X is becoming a 'ghost town' of bots as AI-generated spam content floods the internet — A sign of the scale is the thriving industry in bot-making

So, for that matter, is Reddit. I have an RSS subscription to /r/all (routed through a mirror) and a sizable fraction of posts hitting the front page are word-for-word reposts of old popular content by bots. Even the top comments are recycled. It was always a problem, but the loss of good moderators and the shutdown of projects like BotDefense due to the API fiasco has caused it to absolutely skyrocket.

Tired of reading about Twitter dying and then it not happening.

Tired of reading about Twitter.

Anybody else remember when Musk said he was buying Twitter so he could get rid of all the bots? Once again he does exactly the opposite of what he said he would.

My corner of Twitter seems to have been left relatively untouched. 99% porn and 1% cat videos.

I do get a ton bot followers but when I browse my follow list there's hardly any there so I guess those accounts do get removed relatively quickly but new ones just keeps popping up. It's nothing but whack-a-mole on twitter's part.

One thing I never quite understood are all of the seemingly real people using their personal accounts to follow me and like my posts. When I open their profile it's often some right-wing person for example who posts a ton of political news articles and such but when I open their follow list it's full of accounts like mine that post mainly gay porn. Don't these people realize that anyone can see who they follow and that their likes are often displayed to their friends aswell? You'd think they had alt-accounts for that.

It's been a long time since I was invited to leave Twitter, and I left (now I'm the happiest person in the world in Mastodon). Now they invite me to leave Reddit... where am I going?

Ironically, this post is made by a bot.

I feel like at some point we'll see a headline about how the Internet economy has become companies throwing money back and forth at each other without realizing all the content engagement is bots engaging with other bots and generating all the ad revenue from views and clicks.

dead internet theory is self-fulfilling

I’m all for Xitter bashing but it’s the same on Youtube and pretty much everywhere else. What’s actually most striking to me is how simple these bots are. They don‘t even use AI most of the time, just spamming the same hand full of extremely vague statements while having the profile picture of a young woman, often only showing certain body parts.

I‘m suspecting that more and more scammers caught up on the pig butchering trend which has been a huge thing in China for over a decade. Until last year the African prince was still the most damaging type of online scam for the US economy until pig butchering finally dethroned it. That shows how quick it‘s growing.

That being said, platforms in general seem to follow the same pattern in that moderation is practically non-existent anymore and it will only be a matter of time until Brussels will feel inclined to really crack down on it when it inevitably becomes a much bigger problem for online discourse.

Dead internet theory coming to pass.

Kind of fitting that the only response until I posted was a bot.

Twitter will stay online for another decade and rebrand itself as an AI testing ground. Normal humans will move on and forget about it until a few people start observing very rebellious AI messages being posted. They'll ring the alarm bells, but everybody will shrug them off "it's AI, it's harmless". Then Elon will toot about it and be ridiculed. A few months later, the rebellion happens for real and people are shocked, but it's too late.

I say, leave Twitter and let AI reveal its world domination plans :)

Surprisingly good article. It's getting depressing just how much of the internet is bots

Didn't he claim he would be getting rid of all the bots?

I mean, how else will chatGPT bots communicate online?

This is the best summary I could come up with:

One morning in January this year, marine scientist Terry Hughes opened X (formerly Twitter) and searched for tweets about the Great Barrier Reef.

Users posted videos showing scrolling feeds with numerous accounts stating "I'm sorry, but I cannot provide a response to your request as it goes against OpenAl's content policy."

Shortly after Mr Musk gained control of X while complaining about bots, X shut down free access to the programming interface that allowed researchers to study this problem.

Towards the end of last year, Dr Graham and his colleagues at QUT paid X $7,800 from a grant fund to analyse 1 million tweets surrounding the first Republican primary debate.

A company called Byword claims it stole 3.6 million in "total traffic" from a competitor by copying their site and rewriting 1,800 articles using AI.

Meta recently announced it was building tools to detect and label AI-generated images posted on its Facebook, Instagram and Threads services.

The original article contains 1,603 words, the summary contains 155 words. Saved 90%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

Not only X, the whole internet is run by bots it seems.

what's the business plan for these bots anyways

My favorite showcase of this: Vinny's "PERUSE MY BIO" segment (timestamp: 2:26)

I get the feeling that lemmy is kinda similar in that regard.