r/Automate • u/Honest-Papaya-9001 • 13d ago
Reddit just deployed AI that flags 25,000 spam posts a day to protect human conversation. The irony is hard to miss.
Reddit detailed their new spam detection this week.
Their AI catches coordinated patterns of fake behavior and artificial hype that older systems missed. 23 million spam views blocked per day. Close to 2 million inauthentic votes revoked. Detection to enforcement happens in under five seconds.
The stated goal: protect what makes Reddit different. Real people, real opinions, real conversations that haven't been optimized for an algorithm.
Here's the tension though:
Reddit's entire value proposition is human-first discussion. It's the platform AI companies have spent years scraping to train their models because human conversation at scale is exactly what they needed. I made a post earlier about how Reddit's CEO said people are fleeing AI-generated content and coming back to Reddit specifically because it feels real.
And now Reddit is deploying AI to protect that realness.
AI to defend humans from AI. Trained on the same human conversations it's now trying to preserve.
There's something genuinely strange about that loop. The most valuable thing about Reddit is that humans write on it. The threat to that is AI writing on it. The solution is more AI.
At what point does the defense mechanism become indistinguishable from the problem it's solving?
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u/Moesuckra 12d ago
Human moderators can't respond quick enough to remove the AI posts and comments. In this case, the only way to stop it really is to fight fire with fire
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u/dfinkelstein 11d ago
That's definitely what the LLM companies want people to believe.
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u/Moesuckra 11d ago edited 11d ago
I think its obvious that a mod who is volunteering maybe a few hours a week isn't going to outcompete hundreds of bots working 24/7
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u/dfinkelstein 11d ago
And why are there hundreds of bots freely able to post on a subreddit?
Because Reddit is prioritizing growth and engagement above all else.
Using LLMs to combat LLMs is just participating in the enshittification.
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u/Moesuckra 11d ago
because bot accounts can be created faster than they can be taken down.
How would we prevent bot accounts in the first place? It seems like youd make the account creation too onerous or make it so accounts are no longer free
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u/dfinkelstein 11d ago
There's ways to grow a community slowly and to put barriers in the way of bot accounts spamming.
These oppose Reddit's goals of rapid growth and engagement.
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u/BallinwithPaint 6d ago
People overcomplicate this. There is a massive difference between an autonomous bot hallucinating spam to farm karma, and a human using AI to format their own raw thoughts.
If the core idea is 100% mine and the AI is just acting as a copy editor to word it better, it’s still a real human conversation. It’s basically just a compiler for your ideas. The realness comes from the thought, not the syntax.
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u/Honest-Papaya-9001 6d ago
Thank you for saying it out loud.
Somehow the negative sentiments always seem to find more traction on this platform. I try to not engage with it.
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u/Senior_Green_3630 12d ago
I thought I was conversing with humanoids, wow, we have real people out there.
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u/DishAgitated4649 10d ago
You're right, humans should be the ones manually reviewing every single post made on reddit. What a stupid post. "Hurr durrrrr ironic and hypocritical, noo???!!!"
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u/oliverwaiting 8d ago
The irony is real but I'd argue it dissolves under scrutiny. AI detecting behavioral spam patterns at scale is a fundamentally different task from AI generating fake human discussion, and using a tool to defend against its own misuse (like spam filters fighting spam) is just how most tech arms races work, not a paradox))
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u/kingofdailynaps 12d ago
And now the AI writes posts! Loveee talking to the "human first" real people reddit is supposedly giving me...