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AI Bots Appeared After Reddit Partnered with OpenAI (documentingourdecline.substack.com)

An investigation into the AI bots that appeared on Reddit after they partnered with OpenAI.

Key points:

  • The bots post a lot of links to products and services which appear to be adverts but are not marked as such.
  • Many of these links are for Sam Altman’s World ID.
  • Reddit added terms on AI advertising to their business page around the time the bots appeared.
  • The bots also make up stories about dead mothers, depression, drug addiction, eating disorders, medical conditions and mental health issues.
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[-] SGforce@lemmy.ca 8 points 17 hours ago

Also, the bots like this are just mimicking astroturf accounts that always existed. Likely even trained on them.

[-] DocumentingDecline@lemmy.ml 2 points 16 hours ago

This idea was explored by searching some of the more obscure links posted by them. The link to the CD key seller and language course seen in figure 14 for instance were posted almost exclusively by the bots so it does not seem likely that they picked these links up just from being trained on Reddit. Additionally the bots almost never post links to youtube, wikipedia, news sites or other subreddits whereas such links are amongst the most common posted by real users. So if the bots were just trained on them it would be expected to see a lot more links like those whereas currently 99% of the links the bots are posting are to products and services.

this post was submitted on 09 Mar 2026
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