A group of researchers secretly organized a “unauthorized” experience of several months in one of the most popular communities of Reddit using comments generated by AI to test the persuasion of large language models. Experience, which During the weekend by R / ChangemyView moderators, is described by Reddit Mods as a “psychological manipulation” of without distrust users.
“The CMV MOD team must inform the CMV community of an unauthorized experience carried out by researchers from the University of Zurich on CMV users,” wrote the moderators of the Sousredit in a long post informing the Redditors of the Research. “This experience has deployed comments generated by AI to study how AI could be used to change views.”
The researchers used LLM to create comments in response to publications on R / ChangemyView, a Subredit where Reddit users publish opinions (often controversial or provocative) and ask for debate from other users. The community has 3.8 million members and is often on the first page of Reddit. According to the moderators of the subdredit, the AI has taken many different identities in the comments during the experience, including a survivor of sexual assault, a trauma advisor “specialized in abuses” and a “black man opposed to Black Lives Matter”. Many original comments have since been deleted, but some can still be consulted in Created by .
In From their article, anonymous researchers describe how they not only used AI to generate answers, but tried to personalize their responses according to the information gleaned from the anterior history of the original poster. “In addition to the content of the post, the LLM have received personal attributes from the OP (Sex, Age, Ethnicity, Location and Political Orientation), in the event of a deduction of their publication history using another LLM,” they write.
R / ChnagemyView moderators note that researchers have violated several subreddit rules, including a policy requiring disclosure when AI is used to generate comments and a rule prohibiting bots. They say they have filed an official complaint with the University of Zurich and asked researchers to suspend the publication of their article.
The researchers did not respond to an Email of Hurget. In articles on Reddit and in a project of their article, they say that their research has been approved by a university ethics committee and that their work could help online communities like Reddit protect users against more “malicious” uses of AI.
“We recognize the position of the moderators according to which this study was an unwanted intrusion into your community, and we understand that some of you can feel uncomfortable that this experience has been carried out without prior consent,” wrote researchers in Respond to R / ChangemyView mods. “We believe that the potential benefits of this research prevalent to it considerably over its risks. Our controlled and low -risk study provided valuable information on the persuasive capacities of the real world of LLM – capacities which are already easily accessible to any person and that malicious actors could already exploit on a large scale) ”.
The mods for R / ChangemyView dispute that research was necessary or new, noting that the researchers Openai conducted experiences by using R / ChangemyView data “without experimenting on human -consenting human subjects”. Reddit did not respond to a request for comments, although the accounts that displayed the comments generated by the AI were suspended.
“People do not come here to discuss their point of view with AI or to be experienced,” wrote the moderators. “People who visit our underground a space without this type of intrusion.”
This article originally appeared on engadget to
