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.
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!
Tired of reading about Twitter dying and then it not happening.
Tired of reading about Twitter.
Sounds like something a bot would say.
It’s Xwitter now.
I will never call it anything but Twitter. Twitter is a pile of shit.
Ironically, this post is made by a bot.
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.
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?
I hear Omelas is nice.
Sir, this is Lemmy.
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).
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.
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.
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.
Kind of fitting that the only response until I posted was a bot.
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.
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
My favorite showcase of this: Vinny’s “PERUSE MY BIO” segment (timestamp: 2:26)
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Vinny’s “PERUSE MY BIO” segment
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
I’ve tried a bunch of Piped links over the last week, none seem to work for me. Are they working for anyone?
I just tried this one. Spun for a full minute and I gave up. I would say 80% of alternative frontends for popular services haven’t worked for me traditionally, yet people swear by them. It’s really puzzling to me. Like you and I can’t be the only person for whom services like these don’t work.
