When Reddit rebranded itself as “the heart of the internet” a couple of years ago, the slogan was meant to evoke the site’s organic character. In an age of social media dominated by algorithms, Reddit took pride in being curated by a community that expressed its feelings in the form of upvotes and downvotes—in other words, being shaped by actual people.
other words, being shaped by actual people.
So earlier this week, when members of a popular subreddit learned that their community had been infiltrated by undercover researchers posting AI-written comments and passing them off as human thoughts.
The researchers, based at the University of Zurich, wanted to find out whether AI-generated responses could change people’s views. So they headed to the aptly named subreddit r/changemyview, in which users debate important societal issues, along with plenty of trivial topics, and award points to posts that talk them out of their original position. Over the course of four months, the researchers posted more than 1,000 AI-generated comments on pitbulls (is aggression the fault of the breed or the owner?), the housing crisis (is living with your parents the solution?), DEI programs (were they destined to fail?).
In one sense, the AI comments appear to have been rather effective. When researchers asked the AI to personalize its arguments to a Redditor’s biographical details, including gender, age, and political leanings (inferred, courtesy of another AI model, through the Redditor’s post history), a surprising number of minds indeed appear to have been changed.
And now they're seething and calling the project inhumane. Do you think they're going to put two and two together and realise they were wrong about Covid and Donald Trump and were simply socially engineered labrats for leading globalist thinkers?
msn.com