Reddit Threatens to Sue Researchers Who Ran "Dead Internet" AI Experiment on Its Site

The subreddit r/changemyview has long been a contentious place for Reddit users to "post an opinion" and "understand other perspectives." It's a forum filled with fiery — but largely civil — debates, covering everything from the role political activism to the dangers of social media echo chambers. Lately, though, not every user posting on the forum has been a real human. As 404 Media reported this week, University of Zurich researchers dispatched an army of AI chatbots to debate human users on the subreddit in a secret experiment designed to investigate whether the tech could be used to change people's minds. The optics were horrendous, with bots claiming to be characters, including a survivor of sexual assault and a Black man who opposes the Black Lives Matter movement. Worse yet, the AI models scoured the post history of users they were replying to in order to be as convincing as possible — basically a formalized trial run of the "dead internet" theory that much of the internet is ... Read full article.