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- cross-posted to:
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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.
Deception on the scale they are proposing with this bot experiment would be a disaster for personal relationships, it’s definitely not okay. I think of those subreddits as a type of entertainment, it’s not my thing but I understand how people are titillated by stories of personal trauma. It was one of the many reasons I permanently abandoned Reddit after fifteen years, it has become a cesspit of bullshit. Some people like rolling about in that stuff, others don’t understand it’s shit.
WTF? I don’t go there for entertainment but to stay abreast of the latest scam types and procedures so that I or my friends don’t become victims. They’re getting insanely sophisticated out there, so I’m just as glad as I am to read of people evading scams on there as I am sorrowful for people falling prey to them, while also learning about the right and wrong steps to take.
This isn’t for fun; that’s what /r/FreeGameFindings is for, which is also an excellent place in its own way. I am following an equivalent Lemmy community but I’m on both just in case the Reddit one catches any titles that the other doesn’t while we wait for Lemmy counterparts to grow.
So, there, two communities that aren’t cesspools. To what subreddits did you go? Here are more: /r/zerowaste, /r/eatcheapandhealthy, /r/personalfinance or even /r/povertyfinance. The “cesspool” stance is subreddit-specific and I bet it’s not any one of these. You have to be strict with your subreddit curation and only go to those communities and nothing else (especially never the homepage), and then it’s awesome.
I’m trying to move here not because of subreddit/community issues but beef with the direction that corporate Reddit itself is going—which is fine to ditch due to that, too, but don’t imply that all subreddits suck.
Maybe those are the subreddits to inhabit but they will inevitably devolve into content and moderation that serves the lowest common denominator as they grow past ~100k subscribers. That seems to be the case generally, whatever the platform. The scale motivates dysfunctional behaviour and we have to either accept it or move on. I feel better off social media in general but miss the discussion.
Well, I suppose anything can happen but they’ve stayed consistent since pretty much their inception… Also, Reddit used to be called a content aggregator, not social media, which was coined as such due to its non-anonymous accounts, although these boundaries have reduced over time.
Anyway, I think we can all agree that we hope Lemmy/FOSS could one day be a major contender in this playing field.