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submitted 7 months ago by ugjka@lemmy.world to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[-] tja@sh.itjust.works 210 points 7 months ago

Oh, I would have thought Reddit themselves would offer such a service

[-] morrowind@lemmy.ml 21 points 7 months ago

That would be an unmarked ad. I don't think that's legal in many places

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[-] dumples@kbin.social 146 points 7 months ago

The only reason reddit was valuable was because it was from real people who weren't paid off. Well that's ruined now.

[-] eronth@lemmy.world 31 points 7 months ago

Yeah, I've noticed that a bit lately anyways. Maybe I'm looking up stuff that has less of a community on Reddit, and thus has less discussion, but I have absolutely noticed some comments have a single product name-drop with little clarity for why they liked the product. It starts to feel like they're just ads (generated or otherwise) meant to trick you into thinking Reddit users are liking the product.

AI is going to just make it worse, and cause Reddit to not be a good goto for actual reviews and discussion on pros/cons.

[-] Jordan117@lemmy.world 21 points 7 months ago

There's an excellent chance that even some of the "authentic" discussions you see are word-for-word reposts of old posts and comments, created by bots to build up karma in order to be sold to spammers and influence peddlers down the line.

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[-] glimse@lemmy.world 17 points 7 months ago

I wanted to figure out what game hosting sites were good and Google pointed me to reddit...every thread was full of boilerplate ads for different sites. The comments were the most obvious, marketing-approved sentences I've ever seen

[-] dumples@kbin.social 19 points 7 months ago

Everything I can find online seems to be advertisements or paid reviews (Also advertisements) when looking for anything anymore. Businesses are terrified of an open honest conversation about what is good and what is not

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[-] ininewcrow@lemmy.ca 88 points 7 months ago

Doesn't mean that the fediverse is immune.

News stories and narratives are still fought over by actors on all sides and sometimes by entities that might be bots. And there are a lot of auto-generating content bots that post stuff or repost old content from other sites like Reddit.

[-] agressivelyPassive@feddit.de 23 points 7 months ago

Especially since being immune to censorship is kind of the point of the fediverse.

If you're even a tiny bit smart about it, you can start hundreds of sock puppet instances and flood other instances with bullshit.

[-] Gullible@sh.itjust.works 39 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

I try to avoid talking about how indefensibly terrible Lemmy’s anti-spam and anti-brigading measures are for fear of someone doing something with the information. I imagine the only thing keeping subtle disinfo and spam from completely overtaking Lemmy is how small its reach would be. Doing the same thing to Reddit is a hundred times more effective, and systemically accepted. Reddit’s admins like engagement.

[-] homesweethomeMrL@lemmy.world 18 points 7 months ago

Put in those tickets. It's a community effort y'know.

[-] ininewcrow@lemmy.ca 17 points 7 months ago

It's an arms race and Lemmy is only a small player right now so no one really pays attention to our little corner. But as soon as we get past a certain threshold, we'll be dealing with the same problems as well.

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[-] KingThrillgore@lemmy.ml 75 points 7 months ago

Generative AI has really become a poison. It'll be worse once the generative AI is trained on its own output.

[-] Simon@lemmy.dbzer0.com 34 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

Here's my prediction. Over the next couple decades the internet is going to be so saturated with fake shit and fake people, it'll become impossible to use effectively, like cable television. After this happens for a while, someone is going to create a fast private internet, like a whole new protocol, and it's going to require ID verification (fortunately automated by AI) to use. Your name, age, and country and state are all public to everybody else and embedded into the protocol.

The new 'humans only' internet will be the new streaming and eventually it'll take over the web (until they eventually figure out how to ruin that too). In the meantime, they'll continue to exploit the infested hellscape internet because everybody's grandma and grampa are still on it.

[-] treadful@lemmy.zip 48 points 7 months ago

I would rather wade with bots than exist on a fully doxxed Internet.

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[-] blusterydayve26@midwest.social 16 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

You’re two years late.

Maybe not for the reputable ones, that’s 2026, but these sheisters have been digging out the bottom of the swimming pool for years.

https://theconversation.com/researchers-warn-we-could-run-out-of-data-to-train-ai-by-2026-what-then-216741

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[-] tearsintherain@leminal.space 61 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

So the human shills that already destroyed good faith in forums and online communities over time are now being fully outsourced to AI. Amazon itself a prime source of enshittification. From fake reviews to everyone with a webpage having affiliate links trying to sell you some shit or other. Including news outlets. Turned everyone into a salesperson.

[-] UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 31 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

Amazon itself a prime source of enshittification

I Turned Bottles of Amazon Drivers' Pee into a #1 Bestseller. Amazon don’t care about their workers’ bladders, but do you know what they do care about? Selling stuff.

“I only do this because I have no other options,” he says. “Other people who go slower just end up getting fired.” I let Christian leave, and hail some more drivers. They all confirm that this is, largely speaking, how their life looks. I hear about how female drivers often develop urinary tract infections from holding it in for too long. Then a dispatch manager I bump into by chance confirms that the “disgusting” bottles of urine outside of fulfilment centres are from Amazon drivers. ​​“We have a point system where, if you pee in a bottle and leave it in the car, you get a point for that,” they tell me. I ask: How many bottles until they’re in trouble? “Ten bottles.”

[-] ColeSloth@discuss.tchncs.de 55 points 7 months ago

I called this shit out like a year ago. It's the end of any viable online searching having much truth to it. All we'll have left is youtube videos from project farm to trust.

[-] Debs@lemmy.zip 36 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

It kinda seems like the end of the Google era. What will we search Google for when the results are all crap? This is the death gasps of the internet I/we grew up with.

[-] Hugh_Jeggs@lemm.ee 32 points 7 months ago

Remember when you could type a vague plot of a film you'd heard about into Google and it'd be the first result?

Nah doesn't work anymore

Saw a trailer for a french film so I searched "french film 2024 boys live in woods seven years"

Google - 2024 BEST FRENCH FILMS/TOP TEN FRENCH FILMS YOU MUST SEE THIS YEAR/ALL TIME BEST FRENCH MOVIES

Absolute fucking gash

I've not been too impressed with Kagi search, but at least the top result there was "Frères 2024"

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[-] Wiz@midwest.social 17 points 7 months ago

Maybe web rings of the 90s were not such a bad idea! Let's bring 'em back!

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[-] BurningnnTree@lemmy.one 20 points 7 months ago

I ran into this issue while researching standing desks recently. There are very few places on the internet where you can find verifiably human-written comparisons between standing desk brands. Comments on Reddit all seem to be written by bots or people affiliated with the brands. Luckily I managed to find a YouTube reviewer who did some real comparisons.

[-] istanbullu@lemmy.ml 38 points 7 months ago

You don't get to blame AI for this. Reddit was already overrun by corporate and US gov trolls long before AI.

[-] TheFriar@lemm.ee 20 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

“New poison has been added to arsenic. Should you stop drinking it? Subscribe to find out.”

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[-] Rinox@feddit.it 11 points 7 months ago

The problem is the magnitude, but yeah, even before 2020 Google was becoming shit and being overrun by shitty blogspam trying to sell you stuff with articles clearly written by machines. The only difference is that it was easier to spot and harder to do. But they did it anyway

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[-] funn@lemy.lol 37 points 7 months ago

I don't understand how Lemmy/Mastodon will handle similar problems. Spammers crafting fake accounts to give AI generated comments for promotions

[-] FeelThePower@lemmy.dbzer0.com 24 points 7 months ago

The only thing we reasonably have is security through obscurity. We are something bigger than a forum but smaller than Reddit, in terms of active user size. If such a thing were to happen here, mods could handle it more easily probably (like when we had the spammer of the Japanese text back then), but if it were to happen on a larger scale than what we have it would be harder to deal with.

[-] BarbecueCowboy@kbin.social 15 points 7 months ago

mods could handle it more easily probably

I kind of feel like the opposite, for a lot of instances, 'mods' are just a few guys who check in sporadically whereas larger companies can mobilize full teams in times of crisis, it might take them a bit of time to spin things up, but there are existing processes to handle it.

I think spam might be what kills this.

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There's one advantage on the fediverse. We don't have the corporations like reddit manipulating our feeds, censoring what they dislike, and promoting shit. This alone makes using the fediverse worth for me.

When it comes to problems involving the users themselves, things aren't that different, and we don't have much to do.

[-] MinFapper@lemmy.world 23 points 7 months ago

We don't have corporations manipulating our feeds

yet. Once we have enough users that it's worth their effort to target, the bullshit will absolutely come.

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[-] linearchaos@lemmy.world 10 points 7 months ago

I think the real danger here is subtlety. What happens when somebody asks for recommendations on a printer, or complains about their printer being bad, and all of a sudden some long established account recommends a product they've been happy with for years. And it turns out it's just an AI bot shilling for brother.

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[-] nytrixus@lemmy.world 33 points 7 months ago

Correction - AI is poisoning everything when it is not regulated and moderated.

Reddit has been poisoning itself for a while, what's the difference? Just AI borrowing from the shithead behavior?

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[-] Th4tGuyII@kbin.social 30 points 7 months ago

It's gross, but also inevitable. If there's an untapped niche to make money from, somebody's going to try it -- plus if they want to waste their money on generating accounts only to have them be banned, then so be it.

Makes me kinda thankful that this community is smaller and less likely to be targeted by this sort of crap.

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[-] PrincessLeiasCat@sh.itjust.works 30 points 7 months ago

The creator of the company, Alexander Belogubov, has also posted screenshots of other bot-controlled accounts responding all over Reddit. Begolubov has another startup called “Stealth Marketing” that also seeks to manipulate the platform by promising to “turn Reddit into a steady stream of customers for your startup.” Belogubov did not respond to requests for comment.

What an absolute piece of shit. Just a general trash person to even think of this concept.

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[-] laverabe@lemmy.world 27 points 7 months ago

I just consider any comment after Jun 2023 to be compromised. Anyone who stayed after that date either doesn't have a clue, or is sponsored content.

[-] vegaquake@lemmy.world 21 points 7 months ago

yeah, the internet is doomed to be unusable if AI just keeps getting more insidious like this

yet more companies tie themselves to online platforns, websites, and other models of operation depending on being always connected.

maybe the world needs a reboot, just get rid of it all and start from scratch

[-] UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 12 points 7 months ago

maybe the world needs a reboot, just get rid of it all and start from scratch

That would destroy all the old good vintage stuff and leave us with machines that immediately fill the vacant space with pure trash.

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[-] sirspate@lemmy.ca 13 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

If the rumor is true that a reddit/google training deal is what led to reddit getting boosted in search results, this would be a direct result of reddit's own actions.

[-] CazzoBuco@lemmy.world 11 points 7 months ago

When the internet is eventually oversaturated with smartbots, where will the humans go.

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[-] catch22@programming.dev 11 points 7 months ago

This is a direct consequence of Google targeting Reddit posts in its search results. Hopefully forum groups like Lemmy don't go get buried under a mountain of garbage as well. As long as advertisers are able to destroy public forums and communities with ads, with ad based revenue sites like Google directing who to target. We will always be creating something great while constantly trying to keep advertisers from turning it into a pile of crap.

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this post was submitted on 23 Apr 2024
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