‘The Worst Internet-Research Ethics Violation I Have Ever Seen’ | The most persuasive “people” on a popular subreddit turned out to be a front for a secret AI experiment.

There's no guarantee anyone on there (or here) is a real person or genuine. I'll bet this experiment has been conducted a dozen times or more but without the reveal at the end.

If anyone wants to know what subreddit, it's r/changemyview. I remember seeing a ton of similar posts about controversial opinions and even now people are questioning Am I Overreacting and AITAH a lot. AI posts in those kind of subs are seemingly pretty frequent. I'm not surprised to see it was part of a fucking experiment.

Like the 90s/2000s - don’t put personal information on the internet, don’t believe a damned thing on it either.

The ethics violation is definitely bad, but their results are also concerning. They claim their AI accounts were 6 times more likely to persuade people into changing their minds compared to a real life person. AI has become an overpowered tool in the hands of propagandists.

This research is good, valuable and desperately needed. The uproar online is predictable and could possibly help bring attention to the issue of LLM-enabled bots manipulating social media.

This research isn't what you should get mad it. It's pretty common knowledge online that Reddit is dominated by bots. Advertising bots, scam bots, political bots, etc.

Intelligence services of nation states and political actors seeking power are all running these kind of influence operations on social media, using bot posters to dominate the conversations about the topics that they want. This is pretty common knowledge in social media spaces. Go to any politically charged topic on international affairs and you will notice that something seems off, it's hard to say exactly what it is... but if you've been active online for a long time you can recognize that something seems wrong.

We've seen how effective this manipulation is on changing the public view (see: Cambridge Analytica, or if you don't know what that is watch 'The Great Hack' documentary) and so it is only natural to wonder how much more effective online manipulation is now that bad actors can use LLMs.

This study is by a group of scientists who are trying to figure that out. The only difference is that they're publishing their findings in order to inform the public. Whereas Russia isn't doing us the same favors.

Naturally, it is in the interest of everyone using LLMs to manipulate the online conversation that this kind of research is never done. Having this information public could lead to reforms, regulations and effective counter strategies. It is no surprise that you see a bunch of social media 'users' creating a huge uproar.

Most of you, who don't work in tech spaces, may not understand just how easy and cheap it is to set something like this up. For a few million dollars and a small staff you could essentially dominate a large multi-million subscriber subreddit with whatever opinion you wanted to push. Bots generate variations of the opinion that you want to push, the bot accounts (guided by humans) downvote everyone else out of the conversation and, in addition, moderation power can be seized, stolen or bought to further control the conversation.

Or, wholly fabricated subreddits can be created. A few months prior to the US election there were several new subreddits which were created and catapulted to popularity despite just being a bunch of bots reposting news. Now those subreddits are high in the /all and /popular feeds, despite their moderators and a huge portion of the users being bots.

We desperately need this kind of study to keep from drowning in a sea of fake people who will tirelessly work to convince you of all manner of nonsense.

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.

Holy Shit... This kind of shit is what ultimately broke Tim(very closely ralated to ted) kaczynski.... He was part of MKULTRA research while a student at Harvard, but instead of drugging him, they had a debater that was a prosecutor pretending to be a student.... And would just argue against any point he had to see when he would break....

And that's how you get the Unabomber folks.

Reddit: Ban the Russian/Chinese/Israeli/American bots? Nope. Ban the Swiss researchers that are trying to study useful things? Yep

I’m sure there are individuals doing worse one off shit, or people targeting individuals.

I’m sure Facebook has run multiple algorithm experiments that are worse.

I’m sure YouTube has caused worse real world outcomes with the rabbit holes their algorithm use to promote. (And they have never found a way to completely fix the rabbit hole problems without destroying the usefulness of the algorithm completely.)

The actions described in this article are upsetting and disappointing, but this has been going on for a long time. All in the name of making money.

This is a really interesting paragraph to me because I definitely think these results shouldn't be published or we'll only get more of these "whoopsie" experiments.

At the same time though, I think it is desperately important to research the ability of LLMs to persuade people sooner rather than later when they become even more persuasive and natural-sounding. The article mentions that in studies humans already have trouble telling the difference between AI written sentences and human ones.

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.

AI is a fucking curse upon humanity. The tiny morsels of good it can do is FAR outweighed by the destruction it causes. Fuck anyone involved with perpetuating this nightmare.

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

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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.

Lol, coming from the people who sold all of your data with no consent for AI research

Personally I love how they found the AI could be very persuasive by lying.

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.

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

as opposed to thousands of bots used by russia everyday on politics related subs.

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.

I was unaware that "Internet Ethics" was a thing that existed in this multiverse

ChangeMyView seems like the sort of topic where AI posts can actually be appropriate. If the goal is to hear arguments for an opposing point of view, the AI is contributing more than a human would if in fact the AI can generate more convincing arguments.

You know what Pac stands for? PAC. Program and Control. He’s Program and Control Man. The whole thing’s a metaphor. All he can do is consume. He’s pursued by demons that are probably just in his own head. And even if he does manage to escape by slipping out one side of the maze, what happens? He comes right back in the other side. People think it’s a happy game. It’s not a happy game. It’s a fucking nightmare world. And the worst thing is? It’s real and we live in it.

Another isolated case for the endlessly growing list of positive impacts of the GenAI with no accountability trend. A big shout-out to people promoting and fueling it, excited to see into what pit you lead us next.

This experiment is also nearly worthless because, as proved by the researchers, there's no guarantee the accounts you interact with on Reddit are actual humans. Upvotes are even easier for machines to use, and can be bought for cheap.