An investigation into the AI bots that appeared on Reddit after they partnered with OpenAI.
Key points:
- The bots post a lot of links to products and services which appear to be adverts but are not marked as such.
- Many of these links are for Sam Altman’s World ID.
- Reddit added terms on AI advertising to their business page around the time the bots appeared.
- The bots also make up stories about dead mothers, depression, drug addiction, eating disorders, medical conditions and mental health issues.
We’ll never know the true extent of the dead internet theory, but I do genuinely wonder what percentage of traffic on the internet is either bots or paid agitators.
Half? 75%? More? Less?
We’ll never know, and nowhere is safe.
And with AI being able to generate fairly convincing images, audio, and videos (at first impression, and getting more and more convincing by the day), it will become harder and harder to tell what is genuine and what is a lie.
There was an article back in October 2025 which stated that at that point bot generated internet content had exceeded human generated content.
I keep seeing that’s it’s become more like around 90%, as genuine users are being drowned in the noise thanks to algorithms; it occupies much of the “dark web” as well
Well that’s the end of reddit as we know it. Rip.
First stackoverflow. Next Wikipedia. And now reddit.
lol. the bots were there LONG ago ago
Reddit has always had a bot problem but of the more than 50 AI bot accounts explored for this article all became active after Reddit partnered with OpenAI. Every account found that matched this pattern of behavior became active during this period. e.g. Same links posted by them.
Additionally during this period Reddit added terms on AI advertising to their business page and the partnership announcement with OpenAI says they became an advertising partner.
