In case you didn’t know, you can’t train an AI on content generated by another AI because it causes distortion that reduces the quality of the output. It is also very difficult to filter out AI text from human text in a database. This phenomenon is known as AI collapse.
So if you were to start using AI to generate comments and posts on Reddit, their database would be less useful for training AI and therefore the company wouldn’t be able to sell it for that purpose.
It feels like Reddit was already using bots to make posts after they killed 3rd party apps. It’s been pointed out a lot here how so many comment chains on the site these days make no sense unless they are AI/bots.
Fr. Couple of months ago I went to check and all I saw were posts with a ton of upvotes and no comments or posts with a ton of upvotes and a thousand comments, not a single comment with anything of substance.
Even before then, you’d always find comments in any larger section that were irrelevant praise posted by bots to generate a “realistic” Reddit account to sell later to marketing companies.
Hell I believe I once used a tool to value my Reddit account at like $200 and it literally told me how kind my responses were. Also to generate comment karma, responding to a post early is much more valuable than a good response.
Oh I forgot about people selling accounts. Not only will they be training on a bunch of bot posts, they’ll be training on ad spam as well.
I never bothered deleting my account or deleting my posts. But I might consider selling my account.
I don’t suppose you remember the tool? I’m curious about mine. lol
I can’t remember the specific site and it may not be up anymore. I either found it by googling “Reddit account value” or words to that effect, or stumbled across the link in Reddit.
I do remember it worked a bit like redditmetis.com as it knew the age of the account and karma, but also use of kind Vs obscene language. I was also a mod of subreddit that just made everyone mods for the heck of it
I think I already type like generative AI too, which may be worth something nowadays. Honestly setting up a bit that uses a large language model to pump vaguely relevant top level comments out soon after posts are posted will probably net you more karma in a month than a decade using it sincerely, although for this reason, I presume old accounts are particularly valued now.
It’s not just the content, it’s the ecosystem
If you’re training ai, you need a way to evaluate outputs. What better way than through karma score?