Reddit to combat AI with more AI

The platform now uses LLMs that can identify suspicious activity.

Reddit

To combat the rise of AI-generated content on Reddit, the social media platform is using its own AI tools, according to a post on its website. Reddit said its automated systems resulted in blocking 23 million spam views a day, catching roughly 25,000 posts and comments per day and revoking close to two million inauthentic votes a day. Using its own AI, Reddit said users are seeing 20 percent less spam exposure from January to March 2026, as compared to the previous three months.

According to Reddit, it's using LLMs to look for suspicious activity the moment an account is created, including "highly subtle, coordinated patterns of fake behavior and artificial hype." On top of that, the site previously added another layer of protection that forces "fishy automated accounts" to verify their humanity. Beyond AI slop, Reddit's new measures are also meant to strengthen its enforcement actions, specifically with "hate and violence in all English text content" on the platform, with coverage coming to more languages soon. The time between detection to enforcement is down to less than five seconds, the company wrote, which has also reduced user exposure to harmful content by more than 40 percent.

It's a notable step for Reddit, which has a contentious history with AI. Last year, researchers from the University of Zurich were caught conducting experiments in r/changemyview with AI-generated comments. In an attempt to address rampant AI scraping, Reddit also adopted a new licensing protocol meant to provide compensation if AI companies wanted to web crawl its website. Despite Reddit's past with AI, it still embraced the use of the technology on its own terms, as seen with the introducing of its Reddit Answers search feature.