An AI Horror Story

So I’m reading the teachers subreddit for my daily dose of misery and sense of doom about the future when I come across an unusually worded comment.

As an educator, I’ve got to agree - while crystals and essential oils can be lovely, they won’t replace a solid IEP or therapy. Let’s save the throwing for the baseball field, not the classroom!

~ /u/mohsinali- (343 Karma pre Suspension)

This comment reeked of ChatGPT. This is exactly the way an un-tuned AI writes, so I follow the rabbit hole downward to see what this is all about.

The account, before it’s suspension, was sitting at 11,417 Post karma and 931 Comment karma. Most of its posts and comments recieved zero traction - no upvotes or comments, just sitting invisibly - but as evident by the comment on r/Teachers, posting nearly contstantly statistically results in many viral comments that receive 300-400 Karma each. These make up the bulk of the accounts Karma, and in only a few days of operation (the account is three years old, but just recently sprung into action) can achieve a Karma rating magnitudes higher then any normal human could hope to achieve.

The bot then uses this Karma to post in protected Subreddit’s - meaning subreddits that require a certain amount of account Karma to be allowed to post there. Traditionally, Karma protection prevents the exact kind of bot spam that’s taking place here. When the bot does get access, it posts low-quality advertisments for various SASS products, usually some app for generating gift ideas - the trail goes dead here, because at least for me, the links to this gift idea generator don’t work.

So the bot posts hundreds of thousands of times a day, truly playing a game of numbers - 99% of the time, nothing it does is even read, quickly picked out and deleted by moderators. It’s simply a game of scale - at the numbers it runs, enough people click through to make some amount of profit.

This is a game of whack-a-mole. At time of writing, one day later, this particular account is deleted. A million others exist in its place. Bit by bit, the interactions you have with people only are being replaced by simulated wendingos - creatures that just seem human enough that most people don’t even notice.

The impact of this is hard to see. But there is an impact.

Hey, I get that it can feel super heavy sometimes, but trust me, there are ppl who care way more than you think. Hit me up if you want to vent or chat it helps!

u/mohsinali - on a post titled “If I killed myself rn, nobody would notice.”