Reddit prepares for ChatGPT-related “spam apocalypse”.

ChatGPT and similar AI bots have been the hot topic in the tech world for several weeks and months and many also find the technology fascinating. Some people see such artificial intelligence as dangerous, on Reddit they fear a spam wave.

For many, chatbots such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT or GPT-4 and Google’s Bard are an exciting and practical thing. Because such text generation delivers human-sounding and well-founded results at first glance. But how Vice reported, the joy about ChatGPT and Co. is not the same everywhere.

For example, last December moderators of the history subreddit r/AskHistorians issued a warning that there would be a flood of AI-generated texts in this forum in the coming weeks and months – and that was not a particularly good development.

“They were pretty easy to spot,” said host Sarah Gilbert, who has a PhD in history from Cornell University. “They are not detailed, they are not comprehensive and they often contain incorrect information.” For the history-focused subreddit, historical questions and answers are the bread and butter.

Because on r/AskHistorians, historians answer users’ questions, and here, of course, expertise is everything. But with the help of ChatGPT, suddenly everyone is an “expert” or can pretend to be one. According to Gilbert, once ChatGPT was launched, there were five to ten ChatGPT posts per day, and that continued to increase in the days and weeks that followed. In the meantime, this has settled down a bit, but this is also due to the fact that ChatGPT texts are treated quite rigorously.

Bots are becoming more and more of a problem

The problem does not only affect a specific forum, ChatGPT is increasingly becoming the most important tool for spammers of all kinds. Because with chatbot-generated content, it is relatively easy to trick the Reddit automatisms for detecting spam. Around February, there was a coordinated bot attack from several “Ask” subreddits, including r/AskWomen, r/AskEconomics and r/AskPhilosophy. According to Gilbert, the problem wasn’t recognizing the ChatGPT texts, but the fact that they “came so quickly”. The history forum alone had to block around 75 accounts a day at the peak of the wave.

The popular r/Technology subreddit also struggles with such bots: “The bot problem was already extremely bad, and Reddit’s automated anti-spam systems are barely helping, and by the time they do, it’s already too late, and the existence of the bot has generally served its purpose,” says one of the moderators there.

Most bots are not used for political or other manipulation, but for classic spam, i.e. advertising. Nevertheless, these are also becoming increasingly difficult to recognize and are clogging the social media channels. “I think a lot of the claims ‘GPT will revolutionize (whatever)’ are nonsense,” says an r/Cybersecurity moderator. “But I’d bet traditional social media has a limited lifespan, largely because inauthentic content is so realistic and cheap to produce that we’ll have trouble figuring out who’s real and who’s a bot.”

See also:

ChatGPT, OpenAI