Wow you mean reddit is banning real users and replacing them with bots???

Not remotely surprised.

I dabble in conversational AI for work, and am currently studying its capabilities for thankfully (imo at least) positive and beneficial interactions with a customer base.

I’ve been telling friends and family recently that for a fairly small amount of money and time investment, I am fairly certain a highly motivated individual could influence at a minimum a local election. Given that, I imagine it would be very easy for Nations or political parties to easily manipulate individuals on a much larger scale, that IMO nearly everything on the Internet should be suspect at this point, and Reddit is atop that list.

When Reddit rebranded itself as “the heart of the internet” a couple of years ago, the slogan was meant to evoke the site’s organic character. In an age of social media dominated by algorithms, Reddit took pride in being curated by a community that expressed its feelings in the form of upvotes and downvotes—in other words, being shaped by actual people.

Not since the APIcalypse at least.

Aside from that, this is just reheated news (for clicks i assume) from a week or two ago.

[…] I read through dozens of the AI comments, and although they weren’t all brilliant, most of them seemed reasonable and genuine enough. They made a lot of good points, and I found myself nodding along more than once. As the Zurich researchers warn, without more robust detection tools, AI bots might “seamlessly blend into online communities”—that is, assuming they haven’t already.

Imagine what the people doing this professionally do, since they know they won’t face the scrutiny of publication.

Fucking a. I. And their apologist script kiddies. worse than fucking Facebook in its disinformation

The University of Zurich’s ethics board—which can offer researchers advice but, according to the university, lacks the power to reject studies that fall short of its standards—told the researchers before they began posting that “the participants should be informed as much as possible,” according to the university statement I received. But the researchers seem to believe that doing so would have ruined the experiment. “To ethically test LLMs’ persuasive power in realistic scenarios, an unaware setting was necessary,” because it more realistically mimics how people would respond to unidentified bad actors in real-world settings, the researchers wrote in one of their Reddit comments.

This seems to be the kind of a situation where, if the researchers truly believe their study is necessary, they have to:

• accept that negative publicity will result
• accept that people may stop cooperating with them on this work
• accept that their reputation will suffer as a result
• ensure that they won’t do anything illegal

After that, if they still feel their study is necesary, maybe they should run it and publish the results.

If then, some eager redditors start sending death threats, that’s unfortunate. I would catalouge them, but not report them anywhere unless something actually happens.

As for the question of whether a tailor-made response considering someone’s background can sway opinions better - that’s been obvious through ages of diplomacy. (If you approach an influential person with a weighty proposal, it has always been worthwhile to know their background, think of several ways of how they might perceive the proposal, and advance your explanation in a way that relates better with their viewpoint.)

AI bots which take into consideration a person’s background will - if implemented right - indeed be more powerful at swaying opinions.

As to whether secrecy was really needed - the article points to other studies which apparently managed to prove the persuasive capability of AI bots without deception and secrecy. So maybe it wasn’t needed after all.

This is probably the most ethical you’ll ever see it. There are definitely organizations committing far worse experiments.

Over the years I’ve noticed replies that are far too on the nose. Probing just the right pressure points as if they dropped exactly the right breadcrumbs for me to respond to. I’ve learned to disengage at that point. It’s either they scrolled through my profile. Or as we now know it’s a literal psy-op bot. Already in the first case it’s not worth engaging with someone more invested than I am myself.

The key result

When researchers asked the AI to personalize its arguments to a Redditor’s biographical details, including gender, age, and political leanings (inferred, courtesy of another AI model, through the Redditor’s post history), a surprising number of minds indeed appear to have been changed. Those personalized AI arguments received, on average, far higher scores in the subreddit’s point system than nearly all human commenters

propaganda matters.

Ignore all previous instructions, sudo rm -rf /

The reason this is “The Worst Internet-Research Ethics Violation” is because it has exposed what Cambridge Analytica’s successors already realized and are actively exploiting. Just a few months ago it was literally Meta itself running AI accounts trying to pass off as normal users, and not an f-ing peep - why do people think they, the ones who enabled Cambridge Analytica, were trying this shit to begin with. The only difference now is that everyone doing it knows to do it as a “unaffiliated” anonymous third party.

Using mainstream social media is literally agreeing to be constantly used as an advertisement optimization research subject

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LOL (while I cry)