most of the time you’ll be talking to a bot there without even realizing. they’re gonna feed you products and ads interwoven into conversations, and the AI can be controlled so its output reflects corporate interests. advertisers are gonna be able to buy access and run campaigns. based on their input, the AI can generate thousands of comments and posts, all to support your corporate agenda.
for example you can set it to hate a public figure and force negative commentary into conversations all over the site. you can set it to praise and recommend your latest product. like when a pharma company has a new pill out, they’ll be able to target self-help subs and flood them with fake anecdotes and user testimony that the new pill solves all your problems and you should check it out.
the only real humans you’ll find there are the shills that run the place, and the poor suckers that fall for the scam.
it’s gonna be a shithole.
How would this be prevented on the fediverse?
We control the experience here to a greater degree. If an instance decides to lean into AI content, we can leave for another, and others can defederate (if desired). Further, bots will be far more transparent. Reddit can (and likely does) offer their preferred bots exemptions for automatic filtering; probably promoting their content using some opaque algorithm. Said bots will receive no such preferential treatment across the Fediverse.