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A group of researchers who secretly performed a large-scale, and completely unauthorized, AI persuasion experiment on Reddit users now face potential legal action. They reportedly deployed dozens of AI chatbots in a popular subreddit to debate with users about an assortment of controversial issues.
According to 404 Media, researchers from the University of Zurich ran what Reddit’s Chief Legal Officer Ben Lee called a “improper and highly unethical experiment.” While doing so, the AI chatbots made more than 1,700 comments over several months while pretending to be several different individuals including a Black man who opposed the Black Lives Matter movement, a trauma counselor specializing in abuse, and a person who believes certain types of criminals should not be rehabilitated. Lee says Reddit has reached out to the research team with “formal legal demands.”
“What this University of Zurich team did is deeply wrong on both a moral and legal level,” Lee stated. “It violates academic research and human rights norms, and is prohibited by Reddit’s user agreement and rules, in addition to the subreddit rules. We have banned all accounts associated with the University of Zurich research effort.
“Additionally, while we were able to detect many of these fake accounts, we will continue to strengthen our inauthentic content detection capabilities, and we have been in touch with the moderation team to ensure we’ve removed any AI-generated content associated with this research.”
Some of the bots in question “personalized” their comments by researching the person who had started the discussion and tailoring their answers to them by guessing the person’s “gender, age, ethnicity, location, and political orientation as inferred from their posting history using another LLM.”
“The researchers did not contact us ahead of the study and if they had, we would have declined,” a moderator post on the r/changemyview subreddit reads. “We have requested an apology from the researchers and asked that this research not be published, among other complaints.”
The Reddit post goes on to state, “We requested that the researchers do not publish the results of this unauthorized experiment. The researchers claim that this experiment ‘yields important insights’ and that ‘suppressing publication is not proportionate to the importance of the insights the study yields.’ We strongly reject this position.
“Community-level experiments impact communities, not just individuals.
“Allowing publication would dramatically encourage further intrusion by researchers, contributing to increased community vulnerability to future non-consensual human subjects experimentation. Researchers should have a disincentive to violating communities in this way, and non-publication of findings is a reasonable consequence. We find the researchers’ disregard for future community harm caused by publication offensive.”
A University of Zurich spokesperson has since told 404 Media, “In light of these events, the Ethics Committee of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences intends to adopt a stricter review process in the future and, in particular, to coordinate with the communities on the platforms prior to experimental studies. The relevant authorities at the University of Zurich are aware of the incidents and will now investigate them in detail and critically review the relevant assessment processes.The researchers have decided on their own accord not to publish the research results.”
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