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

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

Unfortunately, a new marketing automation startup called Astral wants to change that and bring LinkedIn-level marketing slab to the discussion board site. The founder of the startup is Savannah Feder Posted a video on X Demonstrating on Thursday how artificial intelligence agents are used in a browser window, his tool can browse Reddit and automatically write comments promoting whatever the marketer is trying to sell.

Like other computer usage agents, it has recently been demonstrated by the likes anthropic and GoogleAstral can take over the native browser and perform tasks by first taking screenshots of the page and analyzing them using artificial intelligence to figure out what to do next based on the prompt request and eventually send commands back to the mouse.

“See how Astral finds the right places to click,” says Feder as the bot starts logging into Reddit. “Honestly, it’s really impressive to see how he manages the site as a person.” The video shows how the bot goes to the subreddit /r/productmanagement, searches for posts about “user research” and then “writes a response that promotes the product without sounding too sales-y.”

The dream of these bots is that they will help grandma navigate her computer, not create marketing automation spam bots to flood social media. This is surely the reason why so many people despise AI: it’s practiced by the worst people you know.

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

Astral browses websites, creates content and conducts social media marketing.

Check out Astral Reddit’s real-time automation: pic.twitter.com/XbpKt0lZqd

— Savannah (@SavannahFeder) January 9, 2025

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

Perhaps the most disappointing thing is that the people who build tools like Astral really believe that AI and humans are interchangeable, and that this machine will never be better than a human.

Incredibly, after someone asked Feder why he used Astral’s native browser-based AI agent rather than the Reddit API, he explained that it was because Reddit and other social media sites restricted the use of their APIs for automated tasks. There’s a reason for that: Because it’s spammy and annoying. He even excitedly explains to another person that the bot can successfully pass CAPTCHAs.

Alexis Ohanian, co-founder of Reddit, replied to his post With a GIF from Patrick Sponge Bob starts to cry.

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