AI Startup Overruns Reddit With Spam: Is This The End Of Authentic Online Forums?

Reddit could soon be flooded with an overwhelming wave of AI-powered marketing campaigns, thanks to Astral, a tech startup with ambitious plans.

Astral boldly positions itself as a '24/7 AI startup that works to grow your business,' relentlessly promoting any brand, at any time. In a recent demonstration shared on X (formerly Twitter) and captured by Gizmodo, Astral's founder, Savannah Feder, showcased how the system can rapidly flood Reddit with ads disguised as genuine user posts.

AI-Driven Spam: The Reddit Invasion

The ads are cleverly crafted to seamlessly blend into real conversations, even going so far as to include a fabricated disclaimer to add a layer of legitimacy. In one example, the software responded to a user's question about improving customer feedback collection with, "Been using Probe lately to run automated interviews with users (disclosure: currently working with them)."

'It's actually helped me be more objective since the AI handles the conversations and summarises patterns,' it states. Feder intentionally designed Astral as an AI agent to circumvent Reddit's API restrictions, specifically to block the spam the founder aims to leverage to build her tech empire.

Astral's Ambitious And Alarming Plan

Astral's primary focus isn't accessibility or simplifying tasks but rather finding new ways to market products. For many, simply adding 'Reddit' to the end of a search query has become the only reliable way to avoid the flood of AI-generated content that Google increasingly serves up.

Like computer-use agents recently showcased by companies like Anthropic and Google, Astral can control a local browser. It achieves this by capturing webpage screenshots, analysing them with AI to determine the next steps based on user prompts, and then issuing commands to the mouse.

'Look how Astral finds the right places to click,' Feder says as the bot begins the Reddit login process. 'It's honestly really fascinating to see how it navigates the site just like a human would.'

The video then demonstrates the bot's ability to navigate to the subreddit /r/productmanagement, search for posts related to 'user research,' and subsequently compose a response that subtly promotes the product while maintaining a conversational tone.

The End Of Organic Discussion?

Thanks to companies like Astral and similar AI-driven platforms, Reddit could soon face an influx of automated marketing posts. This surge in AI-generated content is expected to persist beyond the initial wave, as these AI applications tend to be highly cost-effective, potentially making them a long-term tool for marketers.

'What is perhaps most disheartening is that the people creating tools like Astral genuinely seem to believe AI and humans are interchangeable, and that machine will be far better than human can ever be,' Gizmodo's business and technology reporter Thomas Maxwell noted.

Alexis Ohanian, a Reddit co-founder, responded to Feder's X post with a GIF of Patrick from SpongeBob SquarePants starting to cry. This humorous response likely reflects Ohanian's concern about the potential impact of AI-powered spam on the platform he co-founded.

It will be interesting to see how platforms like Reddit implement anti-bot measures to combat this emerging threat and preserve the authenticity of their communities.