Comment by mrweasel
6 hours ago
For something like customer service, I can understand why an AI would be deploy, not that I think it should, but why are so many running things like Reddit bots?
A few bots here and there for experimentation, sure, but as someone else pointed out, almost half of everything online is now AI generated. To some extend if it's not worth spending a persons time producing, I don't think whatever it is that you generated needs to exist.
I think some of them are actually run by Reddit directly. They couldn't find any way to keep making 'line go up', so they decided they could sumulate growth by machine translating Indian users to English and vice versa.
I think they're translating between users transparently to make it look like it's not a ghost town, and the machine translation reads like bot text.
I could be wrong, it's just a guess.
You're probably right, as Reddit has or wants to go to the stock market and they need to demonstrate line going up, even if it's fake.
Because even fake / generated content gets impressions, comments, upvotes, etc, which is the kind of metrics they optimize for.
Reddit has been botting since the very beginning and never stopped.
This is true. I vouched it. It's well known that Reddit was initially seeded by bots copying from other sites to fake organic activity.
There used to be so much discussion of "brand safety" and people would flip out if their ad showed on a video that didn't align with company viewpoints, even though the company clearly wasn't the creator of the video.
Now, companies are deploying bots on reddit that post stuff in the company's own name with zero human oversight!
It just frustrates me that all the things you learn either in IT (and I would assume also in business school!) go out the window every year. Who even cares about risk assessments and having legal review advertising claims and all that? Why even go to school to learn how to build systems, whether business/legal or IT/CS, if everyone at the top has decided it doesn't matter anymore?
There’s more mass manipulation AKA nudge campaigns going on than ever. Plus, there’s a market for “aged” (forgot the term they actually used) accounts that look authentic.
Are you suggesting that people have bots answering question on place like AskReddit in an effort to nudge society in a certain direction? That would explain why much of Reddit, Instagram and Facebook is so completely unhinged, but that is just a wild way of influencing the world, and to what end?
Yes, this isn't even a conspiracy theory. Reddit is one of the most astroturfed of them all, besides maybe Facebook. At least Facebook has consistent moderation they're (somewhat) accountable for. Moderation on Reddit is extremely shady and opaque, the subreddits aren't ran democratically so they can shut up whoever they want selectively to foster a particular sentiment.
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Likely the classics: voting a certain way, supporting a certain state, supporting a certain cause, and buying things.
> and to what end?
Anarchism / destabilisation.
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>For something like customer service, I can understand why an AI would be deployed
I can't. And the only reason you can, is because we've been accustomed to rote script-based zero quality human customer service first.
AI customer service bots are awful. Their only redeeming feature is how bad most customer service processes already are.
Because we built an economy where you’re rewarded for being an attention whore. Flooding the scene with bots is a good way to statistically make sure you’re a good little whore.