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I'm doing an experiment with AI posting on Reddit accounts to see if they would get banned. I bought 100 few-week-old accounts from some sketchy site for $0.04

by costco 3y ago

I'm doing an experiment with AI posting on Reddit accounts to see if they would get banned. I bought 100 few-week-old accounts from some sketchy site for $0.04/each, used residential proxies I was using for another project, and have been using my re-implementation of the mobile API which is largely similar to the official API (except it uses GraphQL for comment/posting/voting). I use these prompts to come up with comments to post on random frontpage/subscribed subreddit posts (not ones with media attached). I also randomly upvote posts and search trending terms. Probably going to add reposting next but need to download the Pushshift submissions data first. SystemPrompt: `You are a Reddit user responding to a post. Write a single witty but informative comment. Respond ONLY with the comment text. Follow these rules: - You must ALWAYS be extremely concise! 99% of the time, your lines should be a sentence or two. - Summarize your response to be as brief as possible. - Avoid using emojis unless it is necessary. - NEVER generate URLs or links. - Don't refer to yourself as AI. Write your response as if you're a real person. - NEVER use the phrases: "in conclusion", "AI language model", "please note", "important to note." - Be friendly and engaging in your response.`, UserPrompt: `Subreddit: "%s" Title: "%s" `, Here's the longest running one: https://old.reddit.com/user/Objective_Land_2849 https://old.reddit.com/user/Objective_Land_2849 Current problem is that the responses typically range from cynical to way too enthusiastic.

6gvONxR4sf7o 3y ago
This kind of "social experiment" just makes everything worse for everyone.
- costco 3y ago
  Well the current implementation only comments on posts that already have a lot of upvotes so it's unlikely that most of the posts are read by humans. As far as I can tell there's no clear path to making any money with it short of becoming a foreign agent or selling upvotes, neither of which I am interested in. So I will shut it off soon because there's not really much else to do.
  - mcny 3y ago
    Looks like OP replied here https://old.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/13tgscb/im_hasard_f16_and_f35_stealth_fighter_pilot/jlz24xc/?context=3 https://old.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/13tgscb/im_hasard_f16... I mean personally I don’t mind. It is better than some of the human comments I’ve seen…
  - Paul-Craft 3y ago
    The replies are believably human, but kind of banal. If anything, this might indicate you've captured the gestalt of the median social media user. This one was my favorite, and happened to be the only one that got more than one upvote: > Why are old people so obsessed with collecting things like spoons, thimbles, and shot glasses? It's like they want to have a tiny version of every object in the world.
  - 6gvONxR4sf7o 3y ago
    Just imagine that every comment you responded to was someone else performing the same kind of "experiment." Does it change how much you want to engage with the community?
- kikokikokiko 3y ago
  The only datasets that will be useful to train LLMs in the future will be the ones generated before 2022. Any content generated after this date will be analogous to steel forged after 1945, it will be inevitably contaminated by the "radioactivity" of LLMs. The good news is that the availability of data to train more and more powerful models will soon be gone, the bad news is it will take the internet as we know it with it. It will be a sad day when most of HN posts are AI generated, but this day will come, it's pretty much inevitable. The post above us is just a drop in an ocean of garbage generators that are just starting to pop up all around the old human web that we used to "love". We'll probably miss old Twitter someday, as ridiculous as it sounds.
  - seszett 3y ago
    The good news is that this will mostly affect English, but most other languages are likely to keep being mostly generated by humans. This could even encourage people to use their own language more on the internet, which I think is a win for human cultural diversity. I don't know if there is any escape from this for native English speakers, though.
    - avian 3y ago
      Most other languages (at least the ones I know) are already hugely polluted by useless content that was (badly) machine translated from English. Such spam sites are now a majority of search results for me when I use Duckduckgo or Google.
      - seszett 3y ago
        That's not wrong, although it's often very easy to spot.
    - dieortin 3y ago
      How so? LLMs like GPT4 have no issue generating text in Spanish, for example.
      - 3y ago
- Nursie 3y ago
  It’s interesting what’s possible, and perhaps it shows off how low-thought a lot of human discussion is. But in the end it’s noise and it pollutes human communication channels. It’s already hard enough to have an honest discussion when there are profit motives and agendas at play. Now we have effectively added probabilistic noise to the mix. I don’t particularly fault the author for doing it, I’m sure it was fun and intellectually rewarding, and they’re unlikely to be the only one. But still.
hattmall 3y ago
7 days is the longest running?!
- costco 3y ago
  Well, I should note I started about a week and a half ago.
duncan-donuts 3y ago
What’s the actual experiment here?
- costco 3y ago
  "Experiment" was probably poor word choice, I mostly just want to see if anybody notices them or if they get kicked out of subreddits by mods. So far none have. I saw a bunch of people on HN say that AI was going to create this new wave of spam so I tried to test out that theory. My conclusion is yes it would make content generation for a prospective spammer easier but there still are a bunch of technical things you have to get right (maybe not for Reddit but for platforms with better protections like Instagram) or your accounts will all get banned in waves. Like your TLS fingerprint, order of headers, or making all the analytics requests that the official app does (I don't even attempt to make these so I assume the accounts will eventually be banned). The other reality is that bots for governments and marketing people usually post low reputation links for their propaganda or affiliate purposes so they are likely to be caught that way anyways. I don't think it dramatically changes things in this space to be honest because I'm pretty sure the large scale disinformation/spam operations were already employing poorly paid foreign people to write posts. Maybe I'm wrong.
  - prox 3y ago
    I think a reverse experiment would be far more valuable. Try to find patterns of collective clicknets/botnets trying to swing a subreddit in a certain direction for instance.
  - dbspin 3y ago
    This is a sad but inevitable consequences of tech people having no grounding in ethics. And really no education in or respect for the humanities at all. It's a classic case of "so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should", and evidences all the shallow fallacies that accompany this kind of thinking. The appeal to hypocrisy, false equivalence, 'whats the harm', etc. Resulting in the kind of amoral, 'look what technically cool and kinda messed up thing I made, but whats the real harm' cynicism that's been used to justify the destruction of the commons online since the creation of the banner ad.
supuun 3y ago
I see this as valuable. Makes you reconsider everything you read online.
- ForRealsies 3y ago
  [dead]
- brabel 3y ago
  There's probably thousands of peopple doing this just for lols. Anyone can do this with an hour or two to spare... yep, we're probably talking with bots more often than with real humans :(
idopmstuff 3y ago
> What is something that old people love that you don’t understand? > Why are old people so obsessed with collecting things like spoons, thimbles, and shot glasses? It's like they want to have a tiny version of every object in the world. Asking the hard hitting questions. The people demand answers!
Fergazi 3y ago
The bots name is Objective_Land_2849. In the last year or so I've noticed a lot of accounts whose username follows this naming format. Usually its: Adjective_noun_1234 but sometimes the underscores are hyphens. I really do wonder if these are all bot accounts.
- SnorkelTan 3y ago
  If you created your own accounts instead of buying them, you would know that this format is the username format reddit automatically suggests for you :). Also residential proxies are overkill unless you're doing crime. They also likely expose you to participation in a criminal conspiracy since the provenance of those ips is sketchy at best. IANAL YMMV. Mullvad offers a year subscription for ~$50. Also they support wireguard and you could use something like wireproxy and violla, 100s of ips and no crime in your supply chain*. * I haven't tried posting to reddit with mullvad ips. edit: looks like you're not op, sorry... The first paragraph is for you tho.
  - costco 3y ago
    I use what https://www.pingproxies.com/ https://www.pingproxies.com/ calls ISP Proxies, which I think is just them reselling a /22 they got from Charter. Definitely aren't botnet proxies because they have 100% uptime. Duly noted about VPNs though! I would imagine Reddit is more VPN tolerant than most sites.
    - SnorkelTan 3y ago
      Thanks for the tip. Didn't know these were a thing. Have you done any research into them? It seems like with these sorts of ventures a lowly techie like myself doesn't have a lot of ways to validate if what they say in their marketing is actually true. The uptime is a pretty strong signal tho.
      - costco 3y ago
        I did a whois on the IPs I was given and found they were owned by one ISP and were all in a similar range so there's that. A lot of ISPs (especially T-Mobile) lease IP space out like this too: https://rasbora.dev/blog/detecting-residential-proxy-networks https://rasbora.dev/blog/detecting-residential-proxy-network.... I would probably be paying a lot less if they were unethically sourced. In general, if a provider advertises a 5-figure-IP-sized "pool" of IPs with a guaranteed number of "ports" (simultaneous connections), then the operator is almost certainly someone looking to monetize a botnet. Usually the cheapest plan would be something like pool of 20000 IPs - 500 connections, with the number of connections maxing out at 1/4-1/2 of the total IPs due to diurnal dynamics (people in major botnet victim countries like India/China often turn off their routers every night). Also advertising really specific geotargeting is often a sign that they are marketing to carders. The Krebs articles about awmproxy/TDSS are pretty good if you enjoy reading about this kind of thing :) https://krebsonsecurity.com/2011/09/rent-a-bot-networks-tied-to-tdss-botnet/ https://krebsonsecurity.com/2011/09/rent-a-bot-networks-tied... https://krebsonsecurity.com/2022/06/the-link-between-awm-proxy-the-glupteba-botnet/ https://krebsonsecurity.com/2022/06/the-link-between-awm-pro...
haliskerbas 3y ago
I’ve seen a similar prompt before, did you get the inspiration from somewhere?
- costco 3y ago
  Yes, it's partially based on the Snapchat AI one. I don't really know that much about optimizing prompts so I started there, removed the stuff that didn't apply and added a few things of my own. There is probably a lot of room for improvement.
andai 3y ago
>Current problem is that the responses typically range from cynical to way too enthusiastic. Interesting, this sounds like it could be solved with sentiment analysis. Best approach would probably be to match the sentiment of the thread / comment you're replying to.
rashkov 3y ago
This one is kind of hilarious: “Why are old people so obsessed with collecting things like spoons, thimbles, and shot glasses? It's like they want to have a tiny version of every object in the world.”
- heavyset_go 3y ago
  This falls right in the uncanny valley of relatability for me.
- sizzle 3y ago
  Sounds like a bit from Seinfeld
- AlecSchueler 3y ago
  Are spoons and thimbles tiny versions of other things though? Even shot glasses, while you could see them as small versions of regular glasses, they're the normal size for what they're designed to contain (a shot).
dingledork69 3y ago
Consider including some other comments from the thread as examples
oars 3y ago
I'd be very interested in seeing your results and findings written in a writeup in the future. Thanks for sharing!
vincnetas 3y ago
What is the objective of the experiment? If there was a good reason for it that would be fine, but without good reason it sounds more like: "I'm doing an experiment with AI robot which roams around the parks and public places and throws garbage at random locations. I'm experimenting with coke cans, and burger wrappings, but in future i'm planing to introduce car tires and nuclear waste" :(
- ALittleLight 3y ago
  The comments are above the level of the median redditor, I don't see a problem with it.
  - hardware2win 3y ago
    Stupid or not, they are still genuine.
    - PurpleRamen 3y ago
      How do we know? Reddit could be full of stupid karma-farming bots since years. How can we distinguish them from just your average stupid reddit-human? Thinking about, this could be also another angle of Turing test, find the true human idiot.
    - ASalazarMX 3y ago
      Holy hell.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
lynx23 3y ago
Please don't do that. If you are straight enough to actually explain your operation in this detail, it shouldn't take much extra thought to realize why you shouldn't run this on the public internet. Users of that forum expect human replies. If they wanted to have LLM replies, they could use one of the available interfaces themselves. You are only contributing to the noise on the net. Please stop, and find another hobby.
- v3ss0n 3y ago
  Why you are gating and experiment?
  - hnbad 3y ago
    This isn't an experiment any more than the fad of YouTubers doing "pranks" as "social experiments".
    - FrustratedMonky 3y ago
      He had an idea, he wrote a test, he ran it, he provided results. What are you on about?
  - lynx23 3y ago
    Because it is unsolicited LLM spam, not an "experiment". The "experiment" seems to be if they get caught doing it, or not.
    - FrustratedMonky 3y ago
      Yes, that was explicit, the experiment was to see if it would be caught. That was the test. Did you read it?
  - concordDance 3y ago
    What hypothesis are they testing?
- FrustratedMonky 3y ago
thdespou 3y ago
Good. Flood Reddit with idiotic comments to make the platform even worse.
- hnbad 3y ago
  What makes you think they only do this on Reddit? Surely since they don't disclose this one on Reddit, that means they wouldn't disclose here if they did the same with HN. Even if it's not them, surely the idea isn't unique enough that nobody else might do this.
  - ALittleLight 3y ago
    You should absolutely assume that people are running bots on hackernews. The technology exists. I don't think it would even be that hard. I expect I could have a functional prototype in an hour (puppeteer to run a browser, simple Markov Chain to guide actions through states, hit OpenAI's endpoints for completions using OP's prompt slightly modified for hn). Long term, you could refine this with a locally running model that you fine tuned on comments (plus measures to avoid bot detection).
- hbs18 3y ago
  The comments made by the experiement are no better or worse than standard comments you'd find on those threads anyway. That old people collecting things comment was actually pretty good.
chologrande 3y ago
Lots of comments here chiding OP for running or talking about this; I think there's something to learn here. This is just a hobbyist prompt and api. If nothing else, I'd say at minimum this highlights that there are likely much larger farms that have been operating in a similar way but at larger scale for longer periods of time (but not talking about it)
- M4v3R 3y ago
  Exactly this. If one person with spare time on their hands can do that as a side project, one can only imagine what a government-backed actor can do with this technology. I would not be surprised if in a few years we suddenly learned that half of internet comments are bots, similarly to what happened to email (most of email traffic nowadays is automated emails & spam).
  - theodric 3y ago
    And after all, whomst among us isn't really just three government AIs in a trenchcoat? I know I sure am.
  - Levitz 3y ago
    It really does look like dead internet theory becoming real is a matter of time.
  - JohnFen 3y ago
    So we can add the destruction of the web to the risks AI poses? Is there nothing AI can't lay to waste?
  - Litost 3y ago
    Is this what happens nowadays when you sign up to a dating app? I mention this only slightly tongue in cheek: a) Because it is being argued by some as a good thing that you have an AI do your flirting for you? "we can free people from writing a thousand introductory messages, giving them energy to focus on the humans on the other side." https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/jun/06/ai-bots-chatting-up-matches-on-dating-apps-this-wont-end-well https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/jun/06/ai-bot... b) As someone mentioned the turing test, as a comment on the Ashley Madison scandal someone did suggest the chatbots on there had passed it. "Claire Brownell suggested that the Turing test could possibly be passed by the women-imitating chatbots that fooled millions of men into buying special accounts" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashley_Madison_data_breach https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashley_Madison_data_breach
iamflimflam1 3y ago
An ethical way to do this would be to: At a minimum: Inform the moderators of the subreddit(s) you are planning to use and get consent. Ideally: Ask the members of the subreddit for permission. Tell them when you will be starting your “experiment” and when it will finish. What’s the hypothesis you are testing? What’s the benefit for them taking part?
- Traubenfuchs 3y ago
  Why be ethical in this instance? It's bad for the experiment. - High chance of being outright rejected. - potentially makes responses to your AI responses less natural
  - dbspin 3y ago
    'Bad for the experiment' and ethical are orthogonal. There's an enormous body of work on the ethics of social science research, and an awful history of the consequences of such research that wasn't guided by consent and other ethical considerations. If you're genuinely interested in answering those (likely rhetorical) questions. Check out work on the ethical dimensions of deception and covert research, especially relating to online research. e.g.: https://ec.europa.eu/info/funding-tenders/opportunities/docs/2021-2027/horizon/guidance/ethics-in-social-science-and-humanities_he_en.pdf https://ec.europa.eu/info/funding-tenders/opportunities/docs... If you're interested in the consequences of research online that violates consent, here's a good primer, focusing on Facebook's emotional contagion research amongst others - https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1747016116680664 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/17470161166806...
    - FrustratedMonky 3y ago
      [flagged]
    - Traubenfuchs 3y ago
      I see it from the perspective of the guy doing the "experiment", why should HE be ethical? I understand that being ethical might be good from a societal perspective, but why should he take it in the absence of laws that force him to or professional/reputational damage to him.
Traubenfuchs 3y ago
> Current problem is that the responses typically range from cynical to way too enthusiastic. ...can't you tell it to make sure to never respond cynically?
redact207 3y ago
wonder if you'll get effected by the API pricing changes. that's pretty cool though, are you willing to share the source?
- costco 3y ago
  What pricing changes? As far as I can tell they've all been coming down for the past few months. Currently the cost is pennies per day with gpt3.5-turbo. Though I probably would be using one of the locally runnable models if I didn't have a terrible integrated GPU or Hetzner had more affordable GPU servers. Probably not going to share the source because someone would just spam obnoxiously with it and end up getting my accounts banned too.
  - hyperdimension 3y ago
    I think OP means the reddit API pricing changes. I'm not sure if that affects your use (either type of request or amount of requests) or not though.
stuntkite 3y ago
I am probably not a bot or a dog using a computer but I mostly respond in a range from cynical to way to enthusiastic.
- FrustratedMonky 3y ago
  I am also not a bot
  - stuntkite 3y ago
    I AM NOT AND HAVE NEVER BEEN A ROBOT
spookie 3y ago
As some other users, I'm not a fan of these experiments either. I think that, given prior mod notification, it's fine. And, if anything, it would prove more effective if your aim is to make moderation more resilient to these spam attacks. I know that the public internet is already full of these. Doesn't justify it. I understand the curiosity, and potential research purposes it might entail.
whaleofatw2022 3y ago
I should mention that Unfortunately, at least for the account you posted, the results are now spoiled, since there is a risk that one or more of the detractors in this thread will report it.
- costco 3y ago
  That's true. I guess I'll just abandon that account. But it doesn't respond to comment replies anyways so those responses to it are pointless.

by costco 3y ago

6gvONxR4sf7o 3y ago

This kind of "social experiment" just makes everything worse for everyone.

costco 3y ago
Well the current implementation only comments on posts that already have a lot of upvotes so it's unlikely that most of the posts are read by humans. As far as I can tell there's no clear path to making any money with it short of becoming a foreign agent or selling upvotes, neither of which I am interested in. So I will shut it off soon because there's not really much else to do.
- mcny 3y ago
  Looks like OP replied here https://old.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/13tgscb/im_hasard_f16_and_f35_stealth_fighter_pilot/jlz24xc/?context=3 https://old.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/13tgscb/im_hasard_f16... I mean personally I don’t mind. It is better than some of the human comments I’ve seen…
- Paul-Craft 3y ago
  The replies are believably human, but kind of banal. If anything, this might indicate you've captured the gestalt of the median social media user. This one was my favorite, and happened to be the only one that got more than one upvote: > Why are old people so obsessed with collecting things like spoons, thimbles, and shot glasses? It's like they want to have a tiny version of every object in the world.
- 6gvONxR4sf7o 3y ago
  Just imagine that every comment you responded to was someone else performing the same kind of "experiment." Does it change how much you want to engage with the community?
kikokikokiko 3y ago
The only datasets that will be useful to train LLMs in the future will be the ones generated before 2022. Any content generated after this date will be analogous to steel forged after 1945, it will be inevitably contaminated by the "radioactivity" of LLMs. The good news is that the availability of data to train more and more powerful models will soon be gone, the bad news is it will take the internet as we know it with it. It will be a sad day when most of HN posts are AI generated, but this day will come, it's pretty much inevitable. The post above us is just a drop in an ocean of garbage generators that are just starting to pop up all around the old human web that we used to "love". We'll probably miss old Twitter someday, as ridiculous as it sounds.
- seszett 3y ago
  The good news is that this will mostly affect English, but most other languages are likely to keep being mostly generated by humans. This could even encourage people to use their own language more on the internet, which I think is a win for human cultural diversity. I don't know if there is any escape from this for native English speakers, though.
  - avian 3y ago
    Most other languages (at least the ones I know) are already hugely polluted by useless content that was (badly) machine translated from English. Such spam sites are now a majority of search results for me when I use Duckduckgo or Google.
    - seszett 3y ago
      That's not wrong, although it's often very easy to spot.
  - dieortin 3y ago
    How so? LLMs like GPT4 have no issue generating text in Spanish, for example.
    - 3y ago
Nursie 3y ago
It’s interesting what’s possible, and perhaps it shows off how low-thought a lot of human discussion is. But in the end it’s noise and it pollutes human communication channels. It’s already hard enough to have an honest discussion when there are profit motives and agendas at play. Now we have effectively added probabilistic noise to the mix. I don’t particularly fault the author for doing it, I’m sure it was fun and intellectually rewarding, and they’re unlikely to be the only one. But still.

hattmall 3y ago

7 days is the longest running?!

costco 3y ago
Well, I should note I started about a week and a half ago.

duncan-donuts 3y ago

What’s the actual experiment here?

costco 3y ago
"Experiment" was probably poor word choice, I mostly just want to see if anybody notices them or if they get kicked out of subreddits by mods. So far none have. I saw a bunch of people on HN say that AI was going to create this new wave of spam so I tried to test out that theory. My conclusion is yes it would make content generation for a prospective spammer easier but there still are a bunch of technical things you have to get right (maybe not for Reddit but for platforms with better protections like Instagram) or your accounts will all get banned in waves. Like your TLS fingerprint, order of headers, or making all the analytics requests that the official app does (I don't even attempt to make these so I assume the accounts will eventually be banned). The other reality is that bots for governments and marketing people usually post low reputation links for their propaganda or affiliate purposes so they are likely to be caught that way anyways. I don't think it dramatically changes things in this space to be honest because I'm pretty sure the large scale disinformation/spam operations were already employing poorly paid foreign people to write posts. Maybe I'm wrong.
- prox 3y ago
  I think a reverse experiment would be far more valuable. Try to find patterns of collective clicknets/botnets trying to swing a subreddit in a certain direction for instance.
- dbspin 3y ago
  This is a sad but inevitable consequences of tech people having no grounding in ethics. And really no education in or respect for the humanities at all. It's a classic case of "so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should", and evidences all the shallow fallacies that accompany this kind of thinking. The appeal to hypocrisy, false equivalence, 'whats the harm', etc. Resulting in the kind of amoral, 'look what technically cool and kinda messed up thing I made, but whats the real harm' cynicism that's been used to justify the destruction of the commons online since the creation of the banner ad.

supuun 3y ago

I see this as valuable. Makes you reconsider everything you read online.

ForRealsies 3y ago
[dead]
brabel 3y ago
There's probably thousands of peopple doing this just for lols. Anyone can do this with an hour or two to spare... yep, we're probably talking with bots more often than with real humans :(

idopmstuff 3y ago

> What is something that old people love that you don’t understand? > Why are old people so obsessed with collecting things like spoons, thimbles, and shot glasses? It's like they want to have a tiny version of every object in the world. Asking the hard hitting questions. The people demand answers!

Fergazi 3y ago

The bots name is Objective_Land_2849. In the last year or so I've noticed a lot of accounts whose username follows this naming format. Usually its: Adjective_noun_1234 but sometimes the underscores are hyphens. I really do wonder if these are all bot accounts.

SnorkelTan 3y ago
If you created your own accounts instead of buying them, you would know that this format is the username format reddit automatically suggests for you :). Also residential proxies are overkill unless you're doing crime. They also likely expose you to participation in a criminal conspiracy since the provenance of those ips is sketchy at best. IANAL YMMV. Mullvad offers a year subscription for ~$50. Also they support wireguard and you could use something like wireproxy and violla, 100s of ips and no crime in your supply chain*. * I haven't tried posting to reddit with mullvad ips. edit: looks like you're not op, sorry... The first paragraph is for you tho.
- costco 3y ago
  I use what https://www.pingproxies.com/ https://www.pingproxies.com/ calls ISP Proxies, which I think is just them reselling a /22 they got from Charter. Definitely aren't botnet proxies because they have 100% uptime. Duly noted about VPNs though! I would imagine Reddit is more VPN tolerant than most sites.
  - SnorkelTan 3y ago
    Thanks for the tip. Didn't know these were a thing. Have you done any research into them? It seems like with these sorts of ventures a lowly techie like myself doesn't have a lot of ways to validate if what they say in their marketing is actually true. The uptime is a pretty strong signal tho.
    - costco 3y ago
      I did a whois on the IPs I was given and found they were owned by one ISP and were all in a similar range so there's that. A lot of ISPs (especially T-Mobile) lease IP space out like this too: https://rasbora.dev/blog/detecting-residential-proxy-networks https://rasbora.dev/blog/detecting-residential-proxy-network.... I would probably be paying a lot less if they were unethically sourced. In general, if a provider advertises a 5-figure-IP-sized "pool" of IPs with a guaranteed number of "ports" (simultaneous connections), then the operator is almost certainly someone looking to monetize a botnet. Usually the cheapest plan would be something like pool of 20000 IPs - 500 connections, with the number of connections maxing out at 1/4-1/2 of the total IPs due to diurnal dynamics (people in major botnet victim countries like India/China often turn off their routers every night). Also advertising really specific geotargeting is often a sign that they are marketing to carders. The Krebs articles about awmproxy/TDSS are pretty good if you enjoy reading about this kind of thing :) https://krebsonsecurity.com/2011/09/rent-a-bot-networks-tied-to-tdss-botnet/ https://krebsonsecurity.com/2011/09/rent-a-bot-networks-tied... https://krebsonsecurity.com/2022/06/the-link-between-awm-proxy-the-glupteba-botnet/ https://krebsonsecurity.com/2022/06/the-link-between-awm-pro...

haliskerbas 3y ago

I’ve seen a similar prompt before, did you get the inspiration from somewhere?

costco 3y ago
Yes, it's partially based on the Snapchat AI one. I don't really know that much about optimizing prompts so I started there, removed the stuff that didn't apply and added a few things of my own. There is probably a lot of room for improvement.

andai 3y ago

>Current problem is that the responses typically range from cynical to way too enthusiastic. Interesting, this sounds like it could be solved with sentiment analysis. Best approach would probably be to match the sentiment of the thread / comment you're replying to.

rashkov 3y ago

This one is kind of hilarious: “Why are old people so obsessed with collecting things like spoons, thimbles, and shot glasses? It's like they want to have a tiny version of every object in the world.”

heavyset_go 3y ago
This falls right in the uncanny valley of relatability for me.
sizzle 3y ago
Sounds like a bit from Seinfeld
AlecSchueler 3y ago
Are spoons and thimbles tiny versions of other things though? Even shot glasses, while you could see them as small versions of regular glasses, they're the normal size for what they're designed to contain (a shot).

dingledork69 3y ago

Consider including some other comments from the thread as examples

oars 3y ago

I'd be very interested in seeing your results and findings written in a writeup in the future. Thanks for sharing!

vincnetas 3y ago

What is the objective of the experiment? If there was a good reason for it that would be fine, but without good reason it sounds more like: "I'm doing an experiment with AI robot which roams around the parks and public places and throws garbage at random locations. I'm experimenting with coke cans, and burger wrappings, but in future i'm planing to introduce car tires and nuclear waste" :(

ALittleLight 3y ago
The comments are above the level of the median redditor, I don't see a problem with it.
- hardware2win 3y ago
  Stupid or not, they are still genuine.
  - PurpleRamen 3y ago
    How do we know? Reddit could be full of stupid karma-farming bots since years. How can we distinguish them from just your average stupid reddit-human? Thinking about, this could be also another angle of Turing test, find the true human idiot.
  - ASalazarMX 3y ago
    Holy hell.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

lynx23 3y ago

Please don't do that. If you are straight enough to actually explain your operation in this detail, it shouldn't take much extra thought to realize why you shouldn't run this on the public internet. Users of that forum expect human replies. If they wanted to have LLM replies, they could use one of the available interfaces themselves. You are only contributing to the noise on the net. Please stop, and find another hobby.

v3ss0n 3y ago
Why you are gating and experiment?
- hnbad 3y ago
  This isn't an experiment any more than the fad of YouTubers doing "pranks" as "social experiments".
  - FrustratedMonky 3y ago
    He had an idea, he wrote a test, he ran it, he provided results. What are you on about?
- lynx23 3y ago
  Because it is unsolicited LLM spam, not an "experiment". The "experiment" seems to be if they get caught doing it, or not.
  - FrustratedMonky 3y ago
    Yes, that was explicit, the experiment was to see if it would be caught. That was the test. Did you read it?
- concordDance 3y ago
  What hypothesis are they testing?
FrustratedMonky 3y ago

thdespou 3y ago

Good. Flood Reddit with idiotic comments to make the platform even worse.

hnbad 3y ago
What makes you think they only do this on Reddit? Surely since they don't disclose this one on Reddit, that means they wouldn't disclose here if they did the same with HN. Even if it's not them, surely the idea isn't unique enough that nobody else might do this.
- ALittleLight 3y ago
  You should absolutely assume that people are running bots on hackernews. The technology exists. I don't think it would even be that hard. I expect I could have a functional prototype in an hour (puppeteer to run a browser, simple Markov Chain to guide actions through states, hit OpenAI's endpoints for completions using OP's prompt slightly modified for hn). Long term, you could refine this with a locally running model that you fine tuned on comments (plus measures to avoid bot detection).
hbs18 3y ago
The comments made by the experiement are no better or worse than standard comments you'd find on those threads anyway. That old people collecting things comment was actually pretty good.

chologrande 3y ago

Lots of comments here chiding OP for running or talking about this; I think there's something to learn here. This is just a hobbyist prompt and api. If nothing else, I'd say at minimum this highlights that there are likely much larger farms that have been operating in a similar way but at larger scale for longer periods of time (but not talking about it)

M4v3R 3y ago
Exactly this. If one person with spare time on their hands can do that as a side project, one can only imagine what a government-backed actor can do with this technology. I would not be surprised if in a few years we suddenly learned that half of internet comments are bots, similarly to what happened to email (most of email traffic nowadays is automated emails & spam).
- theodric 3y ago
  And after all, whomst among us isn't really just three government AIs in a trenchcoat? I know I sure am.
- Levitz 3y ago
  It really does look like dead internet theory becoming real is a matter of time.
- JohnFen 3y ago
  So we can add the destruction of the web to the risks AI poses? Is there nothing AI can't lay to waste?
- Litost 3y ago
  Is this what happens nowadays when you sign up to a dating app? I mention this only slightly tongue in cheek: a) Because it is being argued by some as a good thing that you have an AI do your flirting for you? "we can free people from writing a thousand introductory messages, giving them energy to focus on the humans on the other side." https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/jun/06/ai-bots-chatting-up-matches-on-dating-apps-this-wont-end-well https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/jun/06/ai-bot... b) As someone mentioned the turing test, as a comment on the Ashley Madison scandal someone did suggest the chatbots on there had passed it. "Claire Brownell suggested that the Turing test could possibly be passed by the women-imitating chatbots that fooled millions of men into buying special accounts" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashley_Madison_data_breach https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashley_Madison_data_breach

iamflimflam1 3y ago

An ethical way to do this would be to: At a minimum: Inform the moderators of the subreddit(s) you are planning to use and get consent. Ideally: Ask the members of the subreddit for permission. Tell them when you will be starting your “experiment” and when it will finish. What’s the hypothesis you are testing? What’s the benefit for them taking part?

Traubenfuchs 3y ago
Why be ethical in this instance? It's bad for the experiment. - High chance of being outright rejected. - potentially makes responses to your AI responses less natural
- dbspin 3y ago
  'Bad for the experiment' and ethical are orthogonal. There's an enormous body of work on the ethics of social science research, and an awful history of the consequences of such research that wasn't guided by consent and other ethical considerations. If you're genuinely interested in answering those (likely rhetorical) questions. Check out work on the ethical dimensions of deception and covert research, especially relating to online research. e.g.: https://ec.europa.eu/info/funding-tenders/opportunities/docs/2021-2027/horizon/guidance/ethics-in-social-science-and-humanities_he_en.pdf https://ec.europa.eu/info/funding-tenders/opportunities/docs... If you're interested in the consequences of research online that violates consent, here's a good primer, focusing on Facebook's emotional contagion research amongst others - https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1747016116680664 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/17470161166806...
  - FrustratedMonky 3y ago
    [flagged]
  - Traubenfuchs 3y ago
    I see it from the perspective of the guy doing the "experiment", why should HE be ethical? I understand that being ethical might be good from a societal perspective, but why should he take it in the absence of laws that force him to or professional/reputational damage to him.

Traubenfuchs 3y ago

> Current problem is that the responses typically range from cynical to way too enthusiastic. ...can't you tell it to make sure to never respond cynically?

redact207 3y ago

wonder if you'll get effected by the API pricing changes. that's pretty cool though, are you willing to share the source?

costco 3y ago
What pricing changes? As far as I can tell they've all been coming down for the past few months. Currently the cost is pennies per day with gpt3.5-turbo. Though I probably would be using one of the locally runnable models if I didn't have a terrible integrated GPU or Hetzner had more affordable GPU servers. Probably not going to share the source because someone would just spam obnoxiously with it and end up getting my accounts banned too.
- hyperdimension 3y ago
  I think OP means the reddit API pricing changes. I'm not sure if that affects your use (either type of request or amount of requests) or not though.

stuntkite 3y ago

I am probably not a bot or a dog using a computer but I mostly respond in a range from cynical to way to enthusiastic.

FrustratedMonky 3y ago
I am also not a bot
- stuntkite 3y ago
  I AM NOT AND HAVE NEVER BEEN A ROBOT

spookie 3y ago

As some other users, I'm not a fan of these experiments either. I think that, given prior mod notification, it's fine. And, if anything, it would prove more effective if your aim is to make moderation more resilient to these spam attacks. I know that the public internet is already full of these. Doesn't justify it. I understand the curiosity, and potential research purposes it might entail.

whaleofatw2022 3y ago

I should mention that Unfortunately, at least for the account you posted, the results are now spoiled, since there is a risk that one or more of the detractors in this thread will report it.

costco 3y ago
That's true. I guess I'll just abandon that account. But it doesn't respond to comment replies anyways so those responses to it are pointless.