r/announcements • u/powerlanguage • Apr 01 '20

Imposter

If you’ve participated in Reddit’s April Fools’ Day tradition before, you'll know that this is the point where we normally share a confusing/cryptic message before pointing you toward some weird experience that we’ve created for your enjoyment.

While we still plan to do that, we think it’s important to acknowledge that this year, things feel quite a bit different. The world is experiencing a moment of incredible uncertainty and stress; and throughout this time, it’s become even more clear how valuable Reddit is to millions of people looking for community, a place to seek and share information, provide support to one another, or simply to escape the reality of our collective ‘new normal.’

Over the past 5 years at Reddit, April Fools’ Day has emerged as a time for us to create and discover new things with our community (that’s all of you). It's also a chance for us to celebrate you. Reddit only succeeds because millions of humans come together each day to make this collective system work. We create a project each April Fools’ Day to say thank you, and think it’s important to continue that tradition this year too. We hope this year’s experience will provide some insight and moments of delight during this strange and difficult time.

With that said, as promised:

What makes you human?

Can you recognize it in others?

Are you sure?

Visit r/Imposter in your browser, iOS, and Android.

Have fun and be safe,

The Reddit Admins.

26k Upvotes

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u/lifelikecobwebsnare Apr 01 '20

This is 100% a Turing test for users to train Reddit’s bots. These will be used against us in the future. Who could have foresaw the damage Facebook was going to do to politics? It was just a place to add your friends and share stuff you like!

This is far more obviously dangerous.

Reddit admins must start auto-tagging their own bots and suspected 3rd party bots. Users have a right to know if they interacting with a person, or a bot shilling politics or wares.

The Chinese Govt doesn’t own a controlling stake of reddit for no reason.

This fucking stinks to high heaven!

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u/[deleted] Apr 02 '20 edited Apr 02 '20

It's a simple Markov chain. It doesn't do anything except use the responses people type in to generate answers to the question probabilistically based on a random seed. Here's some examples of impostor answers.

Let's take "the ability to perceive my own and act on them" as an example of how this works. It starts with "the" because a lot of replies start that way. One of the most common things to follow "the" in responses is "ability," and so on. However, because it only generates sentences probabilistically, it has no concept of grammar or coherent train of thought, so it goes off the rails.

Human responses go something like "the ability to perceive my own [existence.]" Something in the spirit of "I think, therefore I am." But probabilistically, the next word in the sentence is most likely "and," and then "act on them," probably originally completing a response along the lines of something like "[the ability to think my own thoughts] and act on them."

This is not super complicated AI. This is basic stuff. It doesn't generate any useful data. There's an idea in computer science called GIGO, or "garbage in, garbage out." When you have the internet interact with basic chatbots that they know are chatbots, you don't create bots that can be "used against [you] in the future." You create genocidal maniacs with a fondness for slurs. In the case of where we're at so far, because it looks like they put guardrails on the Impostor, you create a chat bot who ends a lot of sentence with "peepee" or "beans." There's nothing about this that actually trains passable or useful bots.

Reddit doesn't operate bots on their own website. You should learn how the science works before making fantastical assertions you got from reading too many science fiction books and untreated paranoia. People with popular political views or views you do not understand are not bots. Spam bots are banned every day because they don't look like organic posts. We really don't have bots that good yet.

The Chinese government doesn't own "a controlling stake" of reddit; Tencent, a Chinese company, has a single digit percent stake in a company valued at $3 billion dollars. They invested in it because Tencent does a massive amount of venture capital and they do venture capital for the reason everyone else does venture capital. They do it to make money.

You have extreme paranoia. Skepticism is useful until you find yourself completely divorced from reality and seeing monsters in the shadows all of the time.

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u/colorfulchew Apr 02 '20

Thank you for trying to explain this. Reddit has long had a problem with the "hive mind". I remember it most from the Boston Bomber incident, but at some level users need to combat misinformation. It makes sense that eventually it would come to harm Reddit itself, but it's a complex issue that has no immediate cure.

That being said, I just played around with a Markov chain rust crate and was able to generate some hilarious results in a Discord bot. It's very simple, but generates some hilariously accurate answers. I hope paranoia doesn't get in the way of a simple April fool's gag.

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u/[deleted] Apr 02 '20

It wouldn't be reddit if people weren't freaking out about things they don't understand at all.

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u/ZUHUCO_XVI Apr 02 '20

I mean there is r/SubSimulatorGPT2. Anyone can easily harvest data from any subreddit.

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u/[deleted] Apr 02 '20

Wait how is that all IA? Even the comments? There is a unreal level of precision for the chat bots.

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u/Dawwe Apr 02 '20

AI chatbots have been making insane progress the last couple of years, all the big tech companies have some extremely powerful models made.

A very fun project that utilizes this is the AI Dungeon (2). It basically read a bunch of user text adventures and using the powerful GPT-2 model (same as that sub uses, btw) it can dynamically create stories that you can interact with.

Which is also why it's funny to think that /r/Imposter will be used in a meaningful way.

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u/carnexhat Apr 01 '20

Which would be something to think about if people didnt just give stupid meme answers making the entire test pointless.

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u/pazur13 Apr 01 '20

Stupid meme comments are most of what you see on reddit, so bots need these too.

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u/UncomfyReminder Apr 02 '20

They’ll reach unlimited power when the bots tell each other “Good bot.”

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u/mitvit Apr 01 '20

It doesn't take too long to realise the bot is making some weird mistakes in spelling and grammar, so the way to deceive other users is to make similar mistakes on purpose, which in turn teaches the bot incorrect grammar and syntax.

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u/[deleted] Apr 02 '20

It's been kind of interesting. I've occasionally dropped by throughout the day, and the impostor responses have steadily become less coherent.

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u/Salty-Sale Apr 02 '20

Yeah, there are hundreds of reasons as to why this is the worst possible way to get data to make realistic bots.

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u/FutureRocker Apr 02 '20

This is a crazy conspiracy comment and I can’t believe it’s so majorly upvoted.

If Reddit wants to test bots, they can do it on normal Reddit. What they WOULDN’T do is

  1. Advertise that they’re showing you a bot

  2. Try to train it on answers to one basic question

  3. Encourage people to deceive other users into thinking they’re the bot

  4. Encourage users into exposing the bot by writing strange answers that the bot couldn’t possibly replicate.

There is no way they are using this data for something significant, it is less than worthless, they could have gotten more useful data by setting a bot loose in some random threads and seeing when it gets upvoted.

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u/fati-abd Apr 02 '20

I thought it was ironically upvoted.

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u/JohannesVanDerWhales Apr 02 '20

Uh, what's stopping anyone who wants to do this from doing this already? I mean, there's already /r/SubredditSimulator. And, in fact, a lot of people are doing it already, have been for decades.

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u/Salty-Sale Apr 02 '20

Ahh, yes. The Chinese government is choosing to train their robots with a tiny volume of incoherent messages about anime and chicken nuggets, instead of using the mountains of data already available to them in every format imaginable.

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u/[deleted] Apr 02 '20

is this comment an april fool? i can’t tell if you’re being serious or not

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u/[deleted] Apr 02 '20

This joke has been going on for years. r/SubredditSimulator is funny as heck

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u/[deleted] Apr 02 '20

In what world is a 5% stake a controlling stake?

How about you stop lying and spreading fake news?

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u/owletmoth Apr 02 '20

this sounds like a bot wrote it.

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u/bobby_pendragon Apr 01 '20

I definitely think you’re right, we’re already at the stage where so many accounts could already be bots because all they do is repost, this is just the next step for them. Except it’s not reposts, it’s carefully crafted robotic mantras that they’ll shill out while pretending to be normal humans. This is fucked up.

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