‘The Worst Internet-Research Ethics Violation I Have Ever Seen’ | The most persuasive “people” on a popular subreddit turned out to be a front for a secret AI experiment. : reddit

this post was submitted on 04 May 2025

93 points (96.0% liked)

20523 readers

365 users here now

News and Discussions about Reddit

Welcome to !reddit. This is a community for all news and discussions about Reddit.

The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:

Rules

Rule 1- No brigading.

**You may not encourage brigading any communities or subreddits in any way. **

YSKs are about self-improvement on how to do things.

Rule 2- No illegal or NSFW or gore content.

**No illegal or NSFW or gore content. **

Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.

Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.

Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.

That's it.

Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.

Posts and comments which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.

Rule 6- Regarding META posts.

Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-Reddit posts using the [META] tag on your post title.

Rule 7- You can't harass or disturb other members.

If you vocally harass or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.

Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.

Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.

Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.

Let everyone have their own content.

Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here. This includes using AI responses and summaries.

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

‘The Worst Internet-Research Ethics Violation I Have Ever Seen’ | The most persuasive “people” on a popular subreddit turned out to be a front for a secret AI experiment. (www.theatlantic.com)

submitted 5 days ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

10 comments fedilink hide all child comments

all 11 comments

sorted by: hot top controversial new old

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

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?). The AI commenters argued that browsing Reddit is a waste of time and that the “controlled demolition” 9/11 conspiracy theory has some merit. And as they offered their computer-generated opinions, they also shared their backstories. One claimed to be a trauma counselor; another described himself as a victim of statutory rape.

(emphasis mine)

Wow, yeah, clearly very unethical.

[–] [email protected] 44 points 5 days ago

Meanwhile, Reddit’s chief legal officer, Ben Lee, wrote that the company intends to “ensure that the researchers are held accountable for their misdeeds.”

"How dare they perform such dangerous and unethical experiments on our users without paying us an appropriate access fee?" He probably went on to say.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 5 days ago

...and the researchers considered thier experiment a success because they didn't see any comments calling thier bots, bots......it shouldn't matter that calling someone a bot is a bannable offense there...

[–] [email protected] 18 points 5 days ago

At Facebook, that sort of thing would just be called an ordinary workday.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 5 days ago

So, we're gonna tackle bot manipulation for research purposes at the same time we're gonna deal with bot manipulation for ads and political manipulation, right? Or is it just not okay to do for scientific ends but fine if it's to sell you shit or advance a political agenda?

To be clear, this is very much not okay, it's just weird to me that once the goal is to sell you shit people are much more accepting of it as business as usual.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 5 days ago (1 children)

It was r/changemyview

[–] [email protected] 13 points 5 days ago (1 children)

I'm surprised there were any human users left on CMV to be offended by this

[–] [email protected] 5 points 5 days ago

Bots are capable of simulating offense perfectly well.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 5 days ago

If only everyone who tried to warn about this sort of shit happening wasn't an alt-right troll, maybe something could have been done!

[–] Randomgal 0 points 5 days ago

But the lesson you're taking from it is that they are still not worth it, rather than maybe it's important to listen to people you don't agree with on everything, because people are complex?