Reddit is being spammed by AI bots, and it’s all Reddit’s fault

1 week ago 1

Reddit is being spammed by AI bots, and it's all Reddit's fault | Conceptual image of a row of AI–powered robots

Reddit CEO Steve Huffman has said that the platform is being spammed by AI bots, and is now in “an arms race” to detect and block these fake posts.

The irony here is that the very reason Reddit is being targeted by bots is because the company sells access to user posts for AI training …

Reddit lets AI bots harvest user posts

Things kicked off early last year when Reddit signed a $60M deal to allow user posts to be harvested for AI training. The company involved was subsequently revealed to be Google.

To protect that deal, Reddit started denying access to other companies, not just AI training bots but also web crawlers, meaning that only Google would be able to index the site.

And is now being spammed by AI bots

One of the many problems with allowing user posts to be used for AI training is that companies want their products and brands to appear in chatbot results. Since Reddit forms a key part of the training material for Google’s AI, then one effective way to make that happen is to spam Reddit.

Huffman has confirmed to the Financial Times that this is happening, with companies using AI bots to create fake posts in the hope that the content will be regurgitated by chatbots.

“For 20 years, we’ve been fighting people who have wanted to be popular on Reddit,” Huffman said. “We index very well into the search engines. If you want to show up in the search engines, you try to do well on Reddit, and now the LLMs, it’s the same thing. If you want to be in the LLMs, you can do it through Reddit.”

Multiple ad agency execs confirmed to the FT that they are indeed “posting content on Reddit to boost the likelihood of their ads appearing in the responses of generative AI chatbots.”

Huffman says that AI bots are increasingly being used to make these spam posts, and Reddit is trying to block them.

For Huffman, success comes down to making sure that posts are “written by humans and voted on by humans […] It’s an arms race, it’s a never ending battle.”

The company is exploring a number of new ways to do this, including the World ID eyeball–scanning device being touted by OpenAI’s Sam Altman.

9to5Mac’s Take

Reddit users were already unhappy about their posts being sold as AI training material, so to discover that the growing spambot problem on the platform stems directly from this deal is certainly not going to help. This is a problem entirely of Reddit’s own making.