Oh No, This Startup Is Utilizing AI Brokers to Flood Reddit With Advertising Slop

The web is turning into flooded with AI-generated content material, and one of many few locations the place people can nonetheless go to speak with different people has been Reddit.

Sadly, a brand new advertising automation startup known as Astral desires to vary that and convey LinkedIn-tier advertising slop to the dialogue board website. The startup’s founder Savannah Feder published a video on X Thursday demonstrating how utilizing AI brokers in a browser window, her device can navigate by way of Reddit and mechanically write feedback selling no matter it’s a marketer is perhaps attempting to promote.

Like different computer-use brokers lately demoed by the likes of Anthropic and Google, Astral can take over a neighborhood browser and full duties by first capturing screenshots of a web page and analyzing them utilizing AI to determine what to do subsequent based mostly on a immediate, finally sending instructions again to the mouse. “Look how Astral finds the proper locations to click on,” Feder says because the bot begins logging into Reddit. “It’s actually actually fascinating to see the way it navigates the location similar to a human would.” The video goes on to point out how the bot navigates to the subreddit /r/productmanagement, searches for posts about “person analysis,” after which “writes a reply that promotes the product with out sounding too sales-y.”

The dream for these bots is that they are going to assist grandma navigate her laptop by herself, not create advertising automation spambots that flood social media. Actually, this must be why so many individuals present disdain for AI: It’s being deployed by the worst folks you realize.

Saying Astral – an AI marketer that works 24/7 to develop your startup.

Astral navigates web sites, creates content material, and runs advertising throughout socials.

Watch Astral automate Reddit in real-time: pic.twitter.com/XbpKt0lZqd

— Savannah (@SavannahFeder) January 9, 2025

This ought to be additional proof that AI is about to create a sea of undifferentiated mediocrity, and bland content material so far as the attention can see. Anybody who has spent sufficient time on LinkedIn or X has seen generic, soulless posts which are clearly written with AI, and now somebody has excitedly constructed a device to convey this to Reddit. Think about being pleased with this, like being pleased with peeing in somebody’s pool.

What is probably most disheartening is that the folks creating instruments like Astral genuinely appear to imagine AI and people are interchangeable, and that machine will likely be much better than human can ever be.

Extremely, after somebody requested Feder why Astral makes use of an AI agent operating in a neighborhood browser slightly than a Reddit API, she explains that’s as a result of Reddit and different social media websites prohibit utilizing their APIs for automated duties. There’s a motive for that: As a result of it’s spammy and annoying. She even excitedly explains to a different person who the bot can efficiently bypass CAPTCHAs.

Alexis Ohanian, a co-founder of Reddit, replied to the post with a GIF of Patrick from SpongeBob beginning to cry.

Will probably be attention-grabbing to see how platforms like Reddit implement anti-bot measures to fight the slop.