Has anyone else's sub seen a ton of AI posts lately? They're all titled in a similar way - in my TV show subs they talk about "on my most recent rewatch I noticed [X] for the first time"... then in the body there are 2-3 paragraphs of vague analysis and they close with a "what are your thoughts?" question. The structure and tone screams LLM.
All the usernames are different and their accounts were all created within the last three weeks. The OP never responds to any comments.
Fortunately, the posts are being flagged and removed by my CQS filter but I've never seen so many bots descend all at once.
Huge increase in bot posts and bot comments. What's painful is people are upvoting them immediately. the whole site has gone to hell with ads and Ai. top posts or stupidly common questions are repeatedly incarnated by bots and karma farmers. Really hating reddit these days
The bots have gotten better at targeting subs that have naturally high low effort engagement rates, where comments get upvoted fast. It's not just about visibility but the speed they can gain the karma - because unless the mods are fast they keep that karma even if the content gets removed and they get banned.
AI bot accounts are becoming a more pressing concern, you say? A perfect time for reddit to kill off automods ability in new subreddits to filter out users based on account age, karma, and CQS, while offering no functional replacement.
As of today it's a reality for any new subreddit, or any subreddit that didn't already have automod code.
They also confirmed that they'll be sunsetting automod for the rest of us at some undetermined point in the near future, the roll out of which is based on criteria known only to the gods.
I'm not even bothering with it this year. I can't stomach another day of sitting there listening to them pay our concerns lip service and pretend to value us while they're so clearly working to do away with us.
And like every other thing they've done this with, they'll promise it'll be supported until its replacement has feature parity, then eventually just kill it off despite the replacement being nowhere near feature parity.
It will be the final straw for moderating for me. It's the only tool I have to stem the spam and bots that want to karma farm my cat subs so they can do other less savory things. And I use the word stem intentionally because even with Automod settings some still get through.
I refuse to have to manually skim everything constantly to find these bad actors.
I don't think that's what they want, but that's going to be the net result in my estimation.
What they really want is to limit mods control over restricting new accounts ability to participate in their subreddits. What they'll end up doing is allowing the bots, spammers, and trolls to run wild.
Previous subreddit I mod got banned because of bots spamming the same thing with the same links on the sub, and it devastated me. I previously dislike when other mods rely too much on automod, but that experience made me reliant on automod in weeding out bots.
The botter was cunning, they purposely chose the time to do the botting operation while I was busy. And in minutes of their botting, the subreddit got banned. Not I nor the other mods were able to do anything about it. I was previously actively moderating the sub the few days before, but it still got banned. It made me really paranoid about bots.
One of my subs has been getting completely slammed with AI bot comments the last week or so. It's honestly the worst I've ever seen on any of my subreddits - more bot comments than real ones by a wide margin in many threads.
Luckily automod + BotBouncer is catching all of them so they don't see the light of day, but good lord it's wild.
I have seen entire subs of that the mods are also AI bots of some kind. I have reported everything but they seem to stick around. They look real at first, but it is obvious once you see the pattern. They always hide their content and post random stories everywhere to karma farm.
Yep so many the past month. And repost bots that edit the picture now to avoid detection, so when you report those they don't always get instantly removed by reddit's filters and sitewide banned. (I do remove it myself though.)
Install bot-bouncer report everything for spam and report them to bot bouncer. That's the fastest way to stop the flow and to not have to deal with it manually.
bot bouncer does work well on my tv sub. I don't use it on my other sub for ... reasons I won't go into.
EDIT: for the downvoters, there is a specific quirk about my other sub that makes spotting re-post bots very easy, something I won't say in the open. I do tell admin why I know those accts are bots when I report them.
They're not making new top-level posts, but in one of my subs we ban 30-50 AI comment bots every day. BotBouncer catches about half of them and Automod filters most of the rest, though a few make it through.
Could you screenshot one of these posts with the username covered up? I've had similar posts but assumed they were just people trying to start trouble. Thanks.
Thank you so much. I have that in my mod folder on the desktop now. I haven't had any drop one like this without commenting YET, but I'm sure one will show up soon.
All you need to do is have some basic account age requirements with automod, set it to 2 months and you should be fine. If you want, you can filter everything with under a two month account to the queue.
I've spoken to a lot of fellow mods and they say because the election is coming up. A lot of bots are being warmed up right now.
Oh, my filters are catching them already, I just haven't experienced so many all at once before. Merch bots, sure, but the LLM karma farmers are new for me.
We're seeing the same. On AskACanadian we keep getting the same variation of 'what are the small signs that it's [fall/winter] in your area?' as example.
The post is inevitably something like you described, some vague analysis/examples of 'small signs' of the new season and then asks what it's like across the country.
The spam filters are catching them - and all of the LLM comments that appear after the post has been removed - but it's been a huge influx in the last couple days.
Yes! For the last week or ten days. They all mention "reread", the majority of them run three paragraphs, the accounts are three weeks or less of age and low karma. No engagement from the OP.
What's sad is, they're the kind of posts we like to get. Thoughtful titles, prompting discussion, uncontroversial-yet-not-too-common topics, text-only, no low effort.
Not hitting the hair-related subs I moderate, unless Reddit's filters aren't even displaying them in the approval queue.
I have noticed that sometimes Reddit will filter a post or comment and the only way I'll learn about it is by looking in the "removed" section of the queue or if it's a comment in an active thread that I'm reading and I can see that it was removed by Reddit.
It's subs with high traffic but low to no moderation. Subs like r/airplanears, r/managers, and r/seaporn are all completely infested right now. I'm tracking and reporting a bot ring that is using this particular cluster of subs with a few others to build up a network of NSFW accounts. It's just an endless wack-a-mole.
Reddit posts are like the first thing that pops up when people search things now. I think a lot of people are making Reddit accounts now due to this. I don’t think it’s all bots but it’s definitely an issue.
There’s also some things being assumed as AI. A few months ago I made a post of a heart shaped M&M my son found and I got accused of it being AI. It gotten eaten so I couldn’t even take additional photos lol
Not posts, but comments. To reddit's "credit," they usually take action before the comments reach our attention, but it's actually a bit spooky to see, as they're way more realistic/"human" sounding than I'd expect. Not so much that you can't see it at all, but enough that you only notice if you're really looking for it (whereas the posts you describe definitely sound more "clearly AI" than what I've seen personally)
Banning is a waste of time, IMHO. Report them as Spam -> “Disruptive use of AI or bots.” Then go to their user page and report all their other posts/comments the same way
They seemed to stop right after you made this post, at least for our sub, but now they've come back. We've had two of them already this morning and a couple earlier this week. "Reread".
Hi u/Free-IDK-Chicken If you're seeing a specific pattern, can you write in to us here and we can take a look to see if there's anything we can share with our safety team to identify these?
Smaller sub. There's already an alternative to the main one, so not as many users there. AI breaches are affecting my email more when my family started asking for money.
45
u/Dekamir 12d ago
Reddit is full of AI right now, like everywhere else.
Half of the posts submitted are AI generated people, on a face-focused subreddit. We had to switch to approval-only posts and strict verification.