Serious question: If there are so many LLMs on online forums, who is doing it? Is it just 1000s of research students or something more nefarious? Is it AI businesses building up evidence that their output is as highly scored as humans therefore "buy our software"?

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thegrim33 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

We're in the middle of an active cold war where countries are trying to manipulate the citizens of rival countries to destroy their civilization without having to fire a single bullet. Anonymous, over the internet mass manipulation, all for some minimal electricity cost.

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thesuitonym 3 hours ago | parent [-]

That's definitely the most insidious use, but I think the larger portion is advertisers and karma farmers (who later sell to advertisers).

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dylan604 2 hours ago | parent [-]

https://www.npr.org/2024/09/05/nx-s1-5100829/russia-election...

If Russia is willing to spend cash like that, then of course they're willing to run massive bot farms to pollute any forums they can. I'd be shocked if the US was not doing the same in any way they can. You have to ask why Trump killed Radio Free America as well when it was clearly not an big expense.

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pessimizer 2 hours ago | parent [-]

> Trump killed Radio Free America as well

Not sure how this relates to the subject in a direct way. Radio Free America was a outlet explicitly created and utilized to spread US propaganda, but kinda sorta barely disguised as a journalistic enterprise (not really, if you were listening to RFA you knew what you were listening to.) Shutting it down seems to be a counterpoint to all of the covert participation of US intelligence on the web which has done nothing but escalate.

	▲	dylan604 39 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		It was a head scratching decision that few believe was for the stated reason. Other countries are ramping up their propaganda arms while Trump shut down part of the US'. The reasoning was cost, but that doesn't make a lot of sense in the grand scheme of things. Foil hat types would easily believe it was the puppet doing the bidding of the one that pulls the strings. RFA has been a thorn in despots' side for a long time.

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afavour an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It's very common for folks to search Reddit to find reviews of products etc. these days. If you can have a bot account post a fake review of how awesome your product us, and have that upvoted, it can pay huge dividends.

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simsla 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Established accounts are worth money, often for scamming/propaganda.

Not too dissimilar to people bot-leveling in MMOs to the sell the accounts.

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mrhottakes 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

People like the above poster who are "just running an experiment" or "trying something for fun" who then wonder why online communities are full of AI now.

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Rebelgecko 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Lots of marketing. Not even AI business, just regular consumer crap. They realized that blatantly spamming their product looks bad, so they orchestrate multiple accounts to look more organic. And people actually engage with it.

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fidotron 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

HN has historically been gamed for visibility. The stakes for doing this can be quite high if you can pull it off.

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KajMagnus 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

My impression is that they're sometimes unemployed people or students hoping to create a popular open source project, and use it to find a job.

They aren't going to care about any of the advice in the article about not posting slop -- finding a job is (of course?) more important to them.

Can't really say they are doing anything wrong, maybe I too would have? ... Just that large scale, doesn't work

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pessimizer 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

If you farm a fleet of good accounts, you control the discourse. On HN, you could boost whatever you're trying to push, and downvote or flagkill whoever objects.

There are obvious benefits to controlling public discourse, right? Even if it's just to support some project you're working on.

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tardedmeme 2 hours ago | parent [-]

There are certain topics that seem to get instantly flag-killed unusually often. IPv6 is one.

	▲	traderj0e an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I've seen a lot of ipv6 wars here without flagkilling happening
	▲	pessimizer 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		I've been more disturbed by comments that were flagkilled just for being wrongthink, not because they were rude or not well argued. I've also seen a lot less of those flagkills over the last 6 months, which makes me feel like there were some fake accounts that got caught and culled.