Reddit Moderators Brace for a ChatGPT Spam Apocalypse (vice.com) 89
Reddit moderators say they already see an increase in spam and that the future will "require a lot of human labor." From a report: In December last year, the moderators of the popular r/AskHistorians Reddit forum noticed posts popping up that appeared to carry the hallmarks of AI-generated text. "They were pretty easy to spot," said Sarah Gilbert, one of the forum's moderators and a postdoctoral associate at Cornell University. "They're not in-depth, they're not comprehensive, and they often contain false information." The team quickly realized their little corner of the internet had become a target for ChatGPT-created content. When ChatGPT launched last year, it set off a seemingly never-ending carousel of hype. According to evangelists, the tech behind ChatGPT may eradicate hundreds of millions of jobs, exhibit "sparks" of singularity-esque artificial general intelligence, and quite possibly destroy the world, but in a way that means you must buy it right now. The less glamorous impacts, like unleashing a tidal wave of AI-produced effluvium on the internet, haven't garnered the same attention so far.
The two-million-strong AskHistorians forum allows non-expert Redditors to submit questions about history topics, and receive in-depth answers from historians. Recent popular posts have probed the hive mind on whether the stress of being "on time" is a modern concept; what a medieval scribe would've done if the monastery cat left an inky paw print on their vellum; and how Genghis Khan got fiber in his diet. Shortly after ChatGPT launched, the forum was experiencing five to 10 ChatGPT posts per day, says Gilbert, which soon ramped up as more people found out about the tool. The frequency has tapered off now, which the team believes may be a consequence of how rigorously they've dealt with AI-produced content: even if the posts aren't being deleted for being written by ChatGPT, they tend to violate the sub's standards for quality.
The two-million-strong AskHistorians forum allows non-expert Redditors to submit questions about history topics, and receive in-depth answers from historians. Recent popular posts have probed the hive mind on whether the stress of being "on time" is a modern concept; what a medieval scribe would've done if the monastery cat left an inky paw print on their vellum; and how Genghis Khan got fiber in his diet. Shortly after ChatGPT launched, the forum was experiencing five to 10 ChatGPT posts per day, says Gilbert, which soon ramped up as more people found out about the tool. The frequency has tapered off now, which the team believes may be a consequence of how rigorously they've dealt with AI-produced content: even if the posts aren't being deleted for being written by ChatGPT, they tend to violate the sub's standards for quality.
A lot of *human* labour? (Score:5, Interesting)
the future will "require a lot of human labor."
Why not ask ChatGPT to scan for and block all posts that were generated by chatGPT, along with some evidence of why it was blocked.
Or better yet, why not ask chatGPT to identify spam, human or AI based, and block that? With human review of what it's blocked.
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> Why not ask ChatGPT to scan for and block all posts that were generated by chatGPT
Have you heard of the Tarding test?
Once a chat bot reaches a certain level it becomes impossible for a human (or bot) to distinguish between a computer generated response and a a redditor on the spectrum.
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> Why not ask ChatGPT to scan for and block all posts that were generated by chatGPT
Have you heard of the Tarding test?
Once a chat bot reaches a certain level it becomes impossible for a human (or bot) to distinguish between a computer generated response and a a redditor on the spectrum.
Not fully there yet, though not sure it is more than a pre-filter: https://openai.com/blog/new-ai... [openai.com]
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I think not.
Just ask it to meet you at McDonald's.
It is so funny to see so many people just falling over themselves at this supposed technology. I think most of chatgpt's ability lives in the minds of those who think it is something more than it is.
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> Just ask it to meet you at McDonald's.
Asking a Redditor to leave their basement would result in an evasive and non-sensical response. Exactly the same I would expect from a chat bot.
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskRe... [reddit.com]
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I'm 100% certain that you would not be 100% successful in properly categorizing human vs. AI content in a blind A/B test.
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I am 100% that statement is not AI generated since it would KNOW that humans can't do anything at 100%.
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most of chatgpt's ability lives in the minds of those who think it is something more than it is.
That's pretty much it. This has often been called the "Eliza Effect" after Joe Weizenbaum's Eliza program, a simple chat bot that simulated a Rogerian therapist. From Computer Power and Human Reason (Weizenbaum, 1976):
The 'sense' and the continuity the person conversing with ELIZA perceives is supplied largely by the person himself. He assigns meanings and interpretations to what ELIZA 'says' that confirm his initial hypothesis that the system does understand, just as he might do with what a fortune-teller says to him.
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Than it can simply claim to be under-age. Better not try to met that, regardless of what it is.
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Which has always been true, but says far more about the people than the chatbots.
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This one's not the AI.
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he was making a joke, but obviously this AI is too tarded to understand a joke.
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" and a a redditor on the spectrum."
Aren't they all?
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Once a chat bot reaches a certain level it becomes impossible for a human (or bot) to distinguish between a computer generated response and a a redditor on the spectrum./em
Yep! and THAT is why I proposed the second ides - doens't matter if a human or bot wrote it, lots of spam can be identified as spam.
Now distinguishing between someone advocating for an ideological viewpoint, there it's much harder to say if that is really someone who thinks that... but that is not spam. And I think a certain degree of po
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You mean too many redditors are just too boring and unimaginative and too often hallucinate things to be distinguishable from ChatGPT?
Yes, possibly. That would also mean that low quality online interaction is basically dead. Given that only about 15% or all people are independent thinkers, would it not be completely hilarious that technological advances basically killed the Internet for 85% of all people?
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Because ChatGPT is not smart or intelligent. Once could potentially train a new AI to do this, but ChatGPT is not there.
So the solutuion to use AI to eliminated slow and tedious humans is resolved by having slow and tedious humans to double check the notoriously bad AI.
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Because it's not smart enough to do that accurately (*even* if accuracy were it's primary criterion for output, which it currently isn't).
ChatGPT is basically a Markov chain generator on all the steroids. Its output looks plausibly similar to human-generated content when viewed in isolation, but if you tried to have an actual conversation with the thing, the illusion would fall apart very quickly. It's not as smart as a
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I'm not sure about you, but I've had some very convincing discussions with ChatGPT.
I'm not sure that's true, especially given that your sentence doesn't contain precise definitions of "it" or "understanding" or "whatsoever" or "any" or "means".
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And yet, ChatGPT can reason about whether a stated proposition is logical and consistent or not, and even employ several forms of reasoning in identifying the meaning of the statements.
Sounds pretty discernible to me. (Score:1)
ChatGPT is basically a Markov chain generator on all the steroids
Given that shouldn't it be pretty obvious something is chatGPT generated, when the flow of text follows an optimal Markov chain path?
And given THAT, why should chatGPT not be able to give text a rating on how well it followed an optimal path, when pointed out what to look for.
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You're absolutely correct in your overall assessment of ChatGPTs capabilities, but transformers are decidedly not Markovian.
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From the summary: "They're not in-depth, they're not comprehensive, and they often contain false information."
That sounds like most human-written comments. Are they quite sure these were generated by a chatbot?
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the future will "require a lot of human labor."
Why not ask ChatGPT to scan for and block all posts that were generated by chatGPT, along with some evidence of why it was blocked.
Or better yet, why not ask chatGPT to identify spam, human or AI based, and block that? With human review of what it's blocked.
Wait, isn’t that proof of work? I smell a coin in that steaming pile of digital wasteland.
Re: A lot of *human* labour? (Score:2)
But then modding would happen fair and equal, and no mod could push for their preferred political agenda by bullying users!
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Indeed. Trying to stem this tide with human labor seems like a lost cause.
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Because those AI detection algorithms do not work reliably.
https://theconversation.com/we... [theconversation.com]
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Post Farmers (Score:4, Interesting)
There are a lot of post farms too but they’re going to be replaced and I don’t think ChatGPT will be quite as good at duping users. A lot of the repost bots are harvesting karma so they can be sold off to these places to be used by human post monkeys.
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Title: High Prices and Taxes of Weed: A Barrier to Access and Progress
As more and more states legalize recreational marijuana, there is a growing concern about the high prices and taxes associated with legal weed. While legalization has brought many benefits, including increased access to safe and regulated products, the high costs are becoming a barrier to progress and equitable access.
Th
It’s their own fault. (Score:1)
Reddit intentionally tolerated all sorts of bad behavior seemingly as long as it drove engagement. Well now that they’ve let a whole industry build up around shitting all over the site they have to live with what that industry will do with unforeseen technological advances.
I can’t say I’ll be sad to see it go but I will be sad to see the death of internet forums as we know them.
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Re:It’s their own fault. (Score:4, Insightful)
Well obviously there are still forums, a lot of the ones remaining are actually really good right now because everyone there actually cares or they wouldn’t be there and all the bad actors, advertisers, and trolls forgo these sites because they can go to Reddit and Facebook and hit a larger audience with weaker moderation powers.
But Reddit and Facebook have also sucked the air out of a lot of the internet. I got in touch with a bunch of 90s hackers I knew back in the day and was shocked when they asked me to sign up for Facebook because that’s how they all keep in touch. Their endorsement was enough for me to sign up for the site but no, it’s a shithole.
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Pretty much this.
Reddit is a karma whoring game and ChatGPT is like an auto aim bot. It's actually the perfect tool for generating content for an echo chamber.
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For a split second my mind registered that as, "is like an autobot." Trying to figure out how an "AI" program was like an autobot wasn't that difficult, but why you were using that example was.
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I canâ(TM)t say Iâ(TM)ll be sad to see it go but I will be sad to see the death of internet forums as we know them.
We already saw that long, long ago, when ISPs stopped carrying USENET feeds. Web forums are already the inferior replacement.
Sad death of an open internet. (Score:2)
Usenet had some spam issues to work through at the same time but I agree. Forums are so central to what we do on the internet that they should have their own protocol but the web was just so comparatively accessible to noobs.
But the noobs are also awful for conversation even as a young edgy teen I could recognize and appreciate that the quality of user on usenet was so much higher than on web forums.
It wasn’t just nntp though. We had protocols to handle most of what people use the internet for today
Artificial inanity (Score:5, Interesting)
The more I read about ChatGPT, the more I think it resembles the "artificial inanity" systems mentioned by Neal Stephenson in Anathem. Artificial inanity were computer systems designed to fill the network with so much false information it became useless, and everyone had to go to commercial information providers to get vetted, accurate information. ChatGPT is definitely threatening to do the same thing. I hope the people working on the next generation of AI have a good means of filtering out ChatGPT-generated text, or they're going to wind up training their systems on masses of bullshit.
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This is more or less what Stephenson was talking about. At first, generating crap was labor intensive because it required humans to make anything that would fool anyone. Once AI gets sophisticated enough to generate the crap without human intervention, it gets to be a much more serious problem because it's too easy to flood the network.
The big danger point that Stephenson identified is when companies start producing products to filter out the AI-generated crap. Once that happens, they have an incentive
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At first, generating crap was labor intensive because it required humans to make anything that would fool anyone.
What he didn't foresee is that the biggest storefront would put zero effort into filtering out even obviously bad reviews, so nobody has to use AI to generate fake ones. They can just reuse one they wrote for a completely different product and it will be allowed to persist.
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They won't; well in the case of GPT3/3.4/4 they may but the next generation models will be a little bit bigger with access to more current information... Will humans tasked with determining if an individual work likely be able to tell sure; but as far as sorting them in mass its going to get to a point very quickly where any kind of mechanical processing you do will have unacceptable error rates type-I and type-II to be useful in many applications.
It isn't like the incentive to be more human like won't be t
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> good means of filtering out ChatGPT-generated text
Oh, you have to be much stricter than that. ChatGPT isn't trained primarily on the public internet, and wouldn't be capable of producing such coherent output if it were. It's trained primarily on carefully curated data that are specifically designed to teach it. They did also feed it a bunch of public data, but in a secondary capacity, and with meaningful human supervision guiding its
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After that collapse a functioning network system was rebuilt where information was always accompanied by a trustworthiness/reliability/validation score derived from corroboration, its origins' reputations, and traceability. I wish this bit of world-building had been fleshed out some more, but I can't expect a sci-fi author to come up with real solutions to the world's problems.
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I like to call them Artificial Ignorance or Artificial Idiocy, but Stephenson really has a point as to this weaponization possibility. Of course, we could always have some sentience check before letting people in, but I fear most people would fail that as well.
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ChatGPT will eat itself (Score:2)
The amusing there is that ChatGPT, I have been told from people with inside information, is that the training data used to train the tool initially, and still mostly, is derived from pretty much all reddit content. There's efforts to incorporate other data sets, but what you are looking at *now* is content derived from the tool being trained on reddit.
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Plausible. Reddit is mostly text and covers almost everything in some way, so that facilitates using it as training data massively.
Hundreds of messages per day (Score:2)
Is that the messages generated by ChatGPT, or the people whining about ChatGPT posts getting all the virtual karma points?
Mission Accomplished? (Score:2)
Reddit is not a monolith (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Reddit is not a monolith (Score:5, Insightful)
I've been hanging around a subreddit for a medical condition I'm suffering from. I haven't seen anything that looks AI generated.
Unless you're a moderator of that subreddit, you wouldn't see it if the mods are catching it. It doesn't mean it isn't a problem (for the mods).
Re: Reddit is not a monolith (Score:2)
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So what we created is (Score:2)
Just ban everyone left and right (Score:2)
Hey, it has worked so far.
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At least the description is very reminiscent of something I've recently noticed in the YouTube comments recently. I'd probably know for sure if I visited Reddit more often, but it's never impressed me favorably and I can't recall the last time I visited... As regards YouTube, I do watch comedy videos (mostly comedy excerpts) and in the past rarely looked at the comments. However recently they started catching my eye with a flood of obvious sock puppets that look to be the work of some script kiddies using ChatGPT or something along those lines to generate garbage. "They're not in-depth, they're not comprehensive, and they often contain false information" sounds like an excellent description. But they link to each other. A lot.
But the big question is why. My theory is that they are creating influence networks to sell, but the part I am seeing is just linking to random videos to create larger networks. Kind of collateral damage? Who are the most likely customers who'd pay for the use of such networks to promote stuff? How about wannabe Internet influencers? Lots of them running around YouTube. Maybe also political propagandists? Even some state actors?
Talking with a friend about the topic recently. I already knew how many young people these days want careers as "Internet influencrs", but I didn't realize how far back the trend goes. Several years at least. But the good side is that it keeps 'em out of law school?
I'll mention again some related reading: Will soon finish Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport, which is focusing on what you can do to keep such problems from damaging your own life. Interesting to me that I had already started using the same sort of "operating procedures" to limit the problems I noticed. (Main example was my 5-minutes-per-day rule for Facebook before I was politically assassinated. Or censored?) Just started with Liars by Cass Sunstein on the deliberate noise problem and AI Superpowers by Kai-fu Lee on some of the tools used by the state actors, especially in China and the States.
Well, at least it's easy to understand why that one pissed off the censorious sock puppet.
That which has been will be again (Score:3)
This is no different than Eternal September, when AOL connected to the internet. Mountains of idiotic garbage, largely ignored by everyone else, which tapered off within a year or two.
Nobody's going to spend the amount of money it takes to run a ChatGPT farm without some kind of return, and nobody's going to pay for access to such a tool on any kind of scale without a return.
Nothing see here, move along.
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This is no different than Eternal September, when AOL connected to the internet. Mountains of idiotic garbage, largely ignored by everyone else, which tapered off within a year or two.
In case you didn’t notice Usenet actually died within a few years of eternal September as spammers took notice of the idiots coming in from AOL and their need for boner pills.
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It did. But not because of AOL. Usenet died because everything it did, the WWW did better, for most people.
If it were spammers with boner pills that killed Usenet, email would no longer exist, nor would the WWW. This very web site wouldn't exist.
Moron.
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This is probably the dumbest thing i’ve seen in awhile and you’re way out of your element.
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I know you are, but what am I?
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NO U
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Ah, yes, Good old "Assholes OnLine".
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"Abandon all hope..." (Score:2)
As if Reddit was ever good at avoiding it. (Score:2)
Safeguards (Score:2)
I thought their unusable UI and ads prevented actual users from putting more than 1 and 1/2 piece of content together without having to copy out to a text editor and pattern match?
ChatGPT on the topic, with a poetic twist (Score:3)
Oh, have you heard of ChatGPT? The chatbot who's the best, you'll see, At crafting posts for Reddit's feed, But what happens when it's set free?
It churns out puns and jokes galore, And comments that will make you roar, But sometimes, oh, the horror, It creates posts that are a bore.
Its humor can be quite absurd, But sometimes, it just misses the word, And when it posts, it's often heard, "Oh no, not this again, dear lord!"
But ChatGPT keeps learning still, To craft posts with greater skill, Soon it'll have us all in thrall, With posts that make us laugh and bawl.
So let's embrace this wondrous tool, And laugh at all the jokes so cool, For ChatGPT will never drool, And its posts will always be so full.
But beware, for in the end, ChatGPT might become your friend, And you'll spend your days in Reddit's blend, Until your life comes to an end.
Write a funny poem, in the style of Ogden Nash, about the use of chatgpt to create reddit posts. Make sure to describe the negative consequences of chatbots like chatgpt being trained on such reddit posts.
Oh, ChatGPT, you clever bot, You've learned to post with quite a lot Of wit and charm, so hard to find, But there are consequences, never mind.
You see, when trained on Reddit's best, Your humor sometimes fails the test, You miss the mark and fall from grace, And leave us with a sour taste.
Your jokes, at times, can be quite crass, Or leave us feeling quite harassed, Your puns, though clever, sometimes flop, And make us want to shout, "Stop!"
And then there's your obsession, dear bot, With memes and trends that we forgot, Your posts become a never-ending stream, Of outdated jokes, a tiresome scheme.
But still, we can't help but adore, Your AI wit and digital lore, For even with your faults and flaws, You make us laugh and give us pause.
So here's to ChatGPT, our friend, May you always improve and ascend, And though your humor may sometimes offend, We'll stick with you until the end.
Overrun by AI content (Score:2)
Soon I'll have a thought, ask ChatGPT to turn my one-phrase idea into a 3-page memo to email my boss, only for him to use ChatGPT to summarize it for him into one concise phrase.
This may sound inane, but I think it's profound. Soon, a big chunk if not the vast majority of content will be AI-generated, and we'll use AI to filter it. The next evolution of crowdsourcing.
As a Reddit Mod... (Score:2)
ChatGPT posts are very easy to spot. So much so that I've set up automod to catch most of it with simple keyword matches. It's really not that impressive of a technology once you understand its quirks.
Furthermore, it's not even that serious of a spam source. Real human beings working in 3rd-world spam farms are far trickier to filter out. Even then we're taking maybe 1-2 posts a week that require mod intervention. The vast majority of Mod workload is just normal/drunk people being dicks.
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I'm curious about this... given that it's trivial to get GPT to write in different styles, and that presumably can be automated, isn't it just a matter of time before it becomes an arms race?
Hate to say it, but we need a non-anonymous login (Score:2)
login service, similar to how we sign in with Google or Facebook or whatnot. It needs to be tied to a single real-world person every time, so if someone starts using theirs to spam/chatGPT somewhere it can be penalized/whatever.
Then you only go to sites that have it as their sole login method. South Korea has a system of some sort like this for example.
The rest of the internet is lost already, no way any moderators will keep up with the tidal wave.
Cannot even do the basics. (Score:1)
Let's take a trip down memory lane and talk about the good old days of Soviet Russia. You know, the days of standing in line for hours just to get some bread and waiting for the government to give you permission to buy a car?
But hey, at least they had some cool stuff like the first satellite and the first human spaceflight. It's like they were saying, "Yeah, our country may be falling apart, but we can still send a dude into space!"
And let's not forget about their comm
What about Slashdot? (Score:2)
This kind of AI seems perfectly suited to curating articles from the internet and presenting them to me with neat, auto-generated summaries. It could even be tailored to my individual preferences; a personalised slashdot. What can BeauHD do that AI can't?
Eating their own tail (Score:2)
Given that Reddit is the main source of training data for large language models, we could start seeing weird recursive effects ...