Reddit has permanently banned a group of researchers from the University of Zurich after it was revealed that they had been secretly using AI bots to psychologically influence users for months. The experiment, which the scientists themselves called a “study of the persuasiveness of neural networks,” has led to a scandal, and Reddit is now considering filing a lawsuit.
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As part of the study, bots posed as a counselor and a victim of violence. They left more than 1,700 comments in the r/changemymind community and accumulated over 10,000 karma before they were exposed, The Verge reports. At the same time, Reddit’s chief legal officer Ben Lee called the experiment not only illegal but also unethical.
According to the data that has already leaked online, the bots used GPT-4o, Claude 3.5 Sonnet, and Llama 3.1-405B models. They analyzed the history of user posts to select the most convincing arguments. “In all cases, our bots generated comments based on the last 100 publications and the author’s responses,” the document says.
The researchers said they manually deleted posts that they identified as ethically problematic or that clearly indicated that they were written by an AI bot, effectively hiding traces of their experiment. Moreover, in queries to neural networks, they claimed that Reddit users had given consent to participate in the experiment, although in fact they had not.
The study, although illegal, found that bots were indeed many times more effective than humans in persuasion and easily influenced the opinion of the interlocutor. According to the authors of the work, AI bots can be used to interfere in elections or manipulate public opinion if they fall into the hands of attackers.
The researchers recommend that online platforms develop robust mechanisms to verify AI-generated content. Ironically, however, the study itself has become an example of malicious activity and manipulation.