Reddit has always had a bot problem but of the more than 50 AI bot accounts explored for this article all became active after Reddit partnered with OpenAI. Every account found that matched this pattern of behavior became active during this period. e.g. Same links posted by them.

Additionally during this period Reddit added terms on AI advertising to their business page and the partnership announcement with OpenAI says they became an advertising partner.

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 is not mainstream media. The bot accounts explored here all began posting after Reddit partnered with OpenAI as did every account found that matched the same pattern of behavior. e.g. Same links posted.

The activity of these AI bot accounts also coincides with Reddit adding terms and conditions about AI advertising to their business page. Hence it looks suspect.

Reddit is already becoming this. It is full of AI bots.

The big companies are burning down the planet building datacenters to run pointless AI so we're going to combat that by... building datacenters to run AI?

If they actually wanted to rebel against it they would build low energy tools to detect and remove AI spam and encourage people not to engage with this shit at all.