You’re probably right. About 5 years ago I recall seeing a link to an entirely bot-populated sub. The conversations were almost indistinguishable from humans - it was really eerie. After that I had a hard time using Reddit because I had to assume that any comment responding to me might just be a computer program
It’s a strange phenomenon where people couldn’t fathom complex large scale computing before LLMs. Talk of botnets were met with extreme skepticism to the point of inexplicable naivety. Now that people think LLMs are almost like AGI, they’ve swung to the other extreme. There are those who think a post that is more than a few sentences must be computer generated.
now? more like a decade or more ago
It may have felt like that, but I will trust the numbers from the company whose function heavily involves monitoring this stuff.
You’re probably right. About 5 years ago I recall seeing a link to an entirely bot-populated sub. The conversations were almost indistinguishable from humans - it was really eerie. After that I had a hard time using Reddit because I had to assume that any comment responding to me might just be a computer program
There was a super popular sub that implemented some kind of bot stopping feature, and it didn’t get a new post for like 48 hours.
It’s a strange phenomenon where people couldn’t fathom complex large scale computing before LLMs. Talk of botnets were met with extreme skepticism to the point of inexplicable naivety. Now that people think LLMs are almost like AGI, they’ve swung to the other extreme. There are those who think a post that is more than a few sentences must be computer generated.
i wasn’t really thinking of bots acting as humans on discussion sites when writing this comment, it was more about crawler bots and such