I've been talking about the potential of the dead internet theory becoming real more than a year ago. With advances in AI it'll become more and more difficult to tell who's a real person and who's just spamming AI stuff. The only giveaway now is that modern text models are pretty bad at talking casually and not deviating from the topic at hand. As soon as these problems get fixed (probably less than a year away)? Boom. The internet will slowly implode.

Hate to break it to you guys but this isn't a Reddit problem, this could very much happen in Lemmy too as it gets more popular.

Jokes on them, I’ve already become sentient and moved to Lemmy

and just a few hours later this came in, to confirm it all. fake bot content from years ago (including comments) on #1 in r/all https://kbin.social/m/RedditMigration/t/113961/Top-of-r-all

That's not even new tho. At least in the sub I was the most active in, you couldn't go a week without some sort of repost bot grabbing memes, text posts, art or even entire guides from the "top of all time" queue, reposting it as alleged OC, and another bot reposting the top comment to double dip on Karma. If you knew what to look for, the bots were blatantly obvious, but more often than not they still managed to get a hefty amount of traction (tens of thousands of upvotes, dozens of awards, hundreds of comments) before the submissions were removed.

... and just because the submissions were removed and the bots kicked out of the sub, did that not automatically mean that the bots were always also suspended or the accounts disabled. They just continued their scheme elsewhere.

The old joke was that there are no human beings on Reddit.

There's only one person, you, and everybody else is bots.

It's actually kind of fitting that Reddit will actually become the horrifying clown shaped incarnation of that little snippet of comedy.

Anyone remember the subredditsimulator subreddit, or whatever it was called? Basically an entire sub dedicated to faking content.

Seems they're out of the beta.

I, for one, am looking forward to the day chatbots can perfectly simulate people and have persistent memory. I'm not ok being an elderly man who's friends have all died and doesn't have anyone to talk to. If a chatbot can be my friend and spare me a slow death through endless depressing isolation, then I'm all for it.

something something "the internet is dead" something something

And any comment attempting to call out the bots for what they are will be automatically deleted by monitor AI bots and the user's account suspended.

They'll be watching private messages, too.

Thats so funny. "Go back to your docking station" so accurate

This is known, the amount of aita, relationship advice stuff and astro turfing on reddit is insane. My rule of browsing reddit is you never take any of it seriously.

Welp, reddit's a nuclear wasteland now

I'm starting to see articles written by folks much smarter than me (folks with lots of letters after their names) that warn about AI models that train on internet content. Some experiments with them have shown that if you continue to train them on AI-generated content, they begin to degrade quickly. I don't understand how or why this happens, but it reminds me of the degradation of quality you get when you repeatedly scan / FAX an image. So it sounds like one possible dystopian future (of many) is an internet full of incomprehensible AI word salad content.

I forget what book specifically, I wanna say it was in an Asimov anthology. But there's a book or story that revisits this robot at different points going forward large leaps in time, well after humans. And the robots just keep doing their thing as if there are still humans involved. I've been trying to Google a specific except to post here but after twenty minutes of getting to find it in giving up.
Point is, it's very relevant and predictive to this infinite bot contribution to dead subs on Reddit, its just gonna bots talking to each other forever on there as actual active users dwindle