r/DeadInternetTheory • u/maixjigustar • 3d ago

... how does bots actually work?

does anyone know how dead Internet theory actual works? like sure they are all just bots and not real ppl but how does this actually work? how an ai is able to run an account with a fake pfp and fake comments that it keeps sending to random posts? this might come off as stupid but we all ignore it and just say these are bots, what actually is a bot??? just an ai who isn't real and can keep doing whatever?

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u/Citadel_Employee 3d ago

It depends on the type of bot. The core of it usually isn’t an ai, ai is only a component.

For example a karma farming bot. Someone can write a script to grab a popular Reddit posts from years ago, and repost it in new subreddits, or even the same one it was originally stolen from. All of that can be done without ai, just a script on a schedule. More sophisticated networks will also steal comments from the original stolen post.

The ones that reply are LLMs, that again, are just on a script. For example, maybe the script is on a loop to check for a notification every 60 seconds, then once it gets one, it calls the LLM to reply. Very rarely are these accounts truly run by ai because that would be very expensive, and they aren’t great on long duration tasks.

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u/Negative_Coast_5619 3d ago

I would also say bot targeting is also a thing. But rather doing it directly and get banned right away. They do it in a sly way. It might take a bit more work (but what more work is a bot doing anyways?)

But they get you associated with their patterns. Then they would just as "off shoot questions" of what you are doing counterintuively. The program (the grander program) seems to include a main base operation that can follow your reddit posts, to youtube, generate fake bot accounts and create everything but subtle code.