The researchers' bots generated identities as a sexual assault survivor, a trauma counselor, and a Black man opposed to Black Lives Matter.

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.

  • @[email protected]
    1•1 day ago

    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.

    • @[email protected]English
      1•1 day ago

      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.