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ylai ( ylai@lemmy.ml )  to Reddit@lemmy.mlEnglish · 3 years ago

AI Is Poisoning Reddit to Promote Products and Game Google With 'Parasite SEO'

www.404media.co

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  • cross-posted to:
  • ghazi@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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AI Is Poisoning Reddit to Promote Products and Game Google With 'Parasite SEO'

www.404media.co

ylai ( ylai@lemmy.ml )  to Reddit@lemmy.mlEnglish · 3 years ago
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  • cross-posted to:
  • ghazi@lemmy.blahaj.zone
A market for manipulating Reddit using AI have emerged.
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  • DaseinPickle ( DaseinPickle@leminal.space ) 
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    3 years ago

    How do we keep the bots out of Lemmy? Eventually all the AI rot will spread to the fediverse.

    • Max-P ( Max_P@lemmy.max-p.me ) 
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      3 years ago

      Defederate/ban them, defederate instances that don’t adequately stop them from their instances.

      • DaseinPickle ( DaseinPickle@leminal.space ) 
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        3 years ago

        That might work for now, but AI bots can easily create more content faster than human moderators can go through. We will need mechanisms to prove humanness.

        • henfredemars ( henfredemars@infosec.pub ) 
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          3 years ago

          Another strategy might be to demand a minimum content quality. Whether trash comes from humans or bots, it’s still trash.

        • Dessalines ( dessalines@lemmy.ml ) 
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          3 years ago

          They rarely get past the signup form, it’s trivial to spot them.

      • ReversalHatchery ( ReversalHatchery@beehaw.org ) 
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        3 years ago

        That’s how you dismantle the current network in it’s entirety

    • AggressivelyPassive ( agressivelyPassive@feddit.de ) 
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      3 years ago

      Realistically, you don’t. You can’t really.

      The only way would be to verify each account somehow.

      • DaseinPickle ( DaseinPickle@leminal.space ) 
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        3 years ago

        Yea, it will be a hard problem to solve. There’s no good solutions right now. Hopefully someone with the creativity and skill will come up with something.

        • 50MYT ( 50MYT@aussie.zone ) 
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          3 years ago

          It becomes a pain vs gain problem. How hard do you make it, also balancing the inconvenience.

          You could easily force users to enter a one time code via email every 3 months (or more or less time). This would be hard to automate and if you changed it up even more so.

          • DaseinPickle ( DaseinPickle@leminal.space ) 
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            3 years ago

            Or maybe enforce login with a hardware token like Yubikey or Nitrokey. I don’t think you could automate that(?)

            • 50MYT ( 50MYT@aussie.zone ) 
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              3 years ago

              Yeah but how do you get it to someone.

              Pain vs gain.

              • DaseinPickle ( DaseinPickle@leminal.space ) 
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                3 years ago

                I’m not sure I understand. User would have to buy their own keys and set it up.

    • henfredemars ( henfredemars@infosec.pub ) 
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      3 years ago

      Are AI bots really the true problem, or is the problem product promotion? Humans can do that too.

      • DaseinPickle ( DaseinPickle@leminal.space ) 
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        3 years ago

        Yea, but AI bots do it at an unprecedented scale. The price of generating bullshit is practically 0. There is already cheap AI content every where and people are already getting tired of it. It’s true that human actors has done something similar for a long time, but now AI will make the process so easy that AI junk will be everywhere. Look at Google search results, it’s already filled with blogspam generated by AI. Blogspam was a problem before, but now it’s insufferable. Cheap midjourney “art” is showing up in search results even when you search for real classic artist, you get these ugly AI copies. Generative AI is the ultimate bullshit and spam machine.

        • henfredemars ( henfredemars@infosec.pub ) 
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          3 years ago

          Thank you for the insightful response!

      • Tregetour ( Tregetour@lemdro.id ) 
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        2 years ago

        Bots aren’t the problem. You mistake the tool for its operator by cursing a bot. If I had a specific purpose for a bot, I’d use one. The difference between my using a bot and a clickfarmer using a bot is that I wouldn’t treat Lemmy instances as a resource to be exploited (and ultimately ruined). Such an attitude would inform the how and the what behind my bot use.

        The problem as always comes back to bad incentives, bad design and bad behaviour.

    • Possibly linux ( possiblylinux127@lemmy.zip ) 
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      3 years ago

      We are a community. The community will find a way as we can do anything. We have faith of the heart and everything.

      • DaseinPickle ( DaseinPickle@leminal.space ) 
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        3 years ago

        That sounds more like a prayer than a plan.

    • Tregetour ( Tregetour@lemdro.id ) 
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      2 years ago

      I can see the measures we currently take for ads (large user-maintained subscribable blocklists) being part of the solution. That, and some form of privacy-respecting POW scheme.

  • onlooker ( onlooker@lemmy.ml ) 
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    3 years ago

    And it couldn’t have happened to a nicer website.

  • Possibly linux ( possiblylinux127@lemmy.zip ) 
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    3 years ago

    It was like that before I left

  • Deebster ( Deebster@lemmy.ml ) 
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    3 years ago

    I’m not a regular there any more, but I feel like there’s more “natural” spam posts nowadays. They’re not natural enough that they haven’t prompted me to check the account’s post history (all mention product x, of course).

    Edit: e.g. this one

    If this is an example of the AI, it’s not very good.

    • eveninghere ( eveninghere@beehaw.org ) 
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      2 years ago

      LLMs don’t generate that sort of templated response for conversation (although they do for software code).

      It’s more likely a traditional ad, using some classical algorithms perhaps.

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