Reddit turns to AI for content cleanup

Reddit is using AI to combat spam and harmful content, reporting it blocks 23 million spam views daily and reduced user exposure to spam by 20% from January to March. The company employs large language models to detect coordinated patterns and curb hate speech, aiming to protect authentic community content amid rising AI-generated slop.

AI gave the internet a new plague: endless, low-quality content known as "AI slop." Now Reddit is betting that the same technology can clean things up. Reddit has been reinforcing its automated spam detection tools with AI — and is seeing results. On Monday, the company shared https://redditinc.com/news/how-were-keeping-reddit-real-and-safe-in-the-ai-era that it blocks 23 million spam views per day before they reach users, catching 25,000 net new "spammy posts and comments" daily, and revoking nearly 2 million inauthentic votes per day. From January to March, the company says users' exposure to spam dropped by 20 percent. Large language models are employed to detect suspicious behavior through "highly subtle, coordinated patterns" that older detectors may have missed, Reddit said. AI is also being used on the platform to curb hate and violence in English content, with the automated system detecting harmful content in under five seconds and with greater accuracy. These measures aim to protect the authentic, human-made, community-based content that Reddit is known for, at a time when AI bots and content are filtering through nearly every platform and community. Beyond creating an unpleasant experience for users, AI-generated content is easy to spot, lazy, and altogether unhelpful, and it also poses real threats of spreading misinformation. For instance, recent research https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1134423 from the University of Oxford and the University of Potsdam found that when used to write or create social media posts, LLMs altered the meaning of posts on contested topics, introducing bias even when explicitly told to preserve the original meaning. Taken together, the study found that these small changes could accumulate to affect overall public opinion. Our Deeper View The most interesting part of the Oxford study was that the researchers recreated Grok's "explain this post" feature, which is intended as a positive tool that provides users with more context about what they're reading. However, the study found that the simulated system was more supportive of "pro-life" leaning posts than "pro-choice" when discussing abortion issues, which could steer collective opinion over time. This highlights not only the risk of using AI to solve a problem AI itself created, but also how much impact even the slightest bias can have in the long run. Reddit holds a unique position in this AI content machine. While it uses AI to combat spam on the platform, it also has several lucrative deals with AI companies that license its content to train AI models, potentially perpetuating the issue.