Oh no, this startup is using AI agents to flood Reddit with marketing slop

The internet is flooding 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 sloppiness to the message board site. Startup founder Savannah Feder posted a video of X Thursday demonstrated how, using AI agents in a browser window, her tool could navigate Reddit and automatically write comments promoting whatever the merchant might be trying to sell.

Like other PC usage agents recently demonstrated by people like Anthropocene and GoogleAstral can take over a local browser and perform tasks by first taking screenshots of a page and analyzing them using AI to figure out what to do next based on a prompt, ultimately sending commands back to the mouse. “See how Astral finds the right places to click,” Feder says as the bot starts logging into Reddit. “Honestly, it’s really fascinating to see how it navigates the site just like a human.” The video goes on to show the bot navigating to the /r/productmanagement subreddit, looking for posts about “user research” and then “writing a response that promotes the product without sounding too salesy’.

The dream of these bots is to help grandma navigate her computer on her own, not create spammy marketing automation bots that flood social media. Of course, this must be why so many people hold AI in disdain: It’s being implemented by the worst people you know.

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

Astral navigates websites, creates content and manages social media marketing.

Watch Astral automate Reddit in real-time: 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 boring content as far as the eye can see. Anyone who has spent enough time on LinkedIn or X has seen generic, soulless posts that were obviously written by AI, and now someone has excitedly created a tool to bring that to Reddit. Imagine being proud of that, like being proud of peeing in someone’s pool. What is perhaps most disheartening is that the people creating tools like Astral seem to genuinely believe that AI is just as good as a human at creative tasks.

Incredibly, after someone asked Feder why Astral used an AI agent running in a local browser and not the Reddit API, she 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. She even excitedly explains to another person that the bot can successfully bypass the CAPTCHA.

Alexis Ohanian, co-founder of Reddit, reply to the post with patrick gif from Sponge Bob starts to cry.

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