AI Is Poisoning Reddit To Promote Products and Game Google With 'Parasite SEO'

An anonymous reader shares a report: For years, people who have found Google search frustrating have been adding 'Reddit' to the end of their search queries. This practice is so common that Google even acknowledged the phenomenon in a post announcing that it will be scraping Reddit posts to train its AI. And so, naturally, there are now services that will poison Reddit threads with AI-generated posts designed to promote products.

A service called ReplyGuy advertises itself as 'the AI that plugs your product on Reddit' and which automatically 'mentions your product in conversations naturally.' Examples on the site show two different Redditors being controlled by AI posting plugs for a text-to-voice product called 'AnySpeech' and a bot writing a long comment about a debt consolidation program called Debt Freedom Now. A video demo shows a dashboard where a user adds the name of their company and URL they want to direct users to. It then auto-suggests keywords that 'help the bot know what types of subreddits and tweets to look for and when to respond.'

Moments later, the dashboard shows how Reply Guy is 'already in the responses' of the comments section of different Reddit posts. 'Many of our responses will get lots of upvotes and will be well-liked.' The creator of the company, Alexander Belogubov, has also posted screenshots of other bot-controlled accounts responding all over Reddit. Begolubov has another startup called 'Stealth Marketing' that also seeks to manipulate the platform by promising to 'turn Reddit into a steady stream of customers for your startup.'

Read more of this story at Slashdot.