A group of researchers from the University of Zurich secretly conducted an experiment on one of the most popular Reddit communities for several months. Using comments generated by artificial intelligence, they wanted to test the persuasiveness of large language models on unsuspecting users. Over the weekend, this “unauthorized” experiment was revealed.
A group of researchers from the University of Zurich secretly conducted an experiment on one of the most popular Reddit communities for several months. Using comments generated by artificial intelligence, they wanted to test the persuasiveness of large language models on unsuspecting users. Over the weekend, this “unauthorized” experiment was revealed.
Using AI, the researchers created comments in response to posts on the subreddit r/changeemyview, also known as Change My View, where members discuss various topics with the aim of understanding opposing views. The community has 3.8 million members and often makes the front page of Reddit, Engadget writes .
According to moderators, during the experiment, the AI appeared in the comments under various names, including a victim of sexual assault, a psychologist who “specializes in abuse,” and “a black person who speaks out against ‘Black Lives Matter.’”
In total, the AI created over 1,700 comments during the experiment, many of which were deleted.
In their paper, the unnamed researchers describe how they not only used AI to generate replies, but also attempted to personalize its replies based on information gleaned from the post’s previous history on Reddit. “In addition to the content of the post, the LLM was provided with the post’s personal attributes (gender, age, ethnicity, location, and political affiliation) as derived from their post history made using another LLM,” they write.
Moderators of r/chnagemyview say the researchers violated numerous rules of the subreddit, including a policy requiring disclosure of the use of artificial intelligence to generate comments and a rule prohibiting bots. They say they have filed a formal complaint with the University of Zurich and asked the researchers not to publish their paper.
Reddit has banned all accounts associated with the research work and has contacted the University of Zurich and this particular research group with formal legal demands.
At the same time, the researchers claim in their paper that their study was approved by the university's ethics committee, and that their work could help online communities like Reddit protect users from more "malicious" uses of AI.
“We acknowledge the moderators’ position that this study was an unwelcome intrusion into your community, and we understand that some of you may feel uncomfortable that this experiment was conducted without prior consent,” the researchers wrote in a comment on r/changemyview. “We believe that the potential benefits of this study far outweigh its risks. Our low-risk, controlled study provided valuable insight into the real-world persuasive capabilities of LLM—capabilities that are already readily available to anyone, and that attackers can already use on a large scale for much more dangerous purposes (such as election manipulation or hate speech).”
