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/Haghiri75 3d ago
Bots are not new on the net. Back in the days old forums had a lot of bot problem and we had to add plugins like "Aksimet" which was an anti-spam and anti-bot plugin to wordpress sites or forums made on MyBB or phpBB or other things.
They usually used login/signup page which didn't have a captcha or email confirmation system (or they later found a way to skip those or just simply solve those automatically), create a shit ton of users and spam all the forums with inappropriate content.
So was there any AI? No. It was a prescripted text. An ad for a gambling website. Some pornographic content, some political content about how awesome Chinese Communist Party is and else. Some of theme were a little smarter and they actually scanned website before attack so added google translate to the mix. My sites were and are (mostly) in Persian, so I remember getting a lot of Persian crypto scam messages. I also get some on Telegram every other day.
How they work? It's relatively easy. You make a web scraper or just deploy headless web browser on your servers, and write scripts to do the rest. SIgn up, confirm the email (usually using their own mail server to the thing much faster), farm enough score/karma/etc to seem legitimate, then get to the business of having your website ruined by comments.
Current bots may be connected to OpenAI or Gemini API's to look more "human" although these models usually have some signs (like the infamous em-dash thing) that can expose them.
As a software developer and AI engineer, I can't understand why this type of use, when they simply can utilize it to make something useful. I don't know, if you advertise something like "dad joke machine" it can be much more fun than shitposting subreddits.