It is easier than ever for criminals to dump spam over the Internet as powerful large language models (LLMs) become easily accessible. If you’ve spent even ten minutes on the internet in the last few years, you’ll know that this means that spam and bot content have become an even bigger problem than they already were.

Reddit says it developed tools with LLM to reduce spam, much of which was created with LLM in the first place. It’s a bit ironic, but in the age of AI, platforms have no choice but to fight fire with fire. According to the platform, Reddit blocks 23 million spam views per day and detects around 25,000 new spam posts and comments each day.

Social platforms have been creating automated spam reduction tools for years, but Reddit says these updated tools are detecting spam at a higher rate.

“We leverage LLMs to detect very subtle, coordinated patterns of false behavior and artificial hype that older systems once missed,” says a Reddit blog post. The company claims it reduced users’ exposure to spam by 20% from January to March compared to the previous three months.

Platforms like YouTube, Meta, and Instagram allow users to post AI-generated content as long as they disclose it, and TikTok goes so far as to allow users to toggle how much AI-generated content they want to see.

If platforms can more quickly detect AI-generated content, that also means they have the potential to more quickly report violating content like hate speech. But platform experts have continually reminded us that AI content moderation must be combined with human moderation for the most effective results.