Algorithm against Algorithm: Reddit is using AI to police the spam AI is creating

Reddit is one of the world’s largest online community platforms, where news and opinions are threshed out in topic-specific forums with a degree of order and depth. Its format makes it susceptible to spam but moderators of its forums are mostly adept at weeding them out. A few monthsago it increased its degree of verification to ensure that humanbeings were the main participants.

With AI, however, there is only so much that human beings can do. Reddit is therefore using AI to solve the problem that AI is creating.It published a blog talking about how it was using largelanguage models to detect patterns that hint at AI making posts. It added, “We are now: Blocking 23 million spam views per day before they ever reach a human user. Catching ~25K net new spammy posts and comments a day.” Exposure to spam had been reduced by 20 per cent in the first three months of the years. Because the forum maintains quality of posts by the votes of its users, as many as 2 million votes were being revoked daily.