Oh No, This Startup Is Using AI Agents to Flood Reddit With Marketing Slop

The internet is becoming flooded with AI-generated content, and one of the few places people can still go to talk to other people is Reddit.

Unfortunately, a new marketing automation startup called Astral wants to change that and bring LinkedIn-level marketing slop to the discussion board site. The startup is founded by Savannah Feder X has released a video Thursday demonstrated how using an AI agent in a browser window, his tool can navigate through Reddit and automatically write comments that promote what a marketer is trying to sell.

Like other computer-using agents recently demoed by its likes anthropological And GoogleAstral can take over a local browser and complete tasks by first capturing a screenshot of a page and analyzing it using AI to determine what to do next based on a prompt, ultimately sending commands to the mouse. “See how Astral finds the right places to click,” Feder said as the bot began logging into Reddit. “It’s really interesting to see how a human navigates the site.” The video shows how the bot navigates the subreddit /r/product management, searches for posts about “user research,” and then “writes a reply that promotes the product without overselling it.”

The dream of these bots is that they will help grandma navigate her computer on her own, not create marketing automation spambots that flood social media. Certainly, this is why so many people hate AI: it’s being deployed by the worst people you know.

Announcing Astral – an AI marketer that works 24/7 to grow your startup.

Astral navigates websites, creates content and executes marketing across social.

Watch Astral automated Reddit in real-time: pic.twitter.com/XbpKt0lZqd

— Savannah (@savannahfeder) January 9, 2025

This should be further proof that AI is going to create a sea of ​​undifferentiated mediocrity, and dull content as far as the eye can see. Anyone who has spent enough time on LinkedIn or X has seen generic, soulless posts that are obviously written with AI, and now someone has excitedly created a tool to bring that to Reddit. Imagine being proud of it, like being proud of peeing in someone’s pool.

What’s perhaps most frustrating is that the people who build tools like Astral truly believe that AI and humans are interchangeable, and that machines will be far better than humans.

Incredibly, when someone asked Feder why Astral uses an AI agent running in a native browser instead of a Reddit API, he explained that Reddit and other social media sites limit the use of their APIs to automated tasks. There’s a reason for this: because it’s spammy and annoying. He even excitedly explains to another that the bot can successfully bypass the captcha.

Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, Answered the post With a GIF of Patrick spongebob started crying

It will be interesting to see how platforms like Reddit implement anti-bot measures to combat slop.