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Daxtron2 , to Technology in AI Is Poisoning Reddit to Promote Products and Game Google With 'Parasite SEO'

Bots have been doing this on Reddit forever, it's a lot more noticeable now that most of the good users who generated content have left.

dumples ,
@dumples@kbin.social avatar

I remember when I first started noticing bots bad was in 2016. They have been there for a while now. It's advertisers turn now though. It's at the end stages

ITeeTechMonkey , to Reddit in AI Is Poisoning Reddit to Promote Products and Game Google With 'Parasite SEO'
@ITeeTechMonkey@lemmy.world avatar

I can't wait for the stories about people jailbreaking these AI accounts because they are probably just using the ChatGPT API.

psvrh , to Reddit in AI Is Poisoning Reddit to Promote Products and Game Google With 'Parasite SEO'
@psvrh@lemmy.ca avatar

As soon as the "just use site:reddit.com to get around SEO bullshit" became public knowledge it was only a matter of time before this happened.

livus ,

Exactly.

One day it will involve fediverse. So enjoy it here for here now, where the only spam we face is the black market prescription drugs spammers on kbin, and people pushing their own news blogs.

criss_cross ,

Yeah the marketing rot always follows where the audience is.

Nothing good can remain untainted.

Tag365 ,
@Tag365@lemmy.world avatar

So when did it become public knowledge? When the Google is broken controversy started?

nick , to Reddit in AI Is Poisoning Reddit to Promote Products and Game Google With 'Parasite SEO'

Works for me. I haven’t used that shithole since Apollo died.

PhlubbaDubba , to Reddit in AI Is Poisoning Reddit to Promote Products and Game Google With 'Parasite SEO'

So the advertisers are basically admitting now that they peddle direct opposition to an actual useful answer to a Google-able question

Like 90% sure this is a direct response to the fact that people have begun appending reddit to their searches to get answers to questions that aren't just Wikipedia or more advertisements.

KingThrillgore , to Technology in AI Is Poisoning Reddit to Promote Products and Game Google With 'Parasite SEO'
@KingThrillgore@lemmy.ml avatar

Generative AI has really become a poison. It'll be worse once the generative AI is trained on its own output.

Simon ,

Here's my prediction. Over the next couple decades the internet is going to be so saturated with fake shit and fake people, it'll become impossible to use effectively, like cable television. After this happens for a while, someone is going to create a fast private internet, like a whole new protocol, and it's going to require ID verification (fortunately automated by AI) to use. Your name, age, and country and state are all public to everybody else and embedded into the protocol.

The new 'humans only' internet will be the new streaming and eventually it'll take over the web (until they eventually figure out how to ruin that too). In the meantime, they'll continue to exploit the infested hellscape internet because everybody's grandma and grampa are still on it.

franklin , to Reddit in AI Is Poisoning Reddit to Promote Products and Game Google With 'Parasite SEO'
@franklin@lemmy.world avatar

Not surprising they've been social marketing with corporate accounts and purchased accounts for years because the know it's effective.

This is just the natural evolution of that.

sentient_loom ,
@sentient_loom@sh.itjust.works avatar

Yeah this is one instance where I don't care that the human bots are being replaced with AI bots. I mean, it's even worse than before, but those "workers" don't have my support here.

fantasty ,

Astroturfers losing their jobs to AI. I imagine some poor guy coming home after a long day of warmongering and promoting nuclear energy, hanging up his coat: „honey, I’m home“. And the wife has prepared a beautiful dinner, it could be a wonderful day. „How was work today?“, the wife asks. And the guy has to tell her how he lost his job to the evil twin brother of ChatGPT because corporate has done the math and they realized that a bot can replace possibly hundreds of humans. It’s a tragedy really, how is the guy going to pay for his mortgage? How’s he gonna feed his family? I think astroturfers should unionize to combat this kind of automation. It creates harm to society.

sentient_loom ,
@sentient_loom@sh.itjust.works avatar

There's a Kurt Vonnegut story in there somewhere. Or maybe someone more cynical.

fantasty ,

I‘m from Germany so had no idea about Kurt Vonnegut, just read through his biography and work and I think that’s the kind of story I had in mind. Definitely gonna read some of his work, seems highly relevant still nowadays.

Deebster , to Reddit in AI Is Poisoning Reddit to Promote Products and Game Google With 'Parasite SEO'
@Deebster@lemmy.ml avatar

I'm not a regular there any more, but I feel like there's more "natural" spam posts nowadays. They're not natural enough that they haven't prompted me to check the account's post history (all mention product x, of course).

Edit: e.g. this one

If this is an example of the AI, it's not very good.

eveninghere ,

LLMs don't generate that sort of templated response for conversation (although they do for software code).

It's more likely a traditional ad, using some classical algorithms perhaps.

DaseinPickle , to Reddit in AI Is Poisoning Reddit to Promote Products and Game Google With 'Parasite SEO'

How do we keep the bots out of Lemmy? Eventually all the AI rot will spread to the fediverse.

Max_P ,
@Max_P@lemmy.max-p.me avatar

Defederate/ban them, defederate instances that don't adequately stop them from their instances.

DaseinPickle ,

That might work for now, but AI bots can easily create more content faster than human moderators can go through. We will need mechanisms to prove humanness.

henfredemars ,

Another strategy might be to demand a minimum content quality. Whether trash comes from humans or bots, it’s still trash.

agressivelyPassive ,

Realistically, you don't. You can't really.

The only way would be to verify each account somehow.

DaseinPickle ,

Yea, it will be a hard problem to solve. There’s no good solutions right now. Hopefully someone with the creativity and skill will come up with something.

50MYT ,

It becomes a pain vs gain problem. How hard do you make it, also balancing the inconvenience.

You could easily force users to enter a one time code via email every 3 months (or more or less time). This would be hard to automate and if you changed it up even more so.

DaseinPickle ,

Or maybe enforce login with a hardware token like Yubikey or Nitrokey. I don’t think you could automate that(?)

50MYT ,

Yeah but how do you get it to someone.

Pain vs gain.

henfredemars ,

Are AI bots really the true problem, or is the problem product promotion? Humans can do that too.

DaseinPickle ,

Yea, but AI bots do it at an unprecedented scale. The price of generating bullshit is practically 0. There is already cheap AI content every where and people are already getting tired of it. It’s true that human actors has done something similar for a long time, but now AI will make the process so easy that AI junk will be everywhere. Look at Google search results, it’s already filled with blogspam generated by AI. Blogspam was a problem before, but now it’s insufferable. Cheap midjourney “art” is showing up in search results even when you search for real classic artist, you get these ugly AI copies. Generative AI is the ultimate bullshit and spam machine.

possiblylinux127 ,
@possiblylinux127@lemmy.zip avatar

We are a community. The community will find a way as we can do anything. We have faith of the heart and everything.

DaseinPickle ,

That sounds more like a prayer than a plan.

itslilith , to Technology in Instagram Advertises Nonconsensual AI Nude Apps
@itslilith@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

god, I hate capitalism

DdCno1 ,

You are free to invent a better system. So far, nobody has.

LostWon ,

That's highly subjective, but the fascinating book The Dawn of Everything argues otherwise. There are even parts about the anthropological evidence some peoples just up and changed systems every so often (yes, non-violently). Our problem as people in the modern era is many can't imagine anything else, not that no one ever did.

Gaywallet , to Technology in Instagram Advertises Nonconsensual AI Nude Apps
@Gaywallet@beehaw.org avatar

I can't help but wonder how in the long term deep fakes are going to change society. I've seen this article making the rounds on other social media, and there's inevitably some dude who shows up who makes the claim that this will make nudes more acceptable because there will be no way to know if a nude is deep faked or not. It's sadly a rather privileged take from someone who suffers from no possible consequences of nude photos of themselves on the internet, but I do think in the long run (20+ years) they might be right. Unfortunately between now and some ephemeral then, many women, POC, and other folks will get fired, harassed, blackmailed and otherwise hurt by people using tools like these to make fake nude images of them.

But it does also make me think a lot about fake news and AI and how we've increasingly been interacting in a world in which "real" things are just harder to find. Want to search for someone's actual opinion on something? Too bad, for profit companies don't want that, and instead you're gonna get an AI generated website spun up by a fake alias which offers a "best of " list where their product is the first option. Want to understand an issue better? Too bad, politics is throwing money left and right on news platforms and using AI to write biased articles to poison the well with information meant to emotionally charge you to their side. Pretty soon you're going to have no idea whether pictures or videos of things that happened really happened and inevitably some of those will be viral marketing or other forms of coercion.

It's kind of hard to see all these misuses of information and technology, especially ones like this which are clearly malicious in nature, and the complete inaction of government and corporations to regulate or stop this and not wonder how much worse it needs to get before people bother to take action.

tim-clark ,
@tim-clark@kbin.social avatar

Flat earthers on the rise. I can only trust what i see with my eyes, the earth is flat!

How will this affect the courts? How can evidence be trusted?

Gaywallet ,
@Gaywallet@beehaw.org avatar

what

godzilla_lives OP ,
@godzilla_lives@beehaw.org avatar

I believe Tim means to say that the spread of misinformation can be linked to the rise of Flat Earthers. That if we can only trust what we see before us, and we see a flat horizon, we can directly interpret this visual to mean that the Earth is flat. Thus, if we cannot trust our own eyes and ears, how can future courtroom evidence be trusted?

"Up to the Twentieth Century, reality was everything humans could touch, smell, see, and hear. Since the initial publication of the chart of the electromagnetic spectrum, humans have learned that what they can touch, smell, see, and hear is less than one-millionth of reality." -Bucky Fuller

^ basically that

tim-clark ,
@tim-clark@kbin.social avatar

Exactly

some_guy ,

Bucky Fuller

Now I know the source of that sample in the Incubus song New Skin. I've been curious about that for two decades. Thanks!

Badeendje , to Technology in Discord Shuts Down ‘Spy Pet’ Bots That Scraped, Sold User Messages
@Badeendje@lemmy.world avatar

Locking the barn after the horse is stolen.

FlyingSquid Mod , to World News in Russia has forked Wikipedia, featuring "better truths"
@FlyingSquid@lemmy.world avatar

Is Wikipedia but Russian! Is best Wikipedia!

ptz ,
@ptz@dubvee.org avatar

Assuming it still allows community edits, some brave soul is probably going to go all [Citation needed] on it and probably end up in a gulag.

NegativeLookBehind ,
@NegativeLookBehind@lemmy.world avatar

Blyatipedia page for “Gulag”:

Comrade, Gulag is wonderful place, many nice people and beautiful beaches. Food is amazing and lots of beautiful women. You get a new set of clothes and your very own room, which is very secure. You will have the best time!

Naich , to World News in Russia has forked Wikipedia, featuring "better truths"
@Naich@lemmings.world avatar

Should have forked Conservepedia - it's already fucking stupid to start with.

billiam0202 ,

You don't fork what's yours to start with.

gedaliyah , to World News in Russia has forked Wikipedia, featuring "better truths"
@gedaliyah@lemmy.world avatar

Why didn't they just start with Metapedia? It would have been a shorter walk.

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