‘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.

Meanwhile, Reddit’s chief legal officer, Ben Lee, wrote that the company intends to “ensure that the researchers are held accountable for their misdeeds.”

"How dare they perform such dangerous and unethical experiments on our users without paying us an appropriate access fee?" He probably went on to say.

...and the researchers considered thier experiment a success because they didn't see any comments calling thier bots, bots......it shouldn't matter that calling someone a bot is a bannable offense there...

At Facebook, that sort of thing would just be called an ordinary workday.

So, we're gonna tackle bot manipulation for research purposes at the same time we're gonna deal with bot manipulation for ads and political manipulation, right? Or is it just not okay to do for scientific ends but fine if it's to sell you shit or advance a political agenda?

To be clear, this is very much not okay, it's just weird to me that once the goal is to sell you shit people are much more accepting of it as business as usual.

Over the course of four months, the researchers posted more than 1,000 AI-generated comments on pitbulls (is aggression the fault of the breed or the owner?), the housing crisis (is living with your parents the solution?), DEI programs (were they destined to fail?). The AI commenters argued that browsing Reddit is a waste of time and that the “controlled demolition” 9/11 conspiracy theory has some merit. And as they offered their computer-generated opinions, they also shared their backstories. One claimed to be a trauma counselor; another described himself as a victim of statutory rape.

(emphasis mine)

Wow, yeah, clearly very unethical.

But the lesson you're taking from it is that they are still not worth it, rather than maybe it's important to listen to people you don't agree with on everything, because people are complex?