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Really? My attempts at eliciting a response have been rather questionable, to say the least. I entered the following question from /r/bigdickproblems into ChatGPT:
This is what GPT had to say:
I asked a number of other dickstretching-related questions from Reddit (btw the actual sub is /r/AJelqForYou) and the responses were so nearly identical that they aren't worth reproducing here. Of course, the AI can be customized to do various things so (I'm assuming; I don't know much about this) one could theoretically train the AI on various subs to get it to generate responses that would be more in line with what's typical of the sub. But let's be honest here—that's a lot of work to run a few low-level scams. The most prominent Reddit bot, Philosopher AI, charges by the response, so I imagine it would get pretty expensive for a scammer to set up dozens or hundreds of phony accounts. This would also take time, as an account that popped up last week and already has 5,000 responses looks about as suspicious as one that popped up yesterday and has zero responses that aren't related to whatever scam I'm worried about getting baited into. So creating a convincing profile would take months if not years of regular posting, all of it timed to match the patterns of a typical Reddit user (the Philosopher AI bot was discovered because the unusually high volume of posts made it stick out like a sore thumb). And you'd have to start this process over for every scam you run because as soon as the first guy realizes he's been had it's only a matter of time before the account gets banned from whatever sub it's selling in.
This is one of those things that could theoretically work, but the orchestration would have to be so elaborate that it isn't worth doing on a mass scale. Scammers generally depend on schemes where the pool of potential marks is huge and the individual payouts are large enough to make the individual time spent on each mark worth it. Plus, Reddit isn't normally used as a marketplace, and @FiveHourMarathon's method of determining genuine accounts is niche enough that most scammers probably aren't worried about it, any more than they're worried about people who would find it implausible that a billionaire needs your help to retrieve hundreds of millions in embargoed funds.
/r/SubSimulatorGPT2?
Those simulations don't inspire a great deal of confidence toward the ability of AI to credibly simulate Reddit comments. Most of the responses are barely grammatical, let alone coherent.
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ChatGPT, after being trained on raw internet, was taught to be a PR-friendly Q&A assistant that writes in coherent sentences and paragraphs, so it responds to out-there questions like that. A language model trained to talk like a degenerate redditor would do so just as easily as chatgpt imitates a HR employee (as you said). But it's much easier than that - a language model trained on 'just the internet -, as most are - does both by default, depending on context, and they had to 'train that out' (and the constant bypasses show that takes some effort).
It's expensive to use the latest models, or commercial services - but give it a few years and costs drop, leading edge models aren't leading edge anymore, old models leak and become cheaper, or equivalents are open sourced, and hundreds of competitors train new models on now-old and cheap hardware.
There are large-scale 'orchestrations' of accounts now that build up post and comment histories over years by reposting images, links, and comments (or substrings of comments) from other users to gain karma and history, to then be sold off. This isn't that much harder. Rdrama already has a rdrama-gpt3 bot that acts like a rdrama troll just by asking an old base GPT3 to be annoying.
There are a lot of reddit subs dedicated towards being marketplaces! There are even loan subs like https://old.reddit.com/r/borrow/ (previously https://old.reddit.com/r/Loans/ i think) where hundreds of dollars are lent out (at 100% annualized interest rates) based on post history. The incentive is there.
Like I said in another comment, I see no evidence we are there yet. No one has examples of Passable Reddit scam bots being created. I don't think it's beyond the horizon of technological possibility, or even current technology! It just isn't happening yet.
Trust is magic, but proxies for what trust degrade quickly once it becomes common knowledge. Goodharts law and all that. That's why for thousands of years maintaining honor required staking your life, the bigger the commitment required the more valuable the result.
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I think the biggest issue, though, is that these scams aren't generally set up to target the most conscientious individuals. I've heard that the reason scam emails are generally written with poor grammar isn't because the scammers can't speak English very well but that it's done intentionally to root out smart people; i.e. the kind of person whose bullshit detector isn't set off by misspellings and poor punctuation isn't the kind of person who likely to ask too many probing questions that would uncover the fact that the setup obviously makes no sense. I don't know if this is true or not (scambait videos I've seen don't suggest that the scammers are particularly good writers), but it's an interesting idea to consider. One thing that is true, though, is that scammers generally don't try too hard to conceal their scams. I've gotten a number of questionable phone calls over the years and when I start probing them or wasting their time they usually just hang up because it's easier to just wait for another mark than to tie up the phone lines trying to convince someone who's unlikely to buy in anyway.
I haven’t heard that theory, just that it doesn’t make any difference how good the English is because the best scam marks are also the ones most likely to say to themselves ‘of course he has bad English, he’s the prince of Nigeria, not England’.
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Yesterday a scammer DMed me out of the blue on [popular website], and I replied. (after getting hundreds of similar dms, was curious). He was advertising an options trading site. The writing and english was uniformly bad, like "I got Trading" "am one of workers of company" "You can withdrawal all of your profits."
I've heard "it's bad english and unconvincing to select for dumb people" many times. But after 10 minutes of dming him a bunch of non-culture-war but offensive rdrama-tier bait, he kept replying with, alternately, mild offense and more promotion for options in broken english. For another 10 minutes I diplomatically asked him to explain the scam, or just his work situation as a spammer, and just got "am NOT" "You have to stop this and tell me if you are willing to invest". For the last ten minutes, I explained to him the 'bad english to root out smart people' theory and asked why he continued to engage given I don't match the scam recipient profile, and at the end of that he finally said "Ok bye." But then I asked him "soo can i have a link to the (totally not a scam) options site though hehe" and got "Thank you you believe it nota scam" in return. I then asked what his native language was, chatted with him in russian using google translate for a few minutes, and then gave up (he was still replying). From some longer messages, his words per minute was noticeable slow - around 30 (although according to google that's the average typing speed in the US). He never ended up sending me the URL.
This isn't really explained by 'poor grammar to root out sophisticated people theory', as the scammer didn't stop talking despite clear trolling & awareness of the scam.
My guess is 'selecting for good marks' theory is overemphasized - it's plausible it's true sometimes, although I'd like to see an actual scammer (i'm sure there are scam forums) claiming they do that, but I'm pretty sure a majority of cases are just genuine bad english, median-or-below intelligence, and poor incentive alignment between the poor call center worker and whoever benefits directly from the scam.
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Someone running ten thousand reddit bot accounts will probably be more sophisticated than a phone scammer, and the sophistication necessary to use gpt-n will drop as years pass. It'll be a while before they can reliably trick most people, but something as simple as 'having a plausible post history in /r/jelqing' is not that hard. Even a non-AI purely repost bot can do that - just copy 2 year old posts and comments to /r/jelqing, delete the ones that get downvoted for not making sense in context, and then when they're aged make a post on /r/borrow asking for $50 for groceries because work is stiffing me on my paycheck!
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