This is the final straw. I deleted my Reddit account.

From the article: Chief Legal Officer Ben Lee responded to the controversy on Monday, writing that the researchers' actions were "deeply wrong on both a moral and legal level" and a violation of Reddit's site-wide rules.

I don't believe for one moment Reddit admins didn't know this was going on especially since it involved mining user data to feed AI. Since when does Reddit have a moral compass? Their compass always points north to maximum shareholder value which right now is looking like anything to do with AI.

Are you a researcher? Cuz you gotta tell me you are a researcher! Right?

Wow, this is pretty concerning. As someone who spends a lot of time on Reddit, I find it really unsettling that researchers would experiment on users without their knowledge. It's like walking into a coffee shop for a casual chat and unknowingly becoming part of a psychology experiment!

CMV: this was a good research akin to something like white hat hackers where the point is to find and expose security exploits. What this research did is point out how easy it is to manipulate people in a "debate" forum that doesn't allow people from pointing out bad behavior. If this is being done by researchers and publishing it. It's also being done be nefarious actors that will not disclose it.

According to the subreddit’s moderators, the AI took on numerous different identities in comments during the course of the experiment, including a sexual assault survivor, a trauma counselor “specializing in abuse,” and a “Black man opposed to Black Lives Matter.”

You don't need an LLM for that, you got Dean Browning with his xitter alts

I'm glad both the mod team and reddit itself are pursuing legal action and formal complaints, this was scummy when Facebook did it, it still is when researchers do it.

/r/askus was FUCKING OBVIOUS

Conservatives of Reddit: "Dumbass question no one will truthfully answer."

I mean. Reddit was botted to death after the Jon Stewart event in DC. People and corporations realized how powerful Reddit was. Sucks that the site didn’t try to stop it. Now Ai just makes it easier.

Just in my own understanding of life. There are these political think tanks. They are staffed by your old professors professors professor. These guys make big bucks to sit around and do this stuff then figure out attack points. I really think they had this research probably 20 years ago. I figure that's what the guys do all day. Eventually the results end up in the firm that handles Steven Crowder, Ben Shapiro, that guy living in the Philippines.

Worthless research.

That subreddit bans you for accusing others of speaking in bad faith or for using ChatGPT.

Even if a user called it out, they'd be censored.

Edit: you know what, it's unlikely they didn't read the side bar. So, worse than worthless. Bad faith disinfo.

This is deeply unethical, when doing research you need to respect the people who participate and you have to respect what their story is. So by using a regurgitative artificial idiot (RAI) to make them their mind is not respecting them or their story.

The people who are being experimented on were not given compensation for their time and the work they contributed. While it isn’t required it is good practice in research to not actively burn bridges with people so that they will want to participate in more studies.

These people were also not given knowledge they were participating in a study nor were they given the choice to leave with their contributions at their will. Which entirely makes the study unpublishable since the data was not gathered with fucking consent.

This isn’t even taking into account any of the other things which cross ethical lines. All the “researchers” involved should never be allowed to ever conduct or participate in a study of any kind again. Their university should be fined and heavily scrutinized for their work in enabling this shit. These assholes have done damage to all researchers globally who will now have a harder time pitching real studies to potential participants because they could remember this story and how “researchers” took advantage of unknowing individuals. Shame on these people and hope they face real consequences.

I haven't seen this question asked.

how can the results be trusted that they were actually interacting with real humans?

what's the percentage of bot-to-bot contamination?

this study looks more like a hacky farce that is only meant to bring attention to our manipulation and less like actual science.

any professional that puts their name on this steaming pile should be ashamed of themselves.

To me it was kind of obvious. There were a bunch of accounts that would comment these weird sentences and all of them had variants of JohnSmith1234 as their username. Part of the reason I left tbh.

Reddit: "Nobody gets to secretly experiment on Reddit users with AI-generated comments but us!"

What they should do is convince a smaller subsection of reddit users to break off to a new site, maybe entice them with promises of a FOSS platform. Maybe a handful of real people and all the rest LLM bots. They'll never know

Reddit? More like Deddit, amirite?

Consent? Ethics? How about fuck you! —those "researchers," probably

With all the bots on the site why complain about these ones?

Edit: auto$#&"$correct

Good i spent at least the last 3 years on reddit making asinine comments, phrases, and punctuation to throw off any AI botS