Reddit, AI spam bots explore new ways to show ads in your feed
#For sale: Ads that look like legit Reddit user posts
“We highly recommend only mentioning the brand name of your product since mentioning links in posts makes the post more likely to be reported as spam and hidden. We find that humans don’t usually type out full URLs in natural conversation and plus, most Internet users are happy to do a quick Google Search,” ReplyGuy’s website reads.
I’m looking forward to their “Dynamic Product Ads” system to coming back to bite them in the ass when ads for Nestle products appear next to posts talking about whatever horrific thing Nestle is doing this week (and similar things).
The funny thing is, the ai-generated engagement is specifically formatted to still be desirable in that situation, because plenty of advertising is already purely to create goodwill.
Imagine that when people start talking about Nestle being horrible to its workers, a “dynamic product ad” chimes in to retort that Nestle is actually great and cares about its workers.
Exactly like election disinformation? Yup, and plenty of companies can’t wait to have their own disinformation bot net, sanctioned under the guise of “advertising.”
That’d be fucking hilarious.
Then we’d just see reddit users arguing with these bots like as if they’re people. Because they’d totally do that.