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Sneaky spam in conversational replies to blog posts

shkspr.mobi

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Re: Sneaky spam in conversational replies to blog posts

#61

Post by [deleted] »

giraffe_lady wrote: post #40
pinkmuffinere wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh I love these comment threads! I like to add another reply saying something like “oh my goodness, I used Elizabeth Ferguson for my investing too!! She went to my college, so I thought I could trust her. But then I found out she was cheating on me with my wife! We got a divorce and i lost half my assets in the separation. Elizabeth Ferguson probably is enjoying them now :(. Just one experience, but buyer beware!”

Fun until that's a real person using a paid bot service to promote their business and you just libeled them in a perfectly preserved medium.

[deleted]

Re: Sneaky spam in conversational replies to blog posts

#62

Post by jerf »

ultratalk wrote: post #51
jerf wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI has been awful on Reddit. I've acquired a sense for at least some of the bots. There's this set of bots that post a high-engagement post about once a day to an implausibly large range of subreddits, with implausible regularity. I can tell by the way I remove them and the way that the other subs are mostly not that most subs have not figured this out yet. There is an obvious solution to that problem, which I haven'…

Out of curiosity, has anyone noticed a non-negligible presence of bots in threads on HN? I haven't, but I'm not sure if that's because I'm bad at spotting them or because HN is good at getting rid of them or because HN is a niche platform.

I have suspicions but there's fewer signals on HN available to the general public so it's harder to tell.

Well... to be more precise... I'm abundantly positive there are bots and shills here in a general sense. But when it comes to identifying specific accounts as bots or shills, it gets difficult. Yeah, a lot of us have gotten pretty good at identifying the "default LLM voice", but it is trivial to kick it out of that.

I have done some formal writing with AI, and I always feed it a sample of my own writing to emulate. It doesn't do it perfectly. For instance, I'm a semi-colon kind of guy and it still em-dashes without more explicitly instructions to avoid them. But what comes out the other end would definitely pass most people's "default LLM voice" sniff test; it eliminates most of the tells [1] people look for. (I just checked. The resulting output may actually be "better" at avoiding the tells than my own actual text...)

The upshot of all of that is that we are approaching a point with the current AIs that with just a bit of clever prompting it may take many, many kilobytes of text for someone to form a justified (!) opinion that some set of posts is actually AI.

[1]: https://awnist.com/slop-cop

Re: Sneaky spam in conversational replies to blog posts

#63

Post by yhvr »

mschuster91 wrote: post #58
Aurornis wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not a heavy Reddit user but I’ve noticed a sharp increase in comment spam disguised as real discussion. I think the turning point was when they allowed accounts to hide their comment history. Before, when you could click on an account and read all of their other comments it was easy to tell when an account only existed for fake conversations about a product they were spamming. Now the spam accounts hide their com…

Moderators can still see the full comment history. The advantage of hiding one's comments is precisely that they do not show up as easy as before on Google, discussions don't get derailed because of comment muckrakers going through their opponent's post and accuse them of being anti-zionist or pro-zionist, and actual stalkers have a far more difficult time tracking down victims.

It's definitely not as consistent as Reddit's official post histories, but from my experience you can still find a lot just by Googling site:reddit.com "username".

Re: Sneaky spam in conversational replies to blog posts

#65

Post by ziml77 »

4chandaily wrote: post #6
throwaway667555 wrote: post #5

This also is absolutely rampant on reddit in the past months.

This has been rampant on reddit for years.

I wonder if people are finally catching on. I feel like I hear less of "I add 'reddit' to all my searches" than I used to.

The reliability of reddit comments has been questionable even before LLMs. Because people trying to push whatever they are interested in pushing realized that having organic-looking comments is the perfect way to sway people who don't trust professional publications and traditional ads. And now with LLMs in the mix, there's basically not even a cost to doing this and making it look like tons of people love your product and are sharing their friendly thoughts and advice.

Re: Sneaky spam in conversational replies to blog posts

#66

Post by bachmeier »

hrunt wrote: post #3

I subscribe to handful of investment-related YouTube channels. This pattern has been common for years. A bot will reply with a comment loosely related to the video and about how something worked for them. Another bot will reply asking how they did that. Another bot (not the original commenter) will reply that they worked with so-and-so or invested in such-and-such, and then there will be maybe four or five more comme…

If only Google had access to an AI service. That sounds like a snarky comment, but given how easy it would be for Google to use AI to zap those, I can only think there's something preventing them from using it.

Re: Sneaky spam in conversational replies to blog posts

#67

Post by bawolff »

radlad wrote: post #44
chorkpop wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Considering reddit now allows you to hide your post history, I don't know if the admins consider bots to be the giant problem that they certainly are.

I assumed this was meant to make the bot postings less obvious to normal users, to buy them time to "solve the problem." But definitely, bots on reddit seem significantly more common in the past year or two.

Reddit's also famous for NSFW content. There are also stories about harrasing people who post in the "wrong" subreddit (e.g. political subreddits that are the opposite view).

I think there are non bot reasons to do that.

Re: Sneaky spam in conversational replies to blog posts

#68

Post by lewispollard »

sebakubisz wrote: post #35
hrunt wrote: post #3

I subscribe to handful of investment-related YouTube channels. This pattern has been common for years. A bot will reply with a comment loosely related to the video and about how something worked for them. Another bot will reply asking how they did that. Another bot (not the original commenter) will reply that they worked with so-and-so or invested in such-and-such, and then there will be maybe four or five more comme…

Have you seen the same chain pattern outside finance yet? Wonder whether investment scams are the most conspicuous because the payout per convert is high or whether it's seeded the widest on YouTube specifically.

Happens a lot in meditation/spiritual videos on YouTube, spam promoting some AI-generated "manifest riches with the power of your mind" type book.

Re: Sneaky spam in conversational replies to blog posts

#69

Post by bachmeier »

SV_BubbleTime wrote: post #39
hrunt wrote: post #3

I subscribe to handful of investment-related YouTube channels. This pattern has been common for years. A bot will reply with a comment loosely related to the video and about how something worked for them. Another bot will reply asking how they did that. Another bot (not the original commenter) will reply that they worked with so-and-so or invested in such-and-such, and then there will be maybe four or five more comme…

I’m putting together an AI presentation internally for my company, can anyone point to examples of this exact behavior? I’d like to use it as a reference.

Just go to a popular YouTube retirement channel and check the comments on a new video. For instance: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Awtflo0cU4o

Most of the creators delete those comments, but if you get in early, you'll see them.

Re: Sneaky spam in conversational replies to blog posts

#70

Post by kartoffelsaft »

ultratalk wrote: post #51
jerf wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI has been awful on Reddit. I've acquired a sense for at least some of the bots. There's this set of bots that post a high-engagement post about once a day to an implausibly large range of subreddits, with implausible regularity. I can tell by the way I remove them and the way that the other subs are mostly not that most subs have not figured this out yet. There is an obvious solution to that problem, which I haven'…

Out of curiosity, has anyone noticed a non-negligible presence of bots in threads on HN? I haven't, but I'm not sure if that's because I'm bad at spotting them or because HN is good at getting rid of them or because HN is a niche platform.

I made a post here a bit ago where one of the few replies I got was one of these conversational ad-bots, albeit on the more obvious side. It was getting flagged which gives me hope that HN is good at filtering it, but I also mildly worry I'm (or we're) just missing it when it's subtle. I do suspect it's a huge volume in terms of comment count either way though.
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