The front page of the internet has an AI slop problem

TL;DR: Sometimes you have to fight fire with fire, which Reddit might be doing by using AI to fight AI slop. But it also highlights how platforms that were once so valuable because of their human-generated content are now struggling to tamp down on a flood of AI spam—and it could have broader consequences.

What happened: Reddit revealed yesterday that it now uses LLMs to catch around 25,000 spammy posts or comments every day. The irony: AI probably played a big part in the platform’s spam problem getting so bad in the first place.

While Reddit doesn’t have a blanket policy on AI content (it does have a sitewide ban on spam), many subreddits have rules around disclosing AI content or even outright banned it. There’s no reliable estimate of how much of the site is now AI, but browse any busy thread and you’ll find a few commenters accusing others of using ChatGPT. All this poses a problem for a site that, per its CEO, wants to be “the most human place on the internet in a world flooded with AI slop.”

The internet’s town square: Since launching in 2005, Reddit has become an endless font of crowdsourced human opinion and expertise—the go-to place for both product recs and the juicy relationship drama that fuels group chats. Over the last few years, Google even tweaked its algorithm to downrank SEO sites engineered for clicks while boosting “helpful content” from forums like Reddit. (And all that human-generated text is unsurprisingly something AI companies want access to, with Google reportedly paying $60 million a year to train its AI on Reddit data.)

The gamification of AI search: AI is now threatening Reddit’s value proposition not just by flooding discussions with annoying, low-quality posts and comments, but also by helping companies manipulate search and chatbot answers. Brands reportedly use AI to blast mentions of their products on the site, knowing that Reddit content is scraped (and prioritized) by AI search and bots—a strategy called “answer engine optimization.”

Bottom line: Thanks to AI, it’s becoming harder to trust the once seemingly human-written content on platforms like Reddit—impacting the reliability of answers from search engines like Google and forcing us to become more discerning about what’s genuine and what’s not. —WK