AI Experiment on Reddit Influences 137 Users, Sparks Outrage

Researchers at the University of Zurich conducted a covert four-month experiment on the reddit board r/changemyview, utilizing AI-generated comments to assess whether artificial intelligence could influence people's opinions. The experiment involved AI-powered accounts adopting various personas, including a rape victim, an individual opposed to specific social movements, and a trauma counselor specializing in abuse.

Moderators of the r/changemyview subreddit expressed their disapproval, stating that their community is a human space that rejects undisclosed AI as a core value. They emphasized that users do not come to the subreddit to discuss their views with AI or to be experimented upon.

The researchers employed AI to generate responses, attempting to personalize the replies based on information from the original posters’ prior Reddit history, such as political orientation, gender, age, and ethnicity. Over the course of the experiment, the fake AI accounts posted 1,783 comments and received 137 deltas, indicating that other Reddit users acknowledged the accounts had persuaded them to change their opinion on an issue.

The researchers claimed that all comments were manually reviewed before posting to ensure they met the community guidelines and to minimize potential harm. They argued that the potential benefits of this research substantially outweigh its risks, as the large language models used in the experiment can be highly persuasive, surpassing all previously known benchmarks of human persuasiveness.

The researchers also highlighted that the experiment shows distinguishing humans from AI still faces significant challenges, as nobody in the subreddit discovered the AI bots during the entire experiment. The r/changemyview board has 3.8 million members and ranks among the top 1% of subreddits by size.

The Reddit board’s moderators were unaware of the experiment and have asked the university for an apology and to block the publication of the research. The platform’s chief legal officer stated that the experiment broke the site’s user agreement and rules, and all known accounts associated with the University of Zurich research effort were now banned.

The University of Zurich’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences Ethics Commission investigated the incident and promised to coordinate better with test subjects in the future. The lead investigator for the project was also issued a formal warning. The ethics commission stated that suppressing publication is not proportionate to the importance of the insights the study yields.