US EditionUniversity of Zurich Researchers Conduct Unauthorized AI Experiment on Reddit
- Researchers at the University of Zurich secretly ran an experiment using AI bots on the subreddit r/ChangeMyView for four months, posting 1,783 comments and earning over 100 'delta' medals for persuasion, raising ethical concerns.
- Moderators of r/ChangeMyView filed a complaint with the University of Zurich, emphasizing that the experiment violated subreddit rules, including the requirement to disclose AI-generated comments.
- Reddit's Chief Legal Officer, Ben Lee, criticized the study as 'deeply wrong on both a moral and legal level' and indicated potential legal action against the university.
- The researchers at the University of Zurich claimed their study was ethics-approved and intended to help protect users from malicious AI, despite backlash from the Reddit community.
78 Articles
78 Articles
A controversial experiment on Reddit reveals the persuasive powers of AI
Researchers at the University of Zurich wanted to see how persuasive AI could be -- but did not get permission to do research on the actual humans on Reddit that the AI was interacting with.
AI researchers ran a secret experiment on Reddit users to see if they could change their minds — and the results are creepy
University of Zurich researchers secretly unleashed an army of manipulative chatbots on the r/changemyview subreddit — and they were more persuasive than humans at getting people to change their minds.
Researchers at the University of Zurich investigated how well artificial intelligence is able to persuade people to change their minds. Reddit users participated in the experiment without their knowledge.
For a research project, researchers at the University of Zurich invented fictitious individuals, including their résumés and families, and let them comment on specific topics on Reddit. Basically, it is an analysis of how to best implement propaganda using AI – and it is completely disguised as an opinion of ordinary fellow citizens. The AIs were supposedly not unmasked by real people as such. Indeed, social media have long been interspersed wit…
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