was a dumpster fire, but still, people were kind of cognizant of that.

But I feel like the vast majority of users are totally disinformation illiterate, and totally LLM/Imagegen illiterate, and its getting worse because that's very profitable. Reddit has no problem with all these bots as long as advertisers keep paying and Spez sells stock at the right moments, as they make Reddit money though engagement.

Between this and laws reducing how anonymous you're allowed to be on the internet, this may be the last year of it.

Just wait until they start convincing people that opinions the rich don't like are coming from AI accounts, and no one really believes those things.

It's not about driving engagement. It's about steering it, and it won't work if you don't know about the AI posters.

Even before current LLM-style AI systems became mainstream, a noticeable portion of the most popular submissions on that and similar/related subs seemed to be "fake" to me. So, I'm not so sure AI alone changed that dynamic that much. One thing that seems to have changed, though, is that people are now more willing to believe a fake post is fake. There was a time when someone would question the authenticity of a submission, and there was a greater than 85% chance someone would call them out by saying "nothing ever happens" or linking to a sub of similar name.

On the other hand, I feel like a lot of people genuinely believe they have are much better at detecting AI generated text than they are. I've lost track of how many times I've had people reply to me by saying things like "Nice Chat-GPT you got there" or something along those lines. I mean, the typos alone should be a clue.