Millions Use It Every Day. It's One of the Internet's Most Important Websites. Bots Are Destroying It, Piece by Piece.

Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. In the years since ChatGPT's debut transformed Silicon Valley into an artificial intelligence hype factory, the internet's most vibrant communities have puzzled over how to adapt to the ensuing deluge of A.I. slop, especially as autogenerated outputs become more sophisticated. Perhaps no platform exemplifies this conundrum better than Reddit, the anonymized message-board network that's been connecting millions of humans across the world for 20 years now--as many users there increasingly wonder whether they are, indeed, still connecting with other humans. Such concerns aren't new, but they've been heightened thanks to a shocking exercise of A.I.-powered manipulation. In late April, the moderation team for the popular subreddit r/ChangeMyView disclosed that researchers from the University of Zurich had conducted an "unauthorized experiment" on community members that "deployed AI-generated comments to study how AI could be used to change views."