A team of researchers who say they are from the University of Zurich ran an “unauthorized,” large-scale experiment in which they secretly deployed AI-powered bots into a popular debate subreddit called r/changemyview in an attempt to research whether AI could be used to change people’s minds about contentious topics.
more than 1,700 comments made by AI bots
The bots made more than a thousand comments over the course of several months and at times pretended to be a “rape victim,” a “Black man” who was opposed to the Black Lives Matter movement, someone who “work[s] at a domestic violence shelter,” and a bot who suggested that specific types of criminals should not be rehabilitated.
The experiment was revealed over the weekend in a post by moderators of the r/changemyview subreddit, which has more than 3.8 million subscribers. In the post, the moderators said they were unaware of the experiment while it was going on and only found out about it after the researchers disclosed it after the experiment had already been run. In the post, moderators told users they “have a right to know about this experiment,” and that posters in the subreddit had been subject to “psychological manipulation” by the bots.
I remember when my front page was nothing but r/changemyview for like a week and I just unsubscribed from the subreddit completely because some of the questions and the amount of hits felt like something fucky was going on. Guess I was right.
Same happened to the relationshipsadvice and aita subreddits, the number of posts suddenly skyrocketed with incredibly long, overly-detailed stories that smacked of LLM-generated content.
Gotta love the hollow morality in telling users they’ve been psychologically manipulated this time but yet do nothing about the tens of thousands of bots doing the exact same thing 24/7 the rest of the time.
Ok maybe I dont miss reddit after all…
It’ll be interesting to find out if this research got IRB approval prior to the study
This is what should get departments defunded, not DEI 🫠
That’s place is mostly bots anyway, I’m sure no one noticed.
What difference does it make if you’re talking to a bot? We never meet our interlocutors anyway. Would these people have the same reaction if it were revealed they were talking to a role playing person because I’m pretty sure we’ve already done that many times over.
What kind of question is this? A role-playing person talking to others who don’t know they’re role-playing is deceitful, so are you saying there’s absolutely nothing wrong with deception?
It’s generally expected outside of /r/jokes, /r/twosentencehorror, etc. that the people you’re talking to are telling the truth as they know it, or else why talk at all?
I don’t know what your experience is on Reddit but mine came to be that what I was reading couldn’t be trusted. I remember stumbling across a post on some technical subject that I happen to understand very well and couldn’t believe the twaddle that was advanced in the comments with utter conviction and certainty. It got me thinking about all the things I had read and just accepted because I know nothing about them. This is our information landscape, for better or worse.
Why should it be any different in a role playing scenario? These platforms are motivating engagement and people love an emotional story and so that is presented to us. If we loved true stories more, we would get them instead. I don’t think there’s any malice intended, we’re getting what we want because morons love their feels over their knowledge. It’s the reason the Americans have Trump and Elon and antivax, these people inhabit social media but it is the last thing they should turn to for truth because they are dumb as a sack of rocks and are getting played, shorty.
Sure, this is unfortunately our disinformation landscape now, but regardless, is deception okay (given how it’s always intentional by definition)?
Going back to your original question, I do think people would be annoyed by bots and outed human liars alike; at least, I would be, since the bots are controlled by people anyway.
As for my Reddit experience, I like /r/scams, among other similarly healthy and truly informative places to be.
