Technology

59135 readers

6622 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

Follow the lemmy.world rules.
Only tech related content.
Be excellent to each another!
Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
Politics threads may be removed.
No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

521

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 (www.abc.net.au)

submitted 8 months ago by L4s@lemmy.world to c/technology@lemmy.world

103 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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".

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] Jordan117@lemmy.world 115 points 8 months ago (6 children)

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.

[–] 9iNez@lemmy.world 55 points 8 months ago (1 children)

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

[–] Red_October@lemmy.world 18 points 8 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] CleoTheWizard@lemmy.world 3 points 8 months ago (2 children)

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.

[–] Red_October@lemmy.world 4 points 8 months 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.

[–] T156@lemmy.world 1 points 8 months ago

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.

load more comments (4 replies)