It seems that in about a third of threads I check, the top comment is by an LLM. They aren't pushing anything sinister, trying to promote political division, doing crypto scamming or anything like that.

They just post inane one line comments in response to the article headline. They often have some corny joke or something like that, but it's never anything more than two sentences, and those sentences never, ever say anything insightful or even controversial - it's just an incredibly surface level and uncontroversial reaction to the headline.

Of course, this sounds like a setup to a joke about what the average Redditor posts but I'm serious. Just thousands of accounts posting completely inane takes, with that "gee whiz" Ned Flanders ChatGPT perkiness, and getting massively upvoted for it. The entire account will be just these inane one-liners, or sometimes plagiarised posts from the top of all time. Also, they use way more em dashes than the average person - and I'd assume that the average em-dash-user would make less boring comments.

What's the gain in this? Are people farming karma to later sell the accounts to shill products? To get conspiratorial, is Reddit trying to pump up the site with fake accounts to juice growth?