I was banned from Reddit less than 24 hours after creating my first account. I wasn’t trolling or spamming. I was trying to be helpful.
On the advice of a marketing guru, I’d signed up to broaden our social media reach. As I had some time between meetings, I searched and found a couple of threads with Genetec questions (we have been designing, building, and supporting Genetec for over a decade). I quickly shot off brief answers and got into an exchange with a poster that needed some guidance. I thought I had done a good deed for the day.
Then, silence.
A bit later, I received an email: my comment had been automatically removed. The reason? My account had “low karma/account age.” The goal, it said, was to “filter out bad comments and bots.”
The final, ironic sentence of the notification read: “I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically.”
I was a new human user, blocked by an automated gatekeeper designed to stop other bots. A month and several unanswered support tickets later, my account remains flagged and unusable. (check here to see if I’m still banned https://www.reddit.com/user/ChrisMillar_DS/)
My issues on Reddit are not an isolated event.
It mirrors a larger war being waged for our attention, with artificial intelligence on both sides. I’ve recently seen several demos of A.I. tech that focuses on automating…. well, anything. One meeting with a very smart programmer who is automating sales funnel task really blew my mind. I’ve also seen several demos for AI bots to screen marketing and sales outreach. We are headed for a full AI vs AI war where AI talks to AI, vying for a sliver of our time.
Reddit’s bot blocked me, a human, in its effort to block other bots. As we deploy more sophisticated AI to manage the firehose of AI generated content, we may also be limiting new voices into the system. This will have interesting implications for the future of internet content. And as AI content grows exponentially, it will not be long until we can’t find any human generated content through the mass of “AI slop”.
As we rush to build AI to shield us from other AI, who are we really blocking? Probably us.