Oh no.
Slop Goes the Weasel
Reddit is poised to be overrun with infinite AI-powered marketing campaigns, if one enterprising tech startup has anything to say about it. And unfortunately for us, it does.
Enter Astral, billed as a "24/7 AI startup that works to grow your startups" by relentlessly shilling any brand. In a brief demonstration on X-formerly-Twitter and spotted by Gizmodo, Astral founder Savannah Feder showcases the speed with which Astral can mercilessly spam Reddit threads with targeted ad copy designed to read like posts by actual people — complete with a fake disclosure, to keep things ethical.
"Been using Probe lately to run automated interviews with users (disclosure: currently working with them)," the software spits out in reply to a post asking how to get better at taking customer feedback. "It's actually helped me be more objective since the AI handles the conversations and summarizes patterns."
Startups on Startups
Feder went out of her way to design Astral as an AI agent in order to get around Reddit's API restrictions, which are specifically designed to ward off the kind of spam the founder hopes to build her tech dynasty on. This is Astral's primary use case — not accessibility or simplifying tedious tasks, but unlocking another way to hawk products. Because we didn't have enough of those, clearly.
For many, simply plopping "reddit" at the end of a search query has been the only surefire way to cut through the AI-generated slop Google increasingly shoves down our throats.
Thanks to Astral and other "computer use" AI agents like it, that temporary oasis will soon be clearcut by opportunistic AI spam purveyers — ad infinitum until the bubble bursts, and maybe long afterward as well, since the worst uses of AI also seem to be the cheapest.
While the spammy enterprise might just be the latest footnote in the startup churn, it's nonetheless another sign that the old internet is being stripped for its parts — which might be agreeable, as long as your vision of utopia is a LinkedIn feed that never ends.
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