Reddit Biohackers Subreddit Bans Peptide Posts After Companies Manipulate AI Chatbots
By
Jason Koebler
If you only eat one bagel today, this is the bagel.
Summary
Moderators of the r/biohackers subreddit have banned new posts about peptides and hormone replacement therapy (HRT) because companies in those industries have been systematically spamming the community. The goal is to manipulate AI chatbots like ChatGPT and Google's AI search by flooding Reddit with promotional content that gets scraped and used as source material. This practice, dubbed "AI-engine optimization," exploits how AI models rely on user-generated content from platforms like Reddit to inform their answers.
Key quotes
· 3 pulledThe moderators of the biohacking subreddit say that peptide and hormone replacement therapy companies have been surreptitiously spamming Reddit in an attempt to get their posts scraped by AI chatbots.
The strategy is an effort to systematically manipulate the answers provided by chatbots by manipulating the underlying source material that those chatbots will scrape.
In a post last week, the moderators of r/biohackers said they would be banning new posts about peptides and hormone replacement therapy (HRT) because of at
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