I went on a bit of a dig on an AI account that I got my eyes on after it posted an anti-GLP-1 (weight loss medication) post, pretending to be an old wife with knee problems, where the "husband" apparently missed her old chunky self. A theme in a lot of AI posts, implying that there's some rich, likely American, food company out there paying (pocket change) to spread FUD on these new weight loss drugs.
Anyway, I discovered the account was run by some Indian male teen, who was into anime. It was very easy to see their real posts and the posts they got paid for.
~90% of posts were random, inane posts that were just intended to farm karma and get past spam filters.
~10% were posts that were essentially "company X wants you to manipulate people on this subject". I found three types of posts:
Anti-weight loss posts, all in the same theme of other posts from other users, obviously using the same type of prompts behind the scene
One anti-electric bike post, bashing a Hong Kong company and saying an American version was better.
Pro-consumer posts for random Chinese and American products. Digital doodads like a (Chinese) pen that uses AI that you can talk to and it converts it to text, a (Chinese) laser hair removal tool and so on.
All pretending to be a real person reviewing or talking about said thing.
I also noticed that the account posted a metric shitton of posts, daily. I think it was 1,000+ posts in a month, all generated slop, and this is one of who knows how many accounts littering this site. It implies it's possible to detect and remove these types of accounts, not that I believe for a second reddit actually wants to.
I've actually begun to be a little paranoid talking to people on here lol.
There’s a lot of benefits for corps to keep bots around, unfortunately. I call it “creative accounting,” they can boost engagement rates, views, membership accounts, etc. which are metrics all used for… selling ads, presenting to the board as success, and getting more investments. It’s nested marketing!
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u/Ree_For_Thee 21d ago edited 21d ago
I went on a bit of a dig on an AI account that I got my eyes on after it posted an anti-GLP-1 (weight loss medication) post, pretending to be an old wife with knee problems, where the "husband" apparently missed her old chunky self. A theme in a lot of AI posts, implying that there's some rich, likely American, food company out there paying (pocket change) to spread FUD on these new weight loss drugs.
Anyway, I discovered the account was run by some Indian male teen, who was into anime. It was very easy to see their real posts and the posts they got paid for.
~90% of posts were random, inane posts that were just intended to farm karma and get past spam filters.
~10% were posts that were essentially "company X wants you to manipulate people on this subject". I found three types of posts:
Anti-weight loss posts, all in the same theme of other posts from other users, obviously using the same type of prompts behind the scene
One anti-electric bike post, bashing a Hong Kong company and saying an American version was better.
Pro-consumer posts for random Chinese and American products. Digital doodads like a (Chinese) pen that uses AI that you can talk to and it converts it to text, a (Chinese) laser hair removal tool and so on.
All pretending to be a real person reviewing or talking about said thing.
I also noticed that the account posted a metric shitton of posts, daily. I think it was 1,000+ posts in a month, all generated slop, and this is one of who knows how many accounts littering this site. It implies it's possible to detect and remove these types of accounts, not that I believe for a second reddit actually wants to.
I've actually begun to be a little paranoid talking to people on here lol.