A team of researchers who say they are from the University of Zurich ran an “unauthorized,” large-scale experiment in which they secretly deployed AI-powered bots into a popular debate subreddit called r/changemyview in an attempt to research whether AI could be used to change people’s minds about contentious topics.
more than 1,700 comments made by AI bots
The bots made more than a thousand comments over the course of several months and at times pretended to be a “rape victim,” a “Black man” who was opposed to the Black Lives Matter movement, someone who “work[s] at a domestic violence shelter,” and a bot who suggested that specific types of criminals should not be rehabilitated.
The experiment was revealed over the weekend in a post by moderators of the r/changemyview subreddit, which has more than 3.8 million subscribers. In the post, the moderators said they were unaware of the experiment while it was going on and only found out about it after the researchers disclosed it after the experiment had already been run. In the post, moderators told users they “have a right to know about this experiment,” and that posters in the subreddit had been subject to “psychological manipulation” by the bots.
r/changemyview is one of those “fascist gateway” subs, or at least one of the subs that I suspect as that. The gateway works by introduing “controverial” topics which are really fascist but they get upvote because “look at this idiot!”. But slowly it moves the overton window and gives those people who actually do believe in inequality a space to grow in. Opinions that are racist, anti-feminist, anti-trans, ultra-nationalist, authoritarian or generally against equality and justice.
Reddit was slowly boiled over the last decade like a frog.
And you can be absolutely sure that not only researchers are researching this for science, there are plenty of special interests that do this. It really started with climate change denial.
seems like a great reason: upvoted
Lol