The site has become a reservoir of humanity on the web. Now it, too, is turning to AI.
No, but thanks for asking. The rabbit hole still goes far further.
Ghostarchive is apparently blocked from The Atlantic, and other archive options aren’t friendly to VPNs, so I’m afraid I can’t provide an archive link.
The moderator to user ratio on the fediverse is orders of magnitude higher than commercial platforms. Even Lemmy.world (a large, loosely moderated Lemmy instance) has again, orders of magnitude more eyes on its content than reddit.
This means that even if a chatbot gets invented that is impossible to distinguish form a human, mods will more readily be able to tell if it is pushing a narrative/shilling products.
If the lemmy devs implemented AI I’d assume it would be controllable by the instance maintainers. Instances that dont want it should be able to disable it. If thats not an option I’m sure someone would fork it and remove all the AI stuff.
I got perma banned from reddit because i used fuck spez. I can’t even make new account with new email id. It’ll be banned within 24hrs. So perma shifted to Lemmy.
How anyone uses the web without NoScript baffles me, but people still use Chrome, too, so I don’t think I’m in the mainstream in terms of my internet use,
It’s probably our internal modifications, but Jira especially iirc is known to be quite “fragile”.
Edit: ofc the main point here is that companies pay to test only on Chrome, then consider the matter settled, even while Firefox decides to strike out on its own in so many ways regardless. I have no choice but to use Chrome… or to find another job.
It happened long before chatgpt. Subredditsimulator was touted as a “fun game” at first but it was really a testing ground for bot devs. That goes back to like 2016, 6 years before chatgpt.
Openai was established 2015 though, some of their team was probably already shitting up the internet by then
One might argue that OpenAI was not the first domino, just the one that got the most attention. Clippy feels quaint. Remember when you bought shit once and that meant you owned it?
OpenAI was not the first domino, just the one that got the most attention.
Yes, that is correct. And perhaps it got the most attention because of all the ruckus Pigboy did over “his” precious data (i.e. users’) + because it made the whole thing hard to ignore.
Remember when you bought shit once and that meant you owned it?
Yeah. I was talking about this with my mum today - the chat started with my cat refusing litterboxes, then “if this was the 90s old newspapers would do the trick”, then on how you don’t really own books you buy from the internet (unlike pirated ones). But it’s the same deal with some physical goods, if someone can brick them from a distance they aren’t really yours.
You might not be that far off. I can’t think of a kid who is interested in going to six flags. A whole school was going to go for the day, for free. Only a handful expressed interest, the rest said no way they are standing in lines, in the sun, to take a 3 minute ride to nowhere.
The internet is growing more hostile to humans. Google results are stuffed with search-optimized spam, unhelpful advertisements, and AI slop. Amazon has become littered with undifferentiated junk. The state of social media, meanwhile—fractured, disorienting, and prone to boosting all manner of misinformation—can be succinctly described as a cesspool.
It’s with some irony, then, that Reddit has become a reservoir of humanity. The platform has itself been called a cesspool, rife with hateful rhetoric and falsehoods. But it is also known for quirky discussions and impassioned debates on any topic among its users. Does charging your brother rent, telling your mom she’s an unwanted guest, or giving your wife a performance review make you an asshole? (Redditors voted no, yes, and “everyone sucks,” respectively.) The site is where fans hash out the best rap album ever and plumbers weigh in on how to unclog a drain. As Google has begun to offer more and more vacuous SEO sites and ads in response to queries, many people have started adding reddit to their searches to find thoughtful, human-written answers: find mosquito in bedroom reddit; fix musty sponge reddit.
But now even Reddit is becoming more artificial. The platform has quietly started beta-testing Reddit Answers, what it calls an “AI-powered conversational interface.” In function and design, the feature—which is so far available only for some users in the U.S.—is basically an AI chatbot. On a new search screen accessible from the homepage, Reddit Answers takes anyone’s queries, trawls the site for relevant discussions and debates, and composes them into a response. In other words, a site that sells itself as a home for “authentic human connection” is now giving humans the option to interact with an algorithm instead.
The company announced the feature last month as an improved “search experience” that pulls “information … from real conversations and communities across all of Reddit.” Reddit Answers includes links to those conversations, which users are free to click, read, and comment on. Even so, using Reddit Answers is a demoralizing experience. It’s streamlined, yes: The AI responds to questions in bulleted lists, with bold headings followed by summaries of and brief quotes from actual Reddit discussions. But these answers lose the messy, endearing excess of any good Reddit thread. They appear like takeaways instead of teasers, final answers instead of entry points for further discovery; you are unlikely to fall down a rabbit hole of posts from here. Nor are you encouraged to unfurl a thread of people debating, reviewing, and building upon legitimately useful advice. Instead of a Redditor, you feel like you’re just here to peck meat off of some bones.
Consider, for example, requesting tips for traveling with a baby on an airplane. Reddit Answers generates a list of ideas—perhaps “Pack Essentials” or “Board Early”—decontextualized from the parents who gathered this wisdom, the fun horrifying and hilarious anecdotes in their original posts, and the heartwarming support and tips in additional responses. Perhaps the greatest value of a good Reddit thread is the informed disagreement on best purchases and practices—what really were the best earbuds of 2024, and for what reasons. The chatbot’s bulleted summaries steamroll that back-and-forth. The AI answer isn’t even clearly more efficient or useful than reading answers yourself. Aside from the specificity, caveats, and elaboration unique to human conversations, many Redditors already format their responses in digestible lists. (In one thread asking for tips for flying with a baby, the top comment is a list in which every other bullet reads “snacks.”)
For less pragmatic matters, it’s hard to imagine any advantage to using Reddit’s AI. Asking the chatbot for music recommendations will return a boring, unwieldy list. The Reddit thread “What’s a dead giveaway someone grew up as an only child?” has some fantastic responses—doesn’t immediately know which half of a sliced cake is bigger, can’t roughhouse, leaves rooms without announcing where they are going—while the AI answers are bland: “Difficulty Sharing,” “Difficulty in Relationships.” Why would I ask an AI about the odds that the New York Mets re-sign Pete Alonso, what makes focaccia in Liguria special, or the annoying thing about transplants to New York City? Reddit, for its part, seems to understand the limitations: When I reached out to ask about this product, a spokesperson told me over email that in part, “Answers simply summarizes redditors’ existing posts and conversations without presenting an opinion or perspective of its own” and directs users to relevant discussions.
The site exists as it always has outside of Reddit Answers, but the embrace of generative AI feels foreboding. This is a trend across much of the digital and now even physical worlds, as tech companies stuff the technology into apps, smartphones, and glasses. AI can legitimately make life easier—helping more quickly summarize complex topics, write computer code, or edit photos, for instance. But many applications of AI remain limited and frequently superfluous. Google, instead of organizing humanmade information, is blending the web through frequently flawed “AI Overviews.” Apple is touting an Apple Intelligence service that has sent fake-news alerts (a problem that the company solved by temporarily turning off this part of the feature altogether) and that strip mines texts into “lifeless summaries,” as my colleague Lila Shroff noted. Mikey Shulman, the CEO of Suno, an AI music start-up, recently said that making music is “not really enjoyable”—his product can do that work instead. Algorithms, instead of helping bring you to humans, are being pitched as the web’s start, middle, and end point.
All of these generative-AI applications, of course, are only as good as the content they draw from. (Reddit has long been prized as a trove of high-quality AI-training data.) Without human answers, there is no Reddit Answers—and so, should the feature really take off and Redditors stop engaging with one another, the chatbot will be drained of biological intelligence, and soul as well. Such is it with any AI tool seeking to synthesize, summarize, and boil portions of the web to their essence: eventually, the pot will burn dry.
Just think ahead to when they try to humanize AI by adding back in “personalities” - basically replacing the human answers offered freely (at no monetary cost), and freely moderated by humans, with for-cost versions that are 1/1000th as good as the real thing.
You will own nothing - not even your personal opinions - and like it.
You are not logged in. However you can subscribe from another Fediverse account, for example Lemmy or Mastodon. To do this, paste the following into the search field of your instance: !technology@beehaw.org
A nice place to discuss rumors, happenings, innovations, and challenges in the technology sphere. We also welcome discussions on the intersections of technology and society. If it’s technological news or discussion of technology, it probably belongs here.
Remember the overriding ethos on Beehaw: Be(e) Nice. Each user you encounter here is a person, and should be treated with kindness (even if they’re wrong, or use a Linux distro you don’t like). Personal attacks will not be tolerated.
What’s to stop that from happening to Lemmy?
The moderator to user ratio on the fediverse is orders of magnitude higher than commercial platforms. Even Lemmy.world (a large, loosely moderated Lemmy instance) has again, orders of magnitude more eyes on its content than reddit.
This means that even if a chatbot gets invented that is impossible to distinguish form a human, mods will more readily be able to tell if it is pushing a narrative/shilling products.
If the lemmy devs implemented AI I’d assume it would be controllable by the instance maintainers. Instances that dont want it should be able to disable it. If thats not an option I’m sure someone would fork it and remove all the AI stuff.
I have been working on turning the official Reddit app into a Lemmy client. Why? Because fuck spez
I got perma banned from reddit because i used fuck spez. I can’t even make new account with new email id. It’ll be banned within 24hrs. So perma shifted to Lemmy.
Again I’ll say it “fuck spez”
I would probably sooner (insert any obscene idiom here) than use the official reddit app, but your work is still commendable.
Considering digg.com is still there I’m sure the end of reddit is a long way off.
Ten or even twenty years.
Reddit could disable new posts, fire all its employees, and still generate ad revenue for all the content that we had been producing in the past
Pro tip: Go delete all your Reddit posts and comments now while you still can
deleted by creator
I’ll give them this: They certainly stayed on brand.
At least it still loads if you turn javascript off.
How anyone uses the web without NoScript baffles me, but people still use Chrome, too, so I don’t think I’m in the mainstream in terms of my internet use,
When that is the only browser that actually works for Jira, Confluence, and the like at work, then yes boo hoo we absolutely do! 😭
Jira and confluence have always worked fine on my Firefox 🤔
It’s probably our internal modifications, but Jira especially iirc is known to be quite “fragile”.
Edit: ofc the main point here is that companies pay to test only on Chrome, then consider the matter settled, even while Firefox decides to strike out on its own in so many ways regardless. I have no choice but to use Chrome… or to find another job.
Sorry, I couldn’t resist.
This process has been happening since ChatGPT was released. And it’ll only get worse.
And when are those corporations get that people hate this sort of system? Ask Clippy.
It happened long before chatgpt. Subredditsimulator was touted as a “fun game” at first but it was really a testing ground for bot devs. That goes back to like 2016, 6 years before chatgpt.
Openai was established 2015 though, some of their team was probably already shitting up the internet by then
One might argue that OpenAI was not the first domino, just the one that got the most attention. Clippy feels quaint. Remember when you bought shit once and that meant you owned it?
Yes, that is correct. And perhaps it got the most attention because of all the ruckus Pigboy did over “his” precious data (i.e. users’) + because it made the whole thing hard to ignore.
Yeah. I was talking about this with my mum today - the chat started with my cat refusing litterboxes, then “if this was the 90s old newspapers would do the trick”, then on how you don’t really own books you buy from the internet (unlike pirated ones). But it’s the same deal with some physical goods, if someone can brick them from a distance they aren’t really yours.
[Sorry for the rambling.]
Hey! I designed some of those '90s newspapers!
Reddit ended like two years ago.
Yep. Which is when I came here. =)
So you’re the one who ended it. Wow.
You’re gonna need to stay away from 6flags and the Georgia aquarium kthx.
It’s only a matter of time before 6 Flags is just 1000 AIs on rollercoasters.
You might not be that far off. I can’t think of a kid who is interested in going to six flags. A whole school was going to go for the day, for free. Only a handful expressed interest, the rest said no way they are standing in lines, in the sun, to take a 3 minute ride to nowhere.
It alr…oh uh you mean in the future yes that might just be possible sometime in the future yes… :-)You can still pay to watch an AI enjoy the coaster if you stand in line for 2 hours.
… =(((
You da real MVP!
Ironic coming from a site that expects me to pay to read that
fingers crossed
Well if they keep banning all the humans arbitrarily then all that will be left is bots anyway.
Just think ahead to when they try to humanize AI by adding back in “personalities” - basically replacing the human answers offered freely (at no monetary cost), and freely moderated by humans, with for-cost versions that are 1/1000th as good as the real thing.
You will own nothing - not even your personal opinions - and like it.
There’s a reason I already live in a van with 1200W of solar on the roof. I want no part of this.
And also that serfdom (reddit) must fall.
Finally.