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New Study: At Least 15% of All Reddit Content is Corporate Trolls Trying to Manipulate Public Opinion (medium.com)

submitted 10 months ago by silverbax@lemmy.world to c/technology@lemmy.world

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[–] CosmicCleric@lemmy.world 3 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

Yeah, looks like the default “word_wordnumbers” usernames that reddit gives you if don’t change them.

Funny enough, this started happening on YouTube (comments) as well, around the same time.

The issue with sites starting to use numbering as part of the default username only started happening after AI posting became a thing, because an Achilles heel is the fact that AI can't come up with enough believable unique names for all the posts they want their AI bots to make.

[–] numberfour002@lemmy.world 1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

an Achilles heel is the fact that AI can’t come up with enough believable unique names for all the posts you want your AI bots to make

That seems counterintuitive to me in the context of modern AI approaches. I'm wondering if you could elaborate on that a bit more.

[–] CosmicCleric@lemmy.world 1 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

That seems counterintuitive to me in the context of modern AI approaches.

How so? Elaborate?

I’m wondering if you could elaborate on that a bit more.

This seems sufficiently explanatory to me, especially the italicized part...

AI can’t come up with enough believable unique names for all the posts they want their AI bots to make

Unbelievable usernames becomes an easy identifier/tag for identifying bot post.

Edit: since this comment got downvoted (as the assumed reply) I thought I would elaborate a bit more.

Basically, we name our user accounts to fit the society we live in's norms, it's naming conventions.

If you just run a bunch of vowels and consonants together, that does not make a username, at least not one that people will recognize as a valid one created by a human being.

Part of how bots are effective is in the quantity of bots that are used. Since it's near zero cost to spin up a new bot to make posts/comments, many can be made.

However people can track the validity of a user name as being a bot versus human by the quantity of the posts/comments the username makes (only so many hours in a day, and human beings are busy with other things besides just posting on Lemmy), so no one single bot can make too many posts/comments at one time.

Because of this, you need a large quantity of unique names, one for each of your bots, and they have to be believable ones by humans, so they're not identified as bots.