The r/changemyview subreddit was recently at the center of a controversy after discovering that researchers from the University of Zurich had run an unauthorized study using artificial intelligence (AI) generated comments.
On April 28, Reddit’s chief legal officer, Ben Lee, said the research broke the platform’s rules. He confirmed that all accounts linked to the project had been banned and that Reddit was preparing formal legal action.
The subreddit’s moderator shared on April 26 that researchers had posted 1,783 AI-generated comments, which pretended to be written by different types of people, like a critic of certain social movements and a trauma counselor.
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According to the draft of the study’s paper, the AI-generated replies were customized based on users’ previous Reddit activity, such as political views, age, and ethnic background. Over the course of the experiment, other users awarded 137 “deltas”, which mark when someone’s opinion has been changed.
The researchers stated that the study helped show how powerful AI models can be when it comes to persuasion. They argued that it was designed to be low-risk and that understanding AI’s ability to influence people is important.
Following the public backlash, the University of Zurich’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences Ethics Commission issued a formal warning to the lead researcher and stated that future projects must involve better communication with participants. However, they noted that the study’s findings were important enough that stopping publication would not be justified.
Despite this, moderators from the subreddit have asked the university to issue a formal apology and to prevent the research from being published.
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