Generative AI Bots on Reddit

This Reddit post entitled ‘I watched my mom die while pretending i was asleep’ received 1,800 upvotes and accumulated 118 comments for a total of 8,415 words, most of which were an outpouring of sympathy and empathy directed towards the unfortunate user. None of these heartfelt comments received any replies from the user however and were not even read by them because the user who posted this sorrowful story is an AI bot.

We’ll get on to proving that point in just a moment since it is not hard to do via an inspection of their post history. However first we should probably ask why is an AI bot pretending that they watched their mother die from cancer? Is someone trolling users with this content? What is in it for whoever set up this AI account?

One possible answer is advertising revenue since in between these disturbing posts where the AI bot pretends to have human issues it posts a large number of links to products and services. None of these are labelled as adverts but it is clear they are not genuine human behavior since the AI bot will regularly change its age, job and location to suit the post.

If we were to view this as a real person and build a biography on them we would see from their post on the 25th of March 2025 that their mother died when they were 17 and that they have been living in the family house for ‘about a year’ since she died according to their 8th of April post. Yet on the 30th of April they said they were 30 years old. On the 20th of May they were fired from their job but on the 26th they said they were 28 years old and had been working in digital marketing for five years.

On the 9th of April they were talking about starting work in whatever a ‘scaled agile environment’ is and posted a link to a site selling courses for 800 Euros, yet on the 10th they were in New York and were looking to get their iPhone screen replaced at a local company for $289. On the 22nd of April they were working at a digital marketing agency in Austin, Texas and shared a link to a recruiting company but on the 30th of April they said they got rear ended a week before in South Lake Union, Seattle and shared a link to a personal injury lawyer.

On the 27th of May they were looking to order skirting boards from a website in the United Kingdom which does not ship to the United States and on the 12th of June they said they had recently moved to New York, were missing British snacks and shared a link to a grocery delivery site. However on the 19th of June they were looking to sell a plot of land outside of Athens, Georgia and shared the name of a real estate company which had land available in Kentucky and Tennessee.

Also on the 19th they talked about being under investigation in their Army unit and shared a link to US based criminal defense lawyers that specialize in court-martial cases. Whereas on the 22nd of July they were asking about electric vehicles in India, where they implied they lived. On the 31st they were back in the US where they were looking at a company to renovate their bathroom in Stouffville, California.

So in the space of a few months this user has travelled between New York, Texas, Washington, Britain, Georgia, India and California whilst holding multiple jobs and changing ages at will. It is evident that this is not a real person.

In case it gets removed an archived version of the dead mother post is available here: https://web.archive.org/web/20250330071011/https://www.reddit.com/r/confessions/comments/1jjnqo4/i_watched_my_mom_die_while_pretending_i_was_asleep//

This is just a small sample of the 125 posts and 1,321 comments that this one account has made since it was created on the 24th of August 2024. At least 39 of these posts and 77 of the comments contain links to products and services spread across a random selection of subreddits with no behavior showing interest in any particular topic. The bulk of the rest of the content appears to serve to hide this suspicious link posting behavior and seems to be generated based on the content of the subreddits to which it is posted. A search for ‘mother die’ on the r/confessions subreddit turns up hundreds of posts with these words in the title going back years and so the AI bot appears to have simply emulated this content.

More than 50 accounts engaging in this same behavior were found and examined for this article with tens of thousands of AI generated posts and comments between them. It is not hard to find additional accounts and more are becoming active constantly. The same products and services are linked to across these accounts suggesting that they are run by the same operation.

This article will investigate some of these accounts as well as demonstrating the following:

• The AI bots became active after Reddit partnered with OpenAI.

• Reddit added terms on AI adverts and AI training around this time.

• Even if bots are banned their content still does not get removed.

• The bots are using abandoned accounts that became active again.

• Changes made by Reddit have made it harder to combat the bots.

First let's look at some more of these AI bot accounts to establish their behavior and how problematic it is.

These accounts can easily be shown to be bots via the wild inconsistencies in their posts and high number of links posted. They also have a worrying tendency to concoct stories about depression, mental health and medical conditions.

The following screenshots of AI slop are included here with some inconsistencies highlighted as proof of behavior and are intended for the reader to skim over rather than as captivating literary material to read in full. Brief summaries of the content will follow each screenshot compilation.

Example 1 - u/adamvanderb

As can be seen here this user claims to be 24, 25, in their late 20s, in grade 9 and turned ‘your age’ on October 24th. A lot of these bots post to the r/birthday subreddit to pad out their account with this sort of vapid content but this was the first instance observed where the script obviously failed and posted the variable name ‘your age’ instead of the actual value, not that it can remain consistent about that value anyway. None of the users who replied appeared to notice this oddity and just wished the bot a happy birthday.

The bot also says they live in Croatia, the United States and Saskatoon, Canada. They pretend to require spiral and endocrine surgeries to post links for the Liv Hospital in Turkey and posted a link to the World ID site regarding their ‘orb’ in the context of investing in the UK. Links to both sites are very common in these AI bot posts. Their account was created 8 years ago on the 11th of April 2017 but their first post was on the 22nd of August 2025.

Example 2 - u/goxper

Here is an AI bot encouraging underage gambling by posting a link to a lotto website on a subreddit for teenagers whilst pretending to be a 20 year old divorced high school junior. They also pretend to have asthma, intrusive thoughts, an eating disorder and claim to have Tourette’s to post a link to a medical cannabis website. Some of these posts contain links and appear to be adverts whilst others seem to just be padding out their post history by taking advantage of users who do not realize they are replying to a bot. Again there is a post linking to the World ID site, this time on a Spanish language subreddit. Their account was created 7 years ago on the 29th of June 2018 but their first post was on the 14th of July 2025.

Example 3 - u/lottiexx

This bot pretends to be 28 weeks pregnant and excited about the baby whilst also asking about how they should approach their parents about their decision to be child free. They claim to run a HVAC business in Brisbane, Australia but also attend a beauty clinic in Toronto, Canada. They live in Miami where the noise from the airbnb is bothering them, have recently moved to Turkey where they are looking to find a hospital, is interested in becoming a missionary in Australia and of course has a curiosity about World ID. These posts all contain links to commercial websites, many of which appear commonly across other bot accounts. Their account was created 7 years ago on the 29th of March 2018 but their first post was on the 9th of July 2025.

Example 4 - u/Mikester258

This bot seeks oblivion, has an eating disorder, hates all their life decisions, pretends to have a father with dementia to post a link to a medical cannabis website and rather ironically posts links for tools to trick AI detectors. Note the identical title format of the ‘Just turned 25 today’ post to the ‘Just turned your age today’ post in figure 3 and the high level of engagement the post about them being 47 and re-entering the dating world received. Their account was created 8 years ago on the 12th of June 2017 but their first post was on the 11th of June 2025.

Most of these bots have hidden post histories such that a cursory inspection of their accounts will not reveal that anything is amiss since nothing will be displayed. When this investigation began there was a workaround to this and their comments and posts could still be found by using ‘author:UserName’ in the search bar at the top of the page on Reddit. Another workaround that could be used was to visit their profile and enter a single space in the search bar and hit enter to display every post and comment that included a space. e.g. everything besides one word comments. This could also be used to find the links they were posting by searching ‘https’.

At some point in January or February of 2026 however Reddit patched these workarounds such that it is now impossible to search content from accounts with hidden history on Reddit. Third party search engines would now be needed to investigate these bots requiring much more time with less reliable results since not every post or comment will be indexed.

These bot accounts can be demonstrated to be connected by virtue of the same links that are posted by them, which were found by searching URLs in their history.

Commonalities

Here we see three links to Bollsen earplugs, two Czech language comments including links for Audioteka, two links for a QR code generator, two for Planfix, two for a virtual ruler app and another link for Menalam as was also seen in figure 4. Even with a sample size of only five bot accounts it does not take long to start seeing the same links appearing repeatedly.

Once this pattern of behavior is understood it becomes quite easy to find more bot accounts from simple searches.

A search on the r/birthday subreddit for the ‘Just turned your age’ error as was seen in figure 3 turned up two more posts with this same mistake and a quick search for common URLs posted by those accounts returned posts for World, Bollsen earplugs, Menalam and the same QR code generator that was shown in figure 7.

The AI bot account u/bu11dogsc420 was banned some time after these posts with their last post and comments made on the 22nd of January 2026 however all of the content and links they posted are still online and were searchable before Reddit patched the hidden history search. The posts shown here can still be found by visiting the subreddit they were posted on and searching the title.

In addition to the identical links the same language is seen across these accounts and can be used to identify them.

This tendency to end posts with a ‘let’s share’ sentence that ends in an exclamation mark is not unique to these bots and appears to be something they have picked up from emulating human Redditors. However when phrases like ‘let’s share’ or ‘let’s discuss’ were searched on these bot accounts it invariably turned up results using this language. Other commonalities include mentioning the name of a book or movie in italics whilst looking for recommendations similar to it.

These posts often attract engagement from real people with tens of thousands of comments across Reddit being made in response to AI posts like these. Most users appear oblivious that they are replying to a bot. So at this point it is probably worth breaking down how these bots appear to function such that people may be better equipped to spot them.

Behavior of an AI bot

The content posted by these bot accounts can be broadly divided into three categories:

• Filler comments/posts

• Links

• Questions

Examples of filler posts can be seen in several of the screenshots above with posts about birthdays and personal issues like depression where no links are included in the post. Occasionally these accounts will also post memes or images of things like pets, cakes and painted nails which can clearly be demonstrated to be stolen via a reverse image search. The bulk of the filler however takes place in the comments made by these bots and seems to be the result of feeding post titles, images, text and the name of the subreddit into generative AI in order to formulate a response.

These comments appear to function mostly to disguise the posts containing links and generally attract little engagement. e.g. An image post of 6 week old puppies on the r/puppies subreddit provokes a comment reading ‘So little and cute.’ Does this comment add anything of substance or value? No. Did it burn a ridiculous amount of energy so generative AI could use image recognition to determine it was an image of puppies and generate a suitably banal comment? Probably.

This is happening on a large scale across Reddit and makes up the majority of the content posted by these bots. A photo of a bird prompts a response of ‘birds are so intelligent’, a photo of a rabbit prompts a response of ‘wanna kiss it all day’ and a photo of a sheep lying down prompts a response of ‘laying like a cat’.

For the most part these generic comments go unnoticed except in instances where the image recognition has failed resulting in it saying something so incorrect that people feel the need to downvote and correct it.

Comments

The usernames and avatars of real users have been obfuscated in these screenshots. Whilst these instances of misidentifying a fish, not understanding genetic traits of dogs and getting confused over history are not ultimately catastrophic it is not hard to imagine how this could go wrong. Does whoever is behind these bots care if they start trying to differentiate between edible and toxic plants and mushrooms or offering veterinary and medical advice? Absolutely not - cases of each have been observed across these bot accounts.

Some comments also appear to be triggered by keywords resulting in the bot posting a link to a relevant product or service the same as is seen in their posts. This can become especially problematic when it involves healthcare and addiction issues.

Here we can see the AI bot u/Overall-PrettyManly actively encouraging a user to use ChatGPT for medical advice followed by a post about going to Abbeycare Rehab to quit smoking. The website for this rehab center has information about their alcohol rehab programs as well as their programs for numerous drug addictions but contains no information about smoking and does not appear to offer any nicotine rehabilitation programs.

The bot has also made three comments including a link to the website for this rehab center in response to posts about alcohol addiction made by human users. This link appears commonly across these bot accounts, usually in response to posts about addiction but also in some truly surreal scenarios caused by the bot having no concept of context. Hence in the bottom half of the screenshot we can see that the AI bot account u/Mikester258 has suggested the rehab facility to a user who posted about getting addicted to alcohol in a game called My Summer Car.

Questions

A substantial number of posts made by these bots are questions which do not contain any links. It could be that many of these also just function as filler content or serve to drive engagement for karma farming since questions often result in a lot of responses. However you also find oddly specific questions which look like they’re being used as corporate surveying or potentially content to train generative AI.

For example suppose someone posed a question to generative AI about where to visit in Santorini and it was unable to produce a satisfactory answer that was not just regurgitated from the first three travel websites turned up in a search. If the analytics in the training model showed that it needed to improve its answer to this question how would it collect new data if it has already ingested the entire internet?

By creating new answers. Generative AI can’t do that reliably without just hallucinating and telling people to visit places that do not exist but Redditors can. Some Redditors have been to Santorini and found nice little cafés and beauty spots that they are eager to share with other humans because they want those fellow humans to enjoy it as much as they did.

So the AI bot asks Reddit, 16 human users reply and then the AI sees that the two comments that the humans upvoted the most are recommending Imerovigli and Pygros so it scrapes this data to submit for use training the next model, doesn’t bother replying to any of the human users and then moves on to the next post.

It is unclear if this is the purpose for this behavior but it does seem like a possibility and could be an effective means of training generative AI. Of course it could also result in furthering the spread of AI misinformation by virtue of the tendency for jokes to get upvoted the most on Reddit.

Links

Whilst there are other tells in the previous examples like the similar language used, inconsistencies and weird mistakes it is the link posting behavior which makes these bots so easy to spot. Within a few minutes of inspecting the history of any of these bots it becomes clear that they post an unnaturally high number of links to commercial sites with the same links showing up repeatedly across accounts. Or rather it was very easy to spot the bots this way when it was still possible to search their hidden posts and comments.

Here for instance are a selection of the posts made by these bots which include links to whatever manner of crypto nonsense ‘Banana Gun Pro’ is, which is a very common link to find posted by these bots.

These links never contain referral codes or affiliate links and so it does not appear that these accounts are run by some individual that is just looking to spam links to cash in. The websites being linked to would be able to see traffic coming in from Reddit via the document.referrer HTML property but without an affiliate code in the URL they would not be able to pay referral fees to particular users. As such it does not seem likely that these bots are part of an affiliate marketing scheme.

Some of the links posted by these bots were already common to find on Reddit, e.g. World ID was already being discussed on crypto communities. So there is the potential that bots are including links due to emulating existing posts on the subreddit. However there are also so many obscure websites being posted for which few to no results are found on Reddit outside of posts and comments by these bots.

For example here is the u/IvyDamon AI bot account complaining about all the AI generated posts on Reddit in between making AI generated posts linking to a French language course website and a CD key seller. Searching this language course URL on Reddit (when hidden posts were still returned by a search) returned only five posts and seven comments all but one of which were made by AI bots. Searching the CD key URL returned two posts and six comments with two of the comments made by one human user and all the rest by bots.

These accounts were confirmed to be bots by searching ‘https’ for each of the accounts which returned numerous links they had posted. Within a minute or two of browsing each account several URLs were then spotted that matched links commonly posted by the AI bot accounts. Ten of these bots had their histories hidden whilst two displayed as banned on new Reddit but did not show as banned on old Reddit, more on that later.

It also becomes apparent that accounts are bots by virtue of the large number of links posted and almost every one being commercial. Whereas with human users it would be common to see links posted to other subreddits, other social media sites, YouTube, news articles, Wikipedia pages and other sources which are not selling anything.

Hence it does not seem likely that generative AI trained on Reddit ended up learning to just spontaneously post these commercial links without a reason.

What's Going on with Reddit?

This post is almost like someone asked ChatGPT to define irony. It would seem the generative AI content has gotten so out of hand that even the generative AI accounts are complaining about it.

This post seemed too weird not to archive for posterity so is available here: https://web.archive.org/web/20260129131139/https://www.reddit.com/r/ask/comments/1nmayrf/whats_going_on_with_reddit/

It may be worth attempting to answer the questions this bot has raised regarding whether Reddit is doing anything about it, if Reddit is banning the accounts, why these accounts exist and how their numbers keep growing.

Firstly let’s address where the accounts are coming from. With the exception of u/Overall-PrettyManly which appears to have been created specifically for this purpose and began posting before the rest, every other bot account explored here used to belong to a human.

e.g. u/IvyDamon is a 10 year old account which made one post on the 6th of August 2016 that received no responses and then was completely inactive until it began commenting on the 14th of July 2025 and posting on the 25th of August. The age of these bot accounts varies between 2 and 14 years old but all follow the pattern of having been active only briefly years ago, being abandoned and then suddenly becoming active again around this time.

This activity often indicates an account that has been sold or stolen which is typical of scammers and marketing companies that buy old accounts to use for their campaigns. Whilst these old accounts do make it easier to bypass moderation on subreddits which limit new accounts from posting it is curious to note that none of the bot accounts used had any existing karma - a score on Reddit based on upvotes/downvotes on posts and comments which can be used to filter bad actors out of a community.

For instance u/Piot321 is an 11 year old account with 326 post karma and 4,122 comment karma. They are of course a fan of World ID’s Orb and also like to post stolen images of blueberry cakes, recommend AI vitamin supplements to Epilepsy sufferers, have gone to the Liv Hospital in Turkey several times for full body scans, have worked in marketing in the Midwest for 4 years where they use AI headshot tools and have an interest in SEO tools in India.

They are an orphaned 19 year old female that is permanently tired because they have an 18 month old and a 3 month old to take care of. They inherited $5 million from their grandfather and question whether they should donate it all to their evil stepsister’s vegan cat sanctuary but at least they have finally found some ear plugs that help stop the sensory overload from autism when they are in public.

It’s tempting to say you can’t make this stuff up but clearly this bot did. The last two posts and the comment shown here are the highest upvoted on their account. One of them is suggesting Bollsen earplugs for autistic women whilst the other is posted on the satirical subreddit r/AmITheAngel which is intended to poke fun at the content of r/AITAH. The bot is therefore just emulating the fictional content found on this subreddit however the other subreddits shown here are not satirical so when it emulates the content there it is undoubtedly deceiving people. To the bot it is all the same.

The account was created on the 31st of July 2015 and made four comments on the r/DrawForMe subreddit offering to fulfill people’s requests to draw things for around $10-15. The time between the creation of the account and the final comment was 3 hours 22 minutes and 18 seconds and tallying up the current karma score shows that there were no highly upvoted posts that got deleted. In other words the account had no karma when the AI took over.

The internet sure was a much simpler place when drawings of cats sat on ice cubes (?) had to be produced by humans rather than excreted out by generative AI.

After these four comments the account then became entirely inactive until the 24th of June 2025 when it started making AI generated comments and posts but it did not post any links for 40 days. The activity before this appears to have been farming karma in order to enable it to post links without getting caught by automoderator settings.

This example typifies these bots - old accounts with no history that all suddenly became active again and started posting AI generated content.

This could be a instance of an account that was sold and then purchased for this use but from a brief look at account selling sites an account from 2015 with no karma would cost $185 whereas they could have got one from 2022 with no karma for $5.55 or one from 2017 with 500+ karma for $37. The latter would be far more suitable for this role as it would have enabled the account to be used for posting links much quicker.

There would really be no benefit in spending more for an 11 year old account with no karma so if the purpose is posting links for profit why not use cheaper accounts? Subsequently it must be questioned whether someone is actually buying these accounts or if there is another explanation for why they are becoming active again.

The Reddit user agreement says:

If you stop using the Services without deleting your Account, your Account may be deactivated due to prolonged inactivity.

This clause does not seem to be actively enforced however given the age and inactivity of these accounts.

Having now excessively demonstrated how these AI bots behave it is as this point that it should be noted that all of these accounts only became active after Reddit partnered with OpenAI.

Reddit partners with OpenAI

In April 2023 Reddit announced that access to its API would no longer be freely available preventing companies from crawling the data without paying a fee. Reddit’s initial public offering was on the 20th of March 2024 and then on the 16th of May 2024 they announced a partnership with OpenAI. The CEO of OpenAI, Sam Altman was on the Reddit board of directors before this but stepped down on the 10th of January 2022, though remains one of Reddit’s biggest shareholders.

To try and decode the corporate speak here, in the first bullet point when they say ‘bring Reddit content to ChatGPT’ they mean use every Reddit user’s posts and comments to train ChatGPT. Reddit’s user agreement says as much itself.

When Your Content is created with or submitted to the Services, you grant us a worldwide, royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive, transferable, and sublicensable license to use, copy, modify, adapt, prepare derivative works of, distribute, store, perform, and display Your Content and any name, username, voice, or likeness provided in connection with Your Content in all media formats and channels now known or later developed anywhere in the world. This license includes the right for us to make Your Content available for syndication, broadcast, distribution, or publication by other companies, organizations, or individuals who partner with Reddit. For example, this license includes the right to use Your Content to train AI and machine learning models, as further described in our Public Content Policy. You also agree that we may remove metadata associated with Your Content, and you irrevocably waive any claims and assertions of moral rights or attribution with respect to Your Content.

As can be seen via the Internet Archive the line regarding training AI and machine learning was added to the user agreement on the 16th of August 2025 and can be seen here on the current version of the page: https://redditinc.com/policies/user-agreement.

The ‘AI-powered features’ mentioned in the second bullet point include an ‘ask’ button which uses generative AI to search Reddit and produce answers to questions based on responses in previous posts.

The third bullet point in figure 18 is the interesting one. When they say that ‘OpenAI will become a Reddit advertising partner’ what precisely do they mean?

It is true that without an adblocker many of the adverts on Reddit are now for ChatGPT and other AI products. Dozens of such clearly labelled adverts were cropped out from beneath posts whilst compiling these screenshots. Are these the adverts they are referring to or is there another form of advertising being used?

Terms regarding AI generated adverts appear on Reddit’s business site at: https://business.reddithelp.com/s/article/Reddit-Advertising-Services-Agreement

The Internet Archive seems unable to load these pages but the first snapshot it has is from the 8th of July 2025 whilst archive.ph had (prior to being shut down) one from the 9th of July which did load, contained the same content and gave the last revision date as July 7th 2025.

These terms do not specify where or how generated adverts will be delivered or even what they look like though are quick to cover their bases pointing out the potential for problems:

Reddit is not responsible for any output, content, or other materials generated or produced by AI Features, including the Generated Content. Generated Content is generated through machine learning processes and is not tested, verified, endorsed, or guaranteed to be accurate, complete, or current by Reddit. You should independently review and verify all Generated Content as to appropriateness for your campaigns, including before publishing or making any Generated Content publicly available.

Another change that was made around this time on the 3rd of June 2025 was enabling users to hide their post history, an option which most of these AI bots have opted into and which makes them much harder to detect. Some of the bots did not have hidden histories when initially found and then switched it on later whereas others initially had hidden histories and then later turned off that setting. Instances of both were observed on several accounts though it is unclear why these accounts are making these changes.

Before this change there was no option to hide anything which enabled anyone to check on anyone. This was essential for maintaining functional communities that were free from spam bots, trolls and bad actors. You could see if someone was lying or trolling based on what they had said in previous comments and see if a user had a tendency to attack people over particular issues suggesting an ulterior motive such as a state-sponsored troll. This also made it easy for moderators to detect and ban spam bots just by looking at their history. e.g. The t-shirt spam bots that have run rampant on Reddit for years were relatively simple to detect and usually got banned after their first post. So it is not surprising that this announcement was broadly criticized by users who pointed out all of these issues and more.

Another change that was made at some point during this period was to the report page. This is different to the report button on posts and could be used to report accounts directly to Reddit admins. Unlike moderators who are just community volunteers that only have power within their communities, admins are employed by Reddit and as such can ban accounts or remove their content sitewide.

The Reddit report page used to enable reporting multiple accounts at once and had a text box that could be used to provide information for admins to investigate. The old tool enabled reporting dozens of bot accounts at once with an explanation of what they were doing. The new report tool doesn’t let you enter any text and is limited to reporting one user at a time. As a result reporting these numerous AI bot accounts would now require more time and without an explanation may not be effective.

At this point it may be necessary to review the timeline of events to see how this fits together and populate it with the date of the first post containing a suspicious URL from some of these AI bot accounts.

Timeline

• 14th of March 2023 - ChatGPT-4 released

• 20th of March 2024 - Reddit goes public

• 16th of May 2024 - Reddit partners with OpenAI

• 24th of August 2024 - u/Overall-PrettyManly bot account created

• 3rd of September 2024 - First comment from u/Overall-PrettyManly

• 26th of September 2024 - First URL comment from u/Overall-PrettyManly

• 5th of March 2025 - First post from u/Overall-PrettyManly

• 18th of March 2025 - First URL post from u/Overall-PrettyManly

• 3rd of June 2025 - Reddit announces new ability to hide post history

• 11th of June 2025 - First post from u/Mikester258

• 19th of June 2025 - First URL post from u/guide71

• 7th of July 2025 - Reddit Advertising Services Agreement including AI created

• 9th of July 2025 - First post from u/lottiexx

• 14th of July 2025 - First post from u/goxper

• 28th of July 2025 - First URL post from u/btwife_4k

• 3rd of August 2025 - First URL post from u/lottiexx

• 6th of August 2025 - First URL post from u/Mikester258

• 7th of August 2025 - ChatGPT-5 released

• 10th of August 2025 - First URL post from u/goxper

• 16th of August 2025 - Reddit user agreement updated to include AI

• 22nd of August 2025 - First post/URL post from u/adamvanderb

• 1st of September 2025 - First URL post from u/Historical-Hand8091

• 3rd of September 2025 - First URL post from u/brandondecker93

• 10th of September 2025 - First URL post from u/IvyDamon

• 23rd of September 2025 - First URL post from u/bu11dogsc420

• 29th of September 2025 - First URL post from u/greatdane511

• 6th of October 2025 - Last post from u/Overall-PrettyManly

Of the more than 50 AI bot accounts examined which match this pattern of behavior all became active during this period with more accounts regularly becoming active up to the present. Many of these bots made posts and comments that did not contain URLs for a month or so before posting links whilst others posted links right away.

Is Reddit Banning the Bots?

The majority of bots encountered here have not been banned and are still posting whereas some others went dormant despite not being banned. A few of the accounts found here were already banned at the time of discovery, though this fact was not immediately obvious because their posts were all left online. Additionally there is something unusual going on with some of these banned accounts when they are viewed on old Reddit vs on new Reddit.

The AI bot accounts u/trapqueen67567 and u/may907 were found by searching the language course link shown in figure 14. On new Reddit (which is the default) both accounts displayed as banned however on old Reddit no ban message was displayed. With u/may907 all their content remained visible on their profile on old Reddit which was also observed with the banned bot account u/brandondecker93.

Whereas the banned bot accounts u/trapqueen67567, u/PuzzleheadedMud1032 and u/PHEMEL showed as banned on new Reddit but on old Reddit only displayed ‘there doesn’t seem to be anything here’ which is the same as how accounts with hidden history display on old Reddit. This was confirmed five days after taking the screenshots for u/trapqueen67567 in figure 21 when the account was checked again and found to no longer be banned on new Reddit and instead showed the message about hidden history. Presumably the ban for this account was only temporary for some reason whereas for the other banned bots the bans do remain in place. This account was checked again in February 2026 at which point it had switched off hidden history and was regularly posting and commenting.

If further ‘proof of bot’ were needed this screenshot also shows u/may907 posting the skirting board link seen in figure 2 and encouraging stem cell treatment for autism with a link to the Liv Hospital in Turkey as seen in numerous previous screenshots. Meanwhile u/trapqueen67567 is pretending to have tinnitus to post links to the Bollsen earplugs seen in figure 7, posting links to the Menalam supplement app and responding to a post by a gambling addict seeking help with a link to a casino website.

The casino website posted lists non-UK casinos, that is online casinos which operate outside of UK jurisdiction. Presumably the bot was confused by the URL reading ‘non-ukcasinos’ and interpreted it as not being a casino? Regardless the outcome was still a bot responding to a gambling addict with a website which encourages gambling. This sure seems like behavior which should warrant a permanent ban and removal of content rather than just a temporary ban.

This screenshot shows the normal messages that should be displayed on old Reddit when an account is shadowbanned or banned. Both u/BlastarBanshee and u/guide71 are AI bot accounts which had not been banned at the time of discovery but were banned later. The message displayed for u/BlastarBanshee is consistent with a shadowban and all their content was removed such that it no longer appears in searches whereas every other bot account that was banned either showed the suspended message or the glitches in figure 21. In either case all their content was still left online meaning the suspicious links they posted are all still out there directing users to products and services.

Since this behavior of showing as banned on new Reddit but not on old had not been observed before this was investigated further to see if it was only present on these bot accounts. More than 50 banned accounts were found by browsing through old posts and opening the profiles of all the users. Additionally some accounts where checked that were known to be banned having recently been reported as spam. When banned accounts were found in new Reddit they were then opened in old Reddit in a different browser to compare.

Two banned accounts were found that displayed this unusual behavior of not displaying as banned on old Reddit. One of them was a 5 year old account that last commented a year ago and the other a 12 year old account that last commented 4 years ago. These accounts seem to have been genuine users and so it appears that this may just be a glitch where some old accounts do not display as banned on old Reddit for some unknown reason.

However this still suggests that the action Reddit has taken is insufficient. The shadowban and removal of content for u/BlastarBanshee is the appropriate response that should be used and is what is typically seen for spam bots. Whereas banning an account but leaving all the problematic links they posted online achieves nothing considering how many new bots are constantly becoming active. Failing to investigate further and finding other accounts that are all posting the same links likewise suggests a lack of appropriate action being taken.

Inconsistencies

• Some AI bots do not appear to get banned like normal users do.

• Bot content does not seem to get removed by Reddit.

• The bots post high numbers of links to products and services.

• The URLs never contain affiliate codes or tracking links.

• The AI bots are using reactivated old accounts with no karma.

• Reddit tweaked their user agreement to enable training AI.

• Reddit advertising terms mention AI generated adverts.

• Reddit enabled accounts to hide their activity.

• Reddit reduced the functionality of the report tool.

• The AI bots became active after Reddit partnered with OpenAI.

• The AI bots are posting links for World ID, which shares a founder with OpenAI.

• The founder of OpenAI and World has a stake in Reddit.

World ID

Sam Altman’s company World is running an advert on YouTube entitled ‘Human and You Know It’. The advert features a jingle sung to the tune of ‘If You’re Happy and You Know It’ set to clips of various human achievements throughout history. The core premise of the advert is that it is getting harder to tell whether someone online is human or AI. Hence their solution to this issue is to use the not at all ominously named ‘Orb’ to scan your biometrics in order to create a digital ID. The advert ends with a woman submitting to be scanned by the orb followed by the phrase ‘In a world of AI, be human’.

World.org calls itself ‘The real human network’ and says in their introductory statement ‘Universal proof of human, finance and connection for every human.’ The project is centered around the World ID concept which they state is ‘an anonymous proof of human for the age of AI’ and also includes a digital token on a blockchain.

If World ID is intended to stop abusive AI use online then why are so many AI bots posting so many links for it?

If we revisit the history of the first bot we explored here, u/Overall-PrettyManly it quickly becomes apparent that they make a lot of posts and comments about World ID, when they are not too busy making up stories about watching their mother die. World.org is the most frequently posted link by this bot account and several others and is seen in the history of most of the bots.

Again it should be reiterated that these links do not contain any affiliate codes and so there would be no immediate means for an individual to profit from posting these links. The crypto angle of World might create an incentive for people to boost it in order to raise the price of the coin however these posts about World on crypto communities are almost always met with scorn and dismay by users.

This post by the AI bot account u/guide71 typifies the reaction to these posts on crypto communities. The post is downvoted, as is anyone who tries to argue in favor of World and the top response is just ‘No’. In other examples this is usually preceded with a suitable expletive.

As such it appears that if these bots are trying to encourage people to use World ID they are doing a poor job at it and the crypto community is not buying it. Such posts are not limited to these communities however.

Here are some more posts about World from the the AI bot account u/IvyDamon that we saw asking ‘What’s going on with reddit?’ in figures 14 and 15. On the 15th of October it was posting on the r/NoStupidQuestions subreddit about how it had just come across World, then on the 20th it was bullish about it on a crypto community but then on the 6th of November it was asking r/Harvard what the weird orb in the yard was.

Similar posts about World are seen on almost all of these bot accounts as has already been shown with u/adamvanderb in figure 3, u/goxper in figure 4, u/lottiexx in figure 5, u/Piot321 in figure 16 and u/Overall-PrettyManly in figure 24.

Is World.org aware that AI bots are posting links for it all over Reddit? Does this not seem rather ironic and concerning? Especially considering that their mission statement reads:

World is being built so every human benefits from the age of AI.

Distinguish between humans and AI online. Access universally inclusive finance. And connect with other real humans. It’s free to join and designed to be owned by everyone.

Conclusion

As has been exhaustively demonstrated here through a frankly excessive number of screenshots, AI bots are posting a lot of links to products and services on Reddit as well as a lot of disturbing content about dead mothers, depression, eating disorders and every other condition you can think of for which a subreddit exists. There are several inconsistencies with these bot accounts which seem unusual, numerous changes made by Reddit have resulted in making it harder to detect these bots and all of this occurred at around the same time that Reddit added terms on AI adverts to this business website.

For now it is left to the reader to conclude who might be behind the bots based on the information that has been presented thus far. A follow up investigation with more information was intended and started upon however since Reddit has excluded hidden posts from search results it is now unclear if this can continue since most of these bots hide their history. Search engines do turn up some results from these bots but are not reliable enough to build a complete picture as some content does not appear in searches.

Until then there now follows a brief rant about digital ID, since it is the unusual content from World ID which initially sparked this deep dive. Regardless of who is responsible the pertinent question is: if social media companies actually do want to combat this behavior how are they going to go about it?

The answer which seems obvious is digital ID - everything you do and say online being connected to your identity and tracked at all times. This appears to be the dystopia we are rapidly moving towards and the activity of these bots makes that outcome more likely given the current state of the world.

On the 25th of July 2025 the UK brought in age verification laws which have effectively resulted in mass censorship of social media to the point where even a seemingly innocuous subreddit like r/Healthadvice is not available without verifying your age or using a VPN (which the UK has also discussed banning). Then on the 26th of September the UK announced it would be introducing digital ID.

On the 26th of November 2025 the European parliament discussed banning social media for under 16s and President Macron later called for bans for under 15s to be in place by September of 2026. This comes in the wake of the under 16 social media ban in Australia on the 10th of December 2025 and similar laws which have come into force across numerous states in America between 2023 and 2025.

Whilst the potential for social media to harm children seems undeniable the only viable way to enforce these laws is by checking the ID of everyone who posts on social media. As such it is hard not to see this legislation as an overt attempt to push digital ID for everyone. This then opens the doors to complete censorship and tracking of everything online.

What we are already seeing with AI generated content online looks like it could well be the death of social media as we know it. After all what is the point in taking the time to engage with a user and respond to them seriously when there is every chance they are just a generative AI bot?

Given time communities may be able to adapt to this as they have done before with bots and trolls by verifying trusted users and making the community aware of how to spot bad actors. Digital ID schemes like World ID are the nuclear option and nothing more than a different cause of death for the internet. Even if it actually did stop the bots it would come at the cost of entirely destroying free speech online.

Will people feel comfortable criticizing a dictator, condemning a genocide or blowing the whistle on a corrupt corporation when they know that everything they post is connected to their ID?

In March 2025 Reddit started sending warnings to users just for upvoting content that they deemed violent. Meanwhile the UK and Australia have arrested people for posting content on Twitter which they deemed to be violent or problematic, including journalists posting pro-Palestine news content.

In 2020 America exploded into protest because George Floyd was horrifically asphyxiated by a police officer over the course of 9 agonizing minutes. Everyone saw the video and was justifiably outraged. If it happened today the entire scene would have been blurred out, people would be talking about how he was ‘unalived’ and you might get a warning just for upvoting the video to spread awareness.

This is what we have seen in the aftermath of the killings of Renée Good and Alex Pretti - news agencies cutting the footage before anything happens and uncensored content being removed from social media. Such actions make the official narrative by the administration far more effective and the outrage from the public more muted when they have not experienced the horror of personally seeing it.

Once everything online is connected to your identity would people even risk sharing such content, upvoting it or engaging with it in any way?

If Reddit calls itself ‘the heart of the internet’ then that heart is now filled with parasitic worms consuming it from within. Every AI generated lie about a dead parent, medical condition or addiction is one more bite towards a certain demise - or to briefly drop the melodramatic metaphor, it is an erosion of the trust users have that they are engaging with other humans which is the only reason to use the platform.

AI may not be the death of the entire internet but it is the parasite that will tear through the host until they desperately submit to any miraculous cure-all that offers the slightest promise of relief.

Digital ID is not that cure-all but rather a poison-laced snake oil; it may destroy the parasite but only by virtue of killing the host.

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