Reddit users ‘psychologically manipulated’ by unauthorized AI experiment

Trigger warning for brief references to sexual assault. It’s been discovered that millions of Reddit users were deceived and “psychologically manipulated” by an unauthorized AI experiment performed by researchers from the University of Zurich … The university secretly used AI bots to post in the highly-popular Change My View subreddit, with large language models taking on a variety of personas, including a rape victim and a trauma counsellor. The university disclosed the deception to moderators after it had taken place, acknowledging that researchers broke the rules of the subreddit. Over the past few months, we used multiple accounts to posts published on CMV. Our experiment assessed LLM’s persuasiveness in an ethical scenario, where people ask for arguments against views they hold. In commenting, we did not disclose that an AI was used to write comments, as this would have rendered the study unfeasible. While we did not write any comments ourselves, we manually reviewed each comm ... Read full article.