Comment by inasio
1 year ago
Talk about burying the lede! Near the bottom of the story the site owner confirms that it was him that added the backdated AI comments (perhaps it should have been obvious...)
1 year ago
Talk about burying the lede! Near the bottom of the story the site owner confirms that it was him that added the backdated AI comments (perhaps it should have been obvious...)
The investigation of the events on this particular website are just a tool to illustrate a much broader point about internet content, identity and LLMs.
I couldn’t find it. He was trying to seed the site ?
This is what he replied when asked about the backdated comments:
> The backdated answers were an internal test. We conceived of a bot that would provide a quality answer to a thread without a reply after 1+ years. That too also failed. Instead, I’m considering pruning all threads without a reply as they clutter up the forums.
He’s an SEO guy at shopify, so he likely doesn’t care about the consequences of doing shady SEO experiments with old user’s accounts…
Thats some really shady stuff. Its one thing to provide answers with AI bot. Its totally disingenuous to 1) backdate it 2) assume the alias of a real person
Experimenting with using AI bots to respond to questions that had been open for a long time with no response.