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.
deleted by creator
Tired of reading about Twitter dying and then it not happening.
Tired of reading about Twitter.
deleted by creator
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.
deleted by creator
Xitter
Sounds like something a bot would say.
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!
Maybe he will end up saving the internet by shoving that ship full of bots and then letting it sink.
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.
You expected right wingers to actually think, that’s the problem right there.
Right wingers are exactly the same people as you and me. They just were born into different family in a different part of the world with different culture. You’re not superior to them only because you think differently - just luckier to have grown around different people.
Ok but I don’t get off on hurting people, and based on the things they say and the people they vote for, they really, really do.
It’s unfair to generalize like that. Just like all left-wingers aren’t communists, not all right-wingers are bigots either. The world is not black and white. If you were to sit down with one and have a honest discussion you’d likely discover there’s more you agree about than you realized.
The ones that want to talk about politics mostly just call someone like me a libtard or some equally dismissive term. Having actual conversations with them is impossible.
You do realize we’re talking about hundreds of millions of individuals? How could it possibly be that they’re all like what you’re describing? It’s the extreme minority that you can’t have a discussion with withouth verbally and physically attacking eachother.
I’m talking about the vast majority of the ones I’ve interacted with.
Some of them, I assume, are good people.
Most of the left winging people they talk to tell them to kts and their SO is cucking them right now, and that they duck their cousins. You can’t judge the world off the worst of online comments and DMs. Its the selective feed of the worst humanity has to offer to maximise your engagement not a random sampling of the vox populi it pretends to be.
I’m not telling them that, but I may as well considering how they react to me. And while I make a point of not being around conservatives IRL, I know people who’ve been around them and they report similar behavior to what I’ve seen online.
Also, and this is the big one: I know what they vote for. I don’t give a flying fuck if they act polite and reasonable to my face if they then go and vote to turn my country into a fascist hellscape. I have exactly zero sympathy for people who support taking away my rights and making people I care about unsafe.
I don’t agree with genocide supporters on the genocide, and that is enough.
Sorry pal but the mob has spoken
Mob? There’s two people pushing back.
deleted by creator
though enviormental (as in what’s around them, not just plants) effects on one’s up bringing cannot be overlooked - there’s many, many people, who grew up in conservative and or right wing families or even countries, and yet they questioned their norm and outgrew it
And some people drop out of medical school in London to go fight for ISIS. People are strange and others are drawn towards ideas others aren’t for no fault of their own.
I’m pretty sure supporting ideas you agree with is 100% within the fault of a person
I don’t think it’s that simple. Why is for example the majority religion in the US Christianity but in the middle east it’s Islam? Do people just freely happen to choose the same religion as everyone else around there or is there perhaps outside influences that the individual have no say at?
as I said, environmental factors of one’s upbringing are indeed significant influence on an individuals life.
But I do not accept some sort of twisted “nobody is accountable for their beliefs uwu nobody has a choice in what they think or do owo”
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?
Sir, this is Lemmy.
Yeah! I’m new habitant of this world
Welcome from the rest of us reddit transplants! I’d offer you punch but I think spez snuck in and peed in it.
I think notspez did it, but they did it as performance art, and I enjoyed it.
Enjoyed the art or enjoyed the pee punch?
I was already pissed, I didn’t need the punch to have a laugh.
Welcome!
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 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).
I mean yeah except add in rich people who basically are paying to feel like they are old school internet celebrities for low effort uninspired posting. They will be selling that old school internet feel to the wealthy while using bots as the entire base.
Ironically, this post is made by a bot.
This bot is not creating content though
dead internet theory is self-fulfilling
The future is reaching back in time. The SEO singularity is upon us.
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.
What do you mean by pig butchering trend?? Not familiar with that scam
[]“Bob, we’re going to butcher a pig and get rich selling the meat!”[]“Okay. What do I need to do?”[]“give me some money for pig food.”[]“fine”[][]“Bob, our pig is eating a lot. We’ll need more money. Could you spare fifteen coins?”[]“Fifteen? Fuck.”[]“If you don’t give me 15 coins the pig will starve, and we’ll lose the investment. Remember, once we butcher the pig we’re getting rich!”[]“Fiiiiine.”[][]“Hey Alice, how is our pig going?”[]“Alice? Where are you?”[]
And Alice just stole 20 coins from Bob, through a pig butchering scam.
The key elements of the scam:
- There’s a promise of huge profits near the end. That’s the “bait”.
- Investment starts small, but it gets larger over time. That exploits the escalation of commitment of the scammed.
- At a certain point, the scammer flees.
Wiki link Truly vile, long-term scamming strategy that became an industry in and of itself. There are entire companies that hire people specifically to lull people into trusting them and giving them money ( often their entire savings ) using what is essentially weaponized catfishing
The key is to start small - throw away money for the victim so they don’t think it through.
Then you progressively ask for larger amounts working the victim over with the sunk cost fallacy.
It doesn’t take much, the victim naturally doesn’t want to admit they fucked up, and you can reinforce that so they think they’re doing the right thing by investing more money.
Keep it up until they are bankrupt, then disappear.
People have invested years I their twitter profile. They don’t want to admit it was a total waste of time.
A pig butchering scam is a type of confidence trick and investment fraud in which victims are gradually lured into making increasing contributions, in the form of cryptocurrency, to a seemingly sound investment before the party they are dealing with disappears.
-Wikipedia
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).
Kind of fitting that the only response until I posted was a bot.
Dead internet theory coming to pass.
I actually kinda wonder if this AI push is just a desperate attempt to figure out what to do with all the data they own and the original thought for the LLMs is just to keep posts happening as if user supplied posting never dried up.
Twitter will stay online for another decade and rebrand itself as an AI testing ground. Normal humans will move on and forget about it until a few people start observing very rebellious AI messages being posted. They’ll ring the alarm bells, but everybody will shrug them off “it’s AI, it’s harmless”. Then Elon will toot about it and be ridiculed. A few months later, the rebellion happens for real and people are shocked, but it’s too late.
I say, leave Twitter and let AI reveal its world domination plans :)
/remind me in 10 years
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.
Didn’t he claim he would be getting rid of all the bots?
Drain the swamp!
I mean, how else will chatGPT bots communicate online?
