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Title: To Spam AI Chatbots, Companies Spam Reddit with AI-Generated Posts

Link: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/25/06/28/1649...

The problem? "Companies want their products and brands to appear in chatbot
results," reports 9to5Mac. And "Since Reddit forms a key part of the training
material for Google's AI, then one effective way to make that happen is to
spam Reddit." Huffman has confirmed to the Financial Times that this is
happening, with companies using AI bots to create fake posts in the hope that
the content will be regurgitated by chatbots: "For 20 years, we've been
fighting people who have wanted to be popular on Reddit," Huffman said... "If
you want to show up in the search engines, you try to do well on Reddit, and
now the LLMs, it's the same thing. If you want to be in the LLMs, you can do
it through Reddit." Multiple ad agency execs confirmed to the FT that they
are indeed "posting content on Reddit to boost the likelihood of their ads
appearing in the responses of generative AI chatbots." Huffman says that AI
bots are increasingly being used to make spam posts, and Reddit is trying to
block them: For Huffman, success comes down to making sure that posts are
"written by humans and voted on by humans [...] It's an arms race, it's a
never ending battle." The company is exploring a number of new ways to do
this, including the World ID eyeball-scanning device being touted by OpenAI's
Sam Altman. It's Reddit's 20th anniversary, notes CNBC. And while "MySpace,
Digg and Flickr have faded into oblivion," Reddit "has refused to die,
chugging along and gaining an audience of over 108 million daily users..."
But now Reddit "faces a gargantuan challenge gaining new users, particularly
if Google's search floodgates dry up." [I]n the age of AI, many users simply
"go the easiest possible way," said Ann Smarty, a marketing and reputation
management consultant who helps brands monitor consumer perception on Reddit.
And there may be no simpler way of finding answers on the internet than
simply asking ChatGPT a question, Smarty said. "People do not want to click,"
she said. "They just want those quick answers." But in response, CNBC's
headline argues that Reddit "is fighting AI with AI." It launched its own
Reddit Answers AI service in December, using technology from OpenAI and
Google. Unlike general-purpose chatbots that summarize others' web pages, the
Reddit Answers chatbot generates responses based purely on the social media
service, and it redirects people to the source conversations so they can see
the specific user comments. A Reddit spokesperson said that over 1 million
people are using Reddit Answers each week.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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