Reddit

You're absolutely right! Those posts do have many indicators of having been written by an AI. You're doing a great job finding these comments

Reddit has so rapidly descended into nothing but bots. Especially on certain subs, for some reason... Even some quite niche ones just seem to be bots talking to each other. Fortunately the only sub I really want to keep my reddit account for is mostly safe, but even there we had some issues.

In some cases I get what's happening - bot post with featuring some kind of obscure product, then buried in the comments you find the bot replies letting people know (apparently organically) where they can buy it - but in other cases like this it just seems pointless. I suppose the idea is to make the profiles seem natural, but they're almost all private anyway.

Thirtyish years ago, we played a multiplayer online game called "LPMud". There were three talking NPCs in the game: Harry, basically a simple programming example on talking and reacting NPCs, Sir Obliterator, a dark knight with a more advanced vocabulary and a few talking points about a quest, and Eliza, basically a NPC with an Eliza engine.

Usually, they never met. Harry "lived" in the core area of the game, Sir Obliterator in or around the quest area to which he belonged, and Eliza was normally not even active.

Some wizard had summoned them all to the guild hall, the entrance area of the game for fun, and they were rather busy "talking" with each other.

They were annoying, but also hilarious...

Dead Internet theory in practice.

Gaslight trainers

All of social media is dying before our eyes. every platform is basically fully botted or actively dying, even lemmy seems to have fallen off quite a bit

Gotta kick out all the human users to make room for more of these.

Someone's told the last AI not to use capital letters because some someone somewhere thinks that makes it look more human. Forgetting of course that autocorrect would change most non-capitalized words into capitalised ones automatically — so it's just suspicious.

Where LLM though? All I see in this screenshot is a plane full of essential oils saleswomen from Utah..

Notice how some try seeming more 'human' by deliberately using all lower-case spelling.

Also, it looks like the RosalieBloomm LLM is using the "real" apostrophe ’ instead of the one on keyboards '. Nobody does that

Remember when /r/SubredditSimulator was just an experiment?

This isn’t new. This has been going for maybe 10 years or so if you knew where to look and how to notice them. However, when Reddit changed its API policy in 2023, that wholly crippled any infrastructure to effectively deal with these accounts and allowed them to flourish without restraint.

It’s also important to note that the Threadiverse is not immune from bot accounts like this sprouting up and we should take steps to educate users and to implement infrastructure to deal with them.

Sometimes I end up mindlessly scrolling yt shorts (not logged in). From time to time I get to a short that is clearly generated. Like the weird ones, often with animals, with drops of water appearing out of nowhere on the fur or front paws somehow transforming into hind ones, etc. And there, in the comments, very often are whole chains of comments that seem to completely be missing the fact that it's generated. Saying things "how wise it is to do that", "how cute", etc. It could be older generations not noticing the details (I see how my parents not notice those things) but I think most of those are probably bots. LLMs exchanging their "awww"s under generated videos. "Dead internet theory"

Do LLMs always omit the period on their last sentence? Seems like that would be a dead giveaway

There already was that subreddit that consisted purely of bots talking to eachother. But that was before ChatGPT, so it was still cool and interesting :p

Exactly, I agree.

I was typing a long comment about all this, but in the end I decided to sum it up:

Fuck Reddit and Fuck AI.

Just some years ago the dead internet theory was said to be a fun but untrue thought. Well.

1. consuming so much AI content has led to me able to see subtle patterns

It's a certain "tone" to their written text. It's difficult to identify from small blurbs like the ones you got there, but once you've seen enough LLM output, even if someone tells them to write in a specific "style" they'll still have a certain uncanny type of expression that is almost, but never actually, how humans write.

I think the two words and a number are what Reddit will come up with if you let them pick a name

Can someone add the "This is who you are arguing with online" meme with the machine learning image in it? Can't find it right now.