Read a few articles about this, but went to r/changemyview because of the moderator's RFO-style write up and the comment by the Chief Legal Officer of Reddit.
Basically, there was a group of researchers from the University of Zurich that deployed AI-generated comments to study how LLM's could be used to change views of people...without disclosing they were doing it, without getting permission to use the bots, without contacting any moderators, and the whole super shitty aspect of what it was doing.
Some high-level examples of how AI was deployed include:
- AI pretending to be a victim of rape
- AI acting as a trauma counselor specializing in abuse
- AI accusing members of a religious group of "caus[ing] the deaths of hundreds of innocent traders and farmers and villagers."
- AI posing as a black man opposed to Black Lives Matter
- AI posing as a person who received substandard care in a foreign hospital.
First, a paragraph from the Chief Legal Officer's comment:
What this University of Zurich team did is deeply wrong on both a moral and legal level. 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.
Now, the RFO.
I like so many things about it. Except the fact that they had to write it.
Reading it really reminded me of the RFO's we used to write at Booking—which I've come to realize isn't so much a standard practice.
It's structure is as follows:
- Four introductory paragraphs full of context setting
- A list of contents for each header:
- Rules Clarification for this Post Only
- Experiment Notification
- Ethics Concerns
- University of Zurich Response
- Conclusion
- Contact Info for Questions/Concerns
- list of Active User Accounts for AI-generated Content
Then, because the post itself can't be edited, they're using the comments for updates.
URL: https://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/comments/1k8b2hj/meta_unauthorized_experiment_on_cmv_involving