In Reddit’s “Family Medicine” subreddit, a moderator noticed earlier this week that the AI-powered “Reddit Answers” was automatically responding to posters, typically with “something related to what was posted.” Unfortunately, that moderator says, Reddit Answers "has been spreading grossly dangerous misinformation."And yet Reddit’s moderators “cannot disable this feature.”
I have a serious question. Who thought Reddit Answers was a good idea? What’s the actual benefit to the company? Did they get a ton of venture capital funding to build it, or are they trying to jump on the AI hype, or what? Does anyone actually know?
One of the biggest reasons, I think, for Reddit’s popularity in the 2010s was that its comment threads often had advice and information and product recommendations from real people - as opposed to, say, Amazon reviews, which were full of bots even back then. A ton of people still search for topics on Google using the site:reddit.com modifier, because searching Reddit bypasses all the SEO and AI-created spam sites that dominate Google results, and Reddit is still one of the biggest open source databases of actual human advice and conversation.
And Reddit has decided to dilute its most valuable contribution to the internet with AI spambots?
It’s some sort of stage 3 enshittification, obviously - cannibalizing its core use case for short term profit - but I’m morbidly curious who thought this was a good idea and why.