Reddit is nothing more than a social manipulation platform, and their feigned outrage at this is hilarious. They are absolutely complicit in allowing this very thing by allowing signups without any identity verification. They don't stop it because they know that a large percentage of their traffic is bots, and doing so would negatively impact the value of the company. So once again, the right thing is set aside for money.
On the one hand, this is egregious and should not happen. People should not be stalked and lied to, and communities should not be manipulated at this scale.
On the other hand, it certainly already happens as it is incredibly easy for any group to use LLMs and do this. So the process and effectiveness should be studied and reported to the public... There might be a better way to do it though?
More seriously now, the Zurich researchers were very creepy. I'm reading the article further and saw that they stalked some of the past history of redditors first before trying to influence them in r/change my views or whatever it is called.
I wouldn't want to be a guinea pig for that purpose.
Bot farms rule the web. Bot-authored comments are everywhere, no less than 50%, regardless of site. Keep in mind, human-assisted bots have been used for the past 20 years but now the bots are a lot more productive thus the human part is largely quality control.
Fretting at the rare researchers who admit to their bot activity is like fretting at the criminals who admit guilt and praising those who don't.
Seems more likely to me. Reddit has a far broader userbase, whereas HN is primarily made up of the sort of people who would post with AI. And HN has a non rate-limited API (even though most people here probably use Algolia.)
And people already do paste comments from AI, it's becoming more and more common. At least they have the courtesy of pointing it out but I expect that will stop before the AI comments do.
While I do love seeing the comments starting with "I asked ChatGPT..." get absolutely eviscerated in the replies and negatively voted, it is probably sending the wrong signal.
