u/BeginningEcho4983

TL;DR a quick small yet specific enough comment, when posted once under a sufficiently fresh post, itself and slight modifications get spammed in multiple sub-replies and in other posts of the same kind.

I have myself tested this long ago... Decided to post it here today

Say for an example, in India. A religious godman is recorded saying something along the lines of "X is constitutional so why shouldn't we?".

A comment, along the lines of "but a few days ago this man was saying that constitution is not reliable morality"

The comment may be factually correct or incorrect.

BUT, it's spammed by a few select profiles over on multiple political subreddits and posts relating to it...

Sometimes the wrong one.

And a group of likely bots, spamming copypasta of the same. The tell is the similarity.

At least in Indian political subreddits, when you start going through a collection of bots likely connected, it's as if some controversial comment "seeds" them.

Esp. small comments which are specific... Yet having less details.

I haven't tested or verified this with subreddits unrelated to indian politics but anti-AI subreddits do seem to have pro-AI bots spamming... But with a likely difference.

I haven't yet seen enough to conclude this, but it seems like pro-AI bots "evolve" whatever "seed comment" they are spamming.

Seeing a recent post regarding some weight drug on this subreddit, I remembered. "But a cat from 2024"

Yes I too have been seeing this. Distinctly bot profiles have a sudden human touch.

And... Some profiles are a dissonance of a lonely man and a women who's dog died... And another boy who needs linux help.

Like, do people share profiles like that? These "people" posts and comments are always like padding for what is otherwise a bot.

Do the bot farm hosts cycle through those accounts and use them? Seems likely

Or... Do the bots intentionally cycle through scripts and AI models or what?

Pulling info from other sites or a mixture of other old posts?

I am certain that some patterns and the extreme intensity can't be mimicked by real humans...

[Post ends here; some more info for discussion]

I already know the trick of keeping an account dormant for some time before "deploying" it.

And that it is used for less than half of all bots.

Or diversifying the subreddits and topics... Only initially, before focusing on a particular product or political narrative.

Or spamming the opposite topic or position with clear bs while "neutrally" putting short bursts in the other topic as intended.

("AI is bad because <insert obviously nonsense false reason>" in anti-AI subreddit leaving bait for the pro-AI to point out)

(Yes I know real people do it but some bots are distinctively identifiable to be bots)

And the classic:

A bot reposts a famous clickbait/interesting post, another swarm copies over the comments.

And then there's a post on this subreddit where a "test" post let the fake users fall through.

Humans who act like bots... Or are they sophisticated bots?

Or are accounts shared by both sometimes?

Pro/anti-AI, extreme religion or atheism, corporations like microslop or Google, etc...

Post intentionally kept suspiciously short.

(I am still anti-AI anti-datacenter. I am just writing this post for informational purposes, for countering pro-AI arguments and fallacies)

ChatGPT CEO's statement is *half-true* and that is if not counting the exaggeration.

We can run oLLaMa models on our systems, have local single-purpose chatbots, "DeepFilterNoise/RNNoisex" on Linux provides excellent noice cancellation ON DEVICE. And many more.

There ARE small-purpose AI-based photo enhancers on Linux (NOT creating photos BTW)

We know how linus used

Then why do major companies need humongous data centers?

(This feeds itself as more people use AI for silly things, slop generation and vibe coding)

My speculations:

1. Processing the vast data collected for the data market (AI models do learn a lot more of patterns)

2. OTHER AI models for better telemetry handling

3. AI itself is written unskillfully because unlimited resources and thus requires excess hardware

(eg. a year ago or two China or some other asian country made a model run on different GPU models which US/Europe analytics called "unstable". It did that because of limited availability of compute)

4. The administration of the servers is not skillful enough, garbage lies, excess data not trimmed, etc.. (again, resources)

5. For every two topics an AI "learns" it builds pattern references for the connections b/w them.

Now for a highly broad and scope-heavy chatbot like chatGPT or an image generator (which processes text too), the gaps themselves are substantial compared to taking input-output of different AIs by hand.

And the in-between logic is within the AI training for really broad cases.

This is humongous compared to local knowledge base and noise filtering.

5. More-than-required infrastructure. Expensive top-end SSDs and RAM where not needed. Again, "reliability", which is actually a skill issue.

6. "Cold data v/s hot data": After so much collection, obviously there's a sizeable chunk of data which is likely never to be of any use.

But they'll store and retain it nevertheless.

What else?

Basically the other user I share my computer with is able absolute windows loyalist, inconveniences like forced updates are silly compared to major issues like adapting to a "non-standard" KDE desktop environment.

Tolerates all bs by windows.

Deletes my linux partitions often "by mistake" while doing "cleanup" as "linux can't stably exist it deletes itself when windows updates" (he thinks linux must be without the partitions and all for maximum stability)

(CLARIFICATION: Windows updates dom't delete linux HE does)

Has absolutely no idea that things don't work that way.

How do I intentionally seed the installation with more microslop bloat in order to convince him to use linux? Already running the windows 11 upgrade wizard every hour and on login. What else?

Many of you are probably already aware of this. Most of you however aren't, which is why I want to talk about it in a dedicated thread. And no, I am not crazy, paranoid or schizo. I am just massively pissed off about this because I care.

r/archlinux is being plagued by a flood of bot accounts

This has been going on for the past couple of weeks and months. Almost every thread now has a bot account replying to the OP with an LLM-generated comment. The bot accounts and comments always follow the same patterns, which is why they are relatively easy to spot. Once you've understood the pattern, you'll notice them all. Have a look at the bottom of my post for how to identify them.

Even though some of the generated comments can be helpful for specific questions, most of the time they are just AI slop and/or plain wrong, or they have outdated information because of outdated training data.

Either way, I don't think it is good having a Reddit community where there are automated and non-human responses in almost every thread, especially if the thread author or other users are not aware of this. If there is no human interaction on a social-media platform, then what's the point anyway? Talk about the dead internet theory. The future is looking pretty grim. I fucking hate this...

I don't know what the intentions of the bot author(s) are. Are they trying to be helpful, or is this just an attempt of farming Reddit karma on a large amount of Reddit accounts, so they can later on sell them or influence future discussions on the site? Considering that the bots comment in other non-tech subreddits, I don't think the goal is being helpful. Maybe they are just testing the waters...

I also don't know what the moderators of r/archlinux could potentially do about this. Reddit moderation bots for example can automatically delete new threads by checking the author's account and thread contents, but I'm not sure if something like this is possible for individual comments (correct me if I'm wrong). Restricting access to the whole subreddit for new accounts also doesn't seem feasible. I guess this is something that needs to be dealt with by Reddit itself, but I'm not particularly hopeful about this.

How to spot such bot accounts

• Account name

  All accounts share the same naming pattern. Unfortunately though, they are using Reddit's auto-suggestion format, namely Adjective[-_]?Noun[-_]?\d+, which doesn't distinguish them from regular accounts with Reddit-generated names.

• Account age

  All accounts are currently at most 3-4 months old. They therefore don't have accumulated much Reddit karma yet and they also haven't commented a lot yet. The comment spam is unfortunately spread over many different accounts.

• Comments

  It's typical LLM nonsense, structured in 1-3 paragraphs. They will always talk about "typical" or "classic" issues, they will pretend to have the same issue or having solved the same issue, or they pretend to be using the same hardware as the OP. And if the thread is about a new (slop) creation, they will praise the OP for their project and even say they have starred the repo on GitHub, which can be total nonsense.

  The comments are posted always roughly 10 minutes after the OP posted their thread, with an offsetr of a couple of seconds. This offset may be API or token related.

  Don't be fooled about the language that's being used. They will still call you "bro" or use other slang like "fr" and what not. They also sometimes include common spelling or typing mistakes like "teh".

  Also, bots will almost never reply to replies made to their comment, and they will comment only once.

• Subreddit activities

  All of these bot accounts post in the same set of subreddits their author has defined, meaning you will see a subset of them in each comment history. r/archlinux is unfortunately one of the subreddits. They usually only post here once. The other subreddits are in the vast majority of cases completely unrelated to anything Linux or tech. So if a bot suddently talks about deep technical kernel stuff for example while their previous comment history was only about relationship advice (I'm not trying to meme here), then this is already suspicious.

  Here's the list of subreddits you will see 90% of the time:

  • r/careerguidance
  • r/Christianity
  • r/BreakUps
  • r/relationships
  • r/Marriage
  • r/sexandthecity
  • r/confessions
  • r/NBATalk
  • r/ForzaHorizon
  • r/homeassistant

  and some others which appear to be less common (from what I've seen so far).

Examples

• https://www.reddit.com/r/archlinux/comments/1uoaeh8/arch_linux_doesnt_boot_after_the_latest_update/ovqkadb/
• https://www.reddit.com/r/archlinux/comments/1ug6mpa/made_a_cli_based_sudoku/otxfbdr/
• https://www.reddit.com/r/archlinux/comments/1u87v4l/ntfsfix/os60ier/
• https://www.reddit.com/r/archlinux/comments/1ud2qy4/built_a_web_gui_for_aircrackng_because_the/ot8n165/
• https://www.reddit.com/r/archlinux/comments/1u5s84t/detkernel_a_strippeddown_kernel_for_amd_thinkpads/orn4why/
• https://www.reddit.com/r/archlinux/comments/1u4m026/git_client_for_hyprland_arch/ordwpwy/
• https://www.reddit.com/r/archlinux/comments/1ups4q2/discord_notsupportederror_the_element_has_no/ow2ct3p/
• https://www.reddit.com/r/archlinux/comments/1ummqvo/issue_with_the_official_pkgbuilds/ovdbq2k/
• https://www.reddit.com/r/archlinux/comments/1upkp0c/arch_hyprland_is_not_working_properly/ow0wuwv/
• https://www.reddit.com/r/archlinux/comments/1upbxx5/shopping_for_fingerprint_readers/ovywzvu/
• https://www.reddit.com/r/archlinux/comments/1up9xfb/arch_linux_xfce4_amd_is_running_os_instead_of/ovygyr7/
• https://www.reddit.com/r/archlinux/comments/1upsqxt/io_intensive_tasks_brings_computer_to_a_halt/ow2gcwm/

Once again, I am not crazy, paranoid or schizo. I just massively hate the fact that some assholes think that they can turn everything into (more) shit and get away with this. So what I want to do is to at least bring this to wider attention here.