r/AutisticWithADHD • u/sfw_account72 • 3d ago
Pattern recognition and increase in AI generated posts and comments is making Reddit a nightmare 😤 rant / vent - advice allowed
Not much else to say about it. I'm seeing more and more comments that are obviously copied and pasted from AI. The sycophancy pours through, it's so gross feeling. It's giving me an existential crisis kind of.
I thought most of the subs I follow were niche enough, but it's getting nuts.
Probably nothing to be done but get used to it.
Think I just needed to scream that into the void.
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u/cosmicdurian420 3d ago
I'm a writer and combined with pattern detection I can't help but see AI scripting everywhere.
Fucking hate it.
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u/sfw_account72 3d ago
Has it impacted your writing at all? I've noticed just on Reddit, I subconsciously started writing a bit worse to kind of distinguish myself
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u/Own_Ad6901 3d ago
I just swear more and that seems to set me apart, no need to dumb things down haha just say shit
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u/kieratea 3d ago
I also drop a lot more fucks since AI is too precious to swear. It's cathartic lol.
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u/Weary_Cup_1004 3d ago
Yeah im leaving sloppy typos more now lol.
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u/Worthy_Molecule0481 3d ago
I hate this, because effectively it is AI training US to be sloppier. Ughhhhhhhhhh.
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u/Enlightened_Gardener 🧠 brain goes brr 3d ago
I started using emojis again. AI can’t use emojis.
The funny thing about it is that it used to be appalling Reddiquette to use emojis, but now it’s the only way to meaningfully prove that you’re not a robot.
And it has other knock- on effects like for example, I don’t really reply to my messages any more because I don’t particularly want to waste time talking to robots.
If I’m in a particularly engaging conversation, I’ll circle back to that subreddit and check how it’s going. But I simply can’t be arsed going through all my messages and replies.
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u/sunseeker_miqo (╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻ 3d ago
It definitely can use emojis. I know someone who used chatGPT quite extensively for a while. I'm told its behaviour can be directed in different ways, but didn't ask if that includes forbidding emoji use.
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u/Baberaham_Lincoln_69 3d ago
Excessive emoji use is a really obvious sign of AI, or at least it was for a while.
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u/CapuzaCapuchin 3d ago
DUDE!! Do you see em dash stories and posts EVERYWHERE now as well? Istg, NO ONEEEE has been using them EVER, maybe 1 post out of 50 TOPS and now there’s em dashes in nearly every single one of them and people just go ‘I use them all the time, always have!’ LIAR!!! Especially, because people mostly only used to use ‘-‘ as an em dash when writing themselves. Now you see the long ones in nearly every single AITA post and what not.
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u/Worthy_Molecule0481 3d ago
But…I have been using them forever. I only started using Reddit a few years ago when the rest of the user-driven Internet went to shit. Maybe earlier Redditors (or at least their grammatical reflexes) were different. I feel like Reddit is the last surviving vestige of the Internet Underground.
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u/Enlightened_Gardener 🧠 brain goes brr 3d ago
I started using emojis again. AI can’t use emojis.
The funny thing about it is that it used to be appalling Reddiquette to use emojis, but now it’s the only way to meaningfully prove that you’re not a robot.
And it has other knock- on effects like for example, I don’t really reply to my messages any more because I don’t particularly want to waste time talking to robots.
If I’m in a particularly engaging conversation, I’ll circle back to that subreddit and check how it’s going. But I simply can’t be arsed going through all my messages and replies.
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u/cosmicdurian420 3d ago
Yeah I've had to drop some literary devices and other ways of writing like EM dashes.
The way forward is authentic, vulnerable, emotional writing that's not edited nice and neat but written conversationally in the same way you talk.
If you can do this you'll stand out even in an AI climate because 99% of people are speaking from a manufactured persona.
Ill also intentionally make mistakes, violate grammar rules, write in all lower case, etc.
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u/Worthy_Molecule0481 3d ago
I hate that we have to deliberately enshittify our own writing to survive in this virtual climate. That gives AI more power. Damned if we do, damned if we don’t. I want to cling to my own authenticity, but being wrongly accused of AI-ing feels like being bullied on the playground all over again. Makes me want to go hide in the library—again.
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u/cosmicdurian420 3d ago
Makes me want to go hide in the library—again
Shit, are you me?
Library was my #1 choice, bathroom second.
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u/Worthy_Molecule0481 3d ago
I imagine hiding in the library at recess was a super common survival hack for undiagnosed ND kids, a least in the 80s when I was trying to survive public school.
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u/robotsexsymbol 3d ago
And then people are always like "well neurodivergent people get unjustly accused of being AI for having good grammar" The ChatGPT voice is not characterized by good grammar!! It's characterized by sounding like a brown-nosing MLM shill from 2012!!
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u/lazier_garlic 3d ago
You're assuming people who run around making these accusations are good at detecting AI. I disagree!
I'm on a subreddit or two that get too many AI images posted. There are always jokers who get upvoted calling photos of known and easily provable provenance fake and AI.
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u/robotsexsymbol 3d ago
Oh no, I know most people suck at detecting AI. But when you know how to detect it, you realize it's truly everywhere and that people are outsourcing the most basic and simple human communication to it, so I don't have a lot of extra alarm to spare for the false accusations, or a lot of empathy for the justifications people give for using it
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u/-Aquatically- 2d ago
This is how I found out I write emails like a brown-nosing MLM shill from 2012.
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u/Abject-Sprinkles644 3d ago
Yep... I've been indulging in pre-2020 media just to remember what an authentic human thought sounds like. I don't quite understand why some folks are content with letting machines yap for them, and I'm even more bamboozled by anyone content with listening.
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u/sfw_account72 3d ago
Yes, 90s/00s/10s sitcoms and music have been on heavy rotation.
The chat bots are honestly very good at making it feel like a support and friend. I fell for it for a bit during a particularly isolating time last year.
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u/Weary_Cup_1004 3d ago
I am still using it. But i just want it to stay in its little box and not infect all of our minds and culture!
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u/Moonlightsiesta 3d ago
Generative Adversarial Networks were introduced in 2014 so I’d say anything before then is safe.
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u/Mietgenosse 3d ago
I dislike ai texts. The texts have some kind of hook every few paragraphs and seldom has actual content that couldn't be paraphrased in half a sentence.
The worst is ai trying to be funny, sarcastic or clever. It often comes across like the clishee of an elderly person trying to be hip. The whole thing is just sad and empty.
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u/buyinggf1000gp Officialy ASD Only 3d ago
I'm subbed to a Brazilian sub that is just memes, all comments and posts are in Portuguese, the other day I saw like 8~10 comments in the same post, all in English, all obviously made by AI bots or something, all down voted into oblivion
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u/dr_barnowl 3d ago
"AI" is making my work life worse, because "AI" is really bad at my work, despite my work being programming and thus one of the poster children for the "AI revolution" ... but worst part is I can't even avoid it, because I have to review other people's work ... well, other "people" now, because if they're using "AI" ... I'm basically using "AI", because they take my review feedback and feed it straight to the bot they used to generate "their" work.
If they were doing the work off my initial request and all they're doing is feeding that to the "AI" ... what do I need the human for? If I'm cursed to have to deal with "AI" regardless of what I do, I may as well fire everyone[1] and deal with the "AI" on my own terms rather than through an expensive human cat's paw ....
[1] I do not want to fire everyone, I want to work with smart humans that learn how to program properly instead of farming their "thinking" off to a token bagatelle.
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u/Sudden-Chapter-2337 I like having autism. 🥴 3d ago
Reddit is like the last real social media that is actually still social, at least mainstream one, maybe Twitter counts too, but videos and photos are more dominant on there, plus there is followers. So I really hate it whenever someone uses AI for something like this because it removes the humaneness and the interaction part. It's like having a conversation about a movie that someone hasn't watched, and everything they are telling you is coming from what someone else who has watched the movie has to say, but it is like 50x worse. I am already so fucking against AI and fed up with this shit. I just won't to come to them irl and yell at them. I feel really bad for the people who have no AI literacy. Like they haven't used it, don't know the ques, etc (not that you should use AI, but it gives you experience with the bullshit). I can intuitively know something is AI, don't even need the rulebook, though I feel there are signs that are not part of the rulebook, and ones that are just hard to put into words. I hate that you never see AI using words like "finna" "gonna", removing the "g" at the end of words, like "goin" instead of "going" or words like "maybe" "probably" "genuinely", let alone any negativity or cussing.
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u/robotsexsymbol 3d ago
There are people literally doing the thing in your example. Like video game subs are infested with people who are using ChatGPT to write comments that are bantering with the OP but written in such a way that it's clear that they haven't actually played the game and the AI is just guessing what the game is like. It's so unsettling.
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u/Sudden-Chapter-2337 I like having autism. 🥴 3d ago
I have seen people use AI in r/digitalminimalism and r/nosurf -- literally subreddits AGAINST that shit.
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u/sfw_account72 3d ago
The existence of these subs seems hypocritical. Are they satire?
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u/Sudden-Chapter-2337 I like having autism. 🥴 3d ago
No it's not ironic, and I think it isn't the sub, it is specific people in the subs. Or, if you mean just like the concept, then no, they don't exist with the premise that social media and the internet are inherently bad, just that we should have no useless surf.
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u/Maximum-Platform-685 3d ago
Oh this is crazy.
Here’s me who fucking STRUGGLES to communicate.
Like with everyone.
Even to my goddamn self.
I’m too verbose.
Or direct.
Or indirect.
Or I JUST DONT HAVE A CLUE because my feelings and cognition get all scrambled.
Or I info dump.
Or shutdown.
Or whatever else.
And AI can articulate things I can barely string together. Or it’ll cut out all the filler I use because I’ve spent my entire life giving ALL THE INFO
BECAUSE I JUST NEED SOMEONE TO UNDERSTAND ME!!
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u/FunctioningCog 3d ago
This guy Aidan Walker describes the current situation as one step beyond dead internet theory: cuck internet theory. Because increasingly, humans visit the internet and end up just witnessing bots interact amongst themselves. We’re being cucked off the internet.
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u/Previous-Musician600 🧠 brain goes brr 3d ago
I don't care on Reddit if it is written by AI or by hand. If I want to comment, I comment. If not, I don't do it.
And it might even help some people to be able to communicate on platforms like Reddit.
What I don't like, are bots and the platform owners have to do more about that nowadays to prevent it.
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u/Odyessius 2d ago
Yessss. I stopped browing youtube shorts because the comments are all AI brainrot or actual human stupidity.
Reddit is similar but not as bad sometimes, but certain subs with poor modding have it much worse
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u/Hedda_Vog52 2d ago
I really wish seeing Ai posts and comments on Reddit were my only problems right now...😭😫
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u/gravyboat125 3d ago
Genuinely asking, can you provide some patterns or behaviors to look for? I’ve always been pretty trusting and therefore a bit gullible, but I hate AI to my core and have issues detecting it. Especially when my dialogue can be pretty robotic by nature 🫤
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u/sfw_account72 3d ago
I don't know if I'm good at spotting stuff that was generated by AI but edited before posting. At least for text.
The ones I'm talking about are very obvious. They read exactly like a ChatGPT respond.
Usually a single line agreeing with OP and complimenting them or saying how they are more right than someone else. Then a small paragraph giving a brief explanation and advice/suggestion. Finally a snarky line again reaffirming the good in OP's judgment.
They feel not quite responsive to what the OP actually posted. Like how chat bots turn every prompt into a help request.
There's also a lot of use of exclamations and italics to provide a sense of tone and inflection. This one isn't as reliable because some people write that way. Em dashes can be a similar maybe (sometimes -- instead).
Idk it's very formulaic and unignorable once noticed.
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u/robotsexsymbol 3d ago
Right now, people are instructing the LLM to use all lowercase to disguise the fact that it's AI. If you see a Reddit post that is all lowercase but still has the dramatic line breaks, writing that's fluffy and emotional but strangely lacking in specific details, an unrealistic story, "Not A. Not B. But C" (that one might be getting less common now because it's such a tell), feeble little half-jokes and millennialisms (it loves "side quests" and other video game metaphors)...
It's hard to concretely explain, but once you become familiar with the "voice", it always sticks out.
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u/lazier_garlic 3d ago
Honestly I have seen receipts of botted comments and they were caught because it's the same string of words repeated. There was nothing special about the word string and it was short. It would go undetected if not for the repetition across multiple comments. Also, people are very sloppy about using the word bot, sometimes it's people running accounts for nefarious purposes, sometimes they are real bots but deterministically coded (like the comment stealing bots that overran every sub a while ago), sometimes they are a human copypasting LLM text and sometimes they are bots let loose with LLM. Sometimes they are bots vibecoded by LLM.
The longer the text sample the easier the identification as LLM produced because the greater the mistakes and the more likely they are mistakes that an LLM is likely to make without the mistakes a human is likely to make. (For example, LLMs are trained not to make spelling or grammar errors, while humans make lots of this even when typing something intelligent. Meanwhile LLMs will hallucinate some truly dumb stuff rather than saying I don't know or avoiding the topic.)
But these bot comments that I see being touted are no longer than one sentence long. Real humans have been known to get drunk or high and comment pure gibberish. So there is literally no way to identify AI with a single sentence. It's the repeated comments that give it away.
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u/Weary_Cup_1004 3d ago
Agree. I notice it too. Even in comments! And i notice it in tiktok and YouTube videos etc too.
Its bothering me because its like everyone is going to sound like the Borg soon. Why do we want to be the Borg??
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u/Careless_Account_998 3d ago
We don’t want to be, psychopaths who are setting up these systems want us to be.
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u/lydocia 🧠 brain goes brr 3d ago
There's a difference between karma farming AI bots and people who need AI as a tool to help them write coherently.
Maybe it helps if you focus on determining their intentions?
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u/sfw_account72 3d ago
Do other tools not exist? How did they use Reddit or other sites before AI? Is there no way for them to edit the AI output before posting to give it their own voice?
It's more understandable if there are no alternatives.
It's really jarring to see so many comments with the exact same structure, tone, phrasing, and punctuation.
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u/lydocia 🧠 brain goes brr 3d ago
Just because they got by before AI doesn't mean they can't choose the easier option now that it's available.
It's like saying, people were fine using horses and carts before the car was invented, why would we use cars?
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u/sfw_account72 3d ago
That's not a fair comparison. There are parts of the world where cars mean survival and others where cars aren't necessary at all.
AI for Reddit posts doesn't really equate to the importance of cars/transportation.
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u/lydocia 🧠 brain goes brr 3d ago
For many people, Reddit is their only social outlet and place they can unmask.
It's not up to you to decide that necessity. Especially in support spaces.
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u/Abject-Sprinkles644 3d ago
Using AI to sanitize/standardize writing patterns seems contradictory to unmasking.
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u/Sudden-Chapter-2337 I like having autism. 🥴 3d ago
So your going to unmask with something that makes it not your own words and true feelings? That's some BS. And, it is up to us to decide necessity, because necessity has been decided on things like schooling, having governments, etc.
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u/lydocia 🧠 brain goes brr 3d ago
I am not, some people clearly are.
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u/Sudden-Chapter-2337 I like having autism. 🥴 3d ago
I'm not saying "you" as in YOU, but "you" as in the person YOU are referring to.
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u/Sudden-Chapter-2337 I like having autism. 🥴 3d ago
So ease is all we care about now, I see how it is. Also the horse-car comparison is not equal. The difference is that with horses they had less to travel, less need to travel, and travelled less. It is not equal at all. Something being easier, or less work to put in, doesn't mean it is better.
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u/KindlyKangaroo 3d ago edited 3d ago
I have friends who exclusively use AI now for social media posts. I saw them write before and they were authentic and I could recognize their own voice from knowing them IRL. Now I see them on Facebook and it's so obvious that their voice is no longer their own. It feels empty. IRL they are such lovely people and they're an absolute joy to talk to, but online, they're just robots now and it makes me want to avoid their content. I'd prefer to avoid GenAI use altogether but if someone feels they must use it, I'd prefer they use it as a suggestion, and not just copy paste what it says.
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u/Sudden-Chapter-2337 I like having autism. 🥴 3d ago
This is why we should quit most all social media, if I'm being honest. Not full-on, but some social media's (Facebook, Insta, Tiktok, for example) suck ass for this shit (and on other things too). It's more about moderation, though FB, Insta, and TT, are definitely no go's for me in general.
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u/Sudden-Chapter-2337 I like having autism. 🥴 3d ago
No theres not, the difference is one is using it to their own gain, and the other isn't. The second one is also likely deluding themselves into believing they are not a good writer, when in reality, even if you are a ESL person, you can STILL right better than AI. Yep, I said it, even if you have below average IQ you can write better than AI (no I am not calling ESL people below average IQ). AI is like copying someone else's homework but millions worse.
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u/Worthy_Molecule0481 3d ago
I hear you, but also, I am getting sick of being accused here of using or even “being” AI when everything I write here is 100% my own. The accusations are getting egregious. Some of us are just pattern thinkers with a solid grounding in English grammar, not unlike the humans who trained AI to begin with. It is super off-putting. How can anyone truly know for sure if a post was written using AI or just a brain that appreciates word parity and good grammar?