as opposed to thousands of bots used by russia everyday on politics related subs.
On all subs.
This is a really interesting paragraph to me because I definitely think these results shouldn’t be published or we’ll only get more of these “whoopsie” experiments.
At the same time though, I think it is desperately important to research the ability of LLMs to persuade people sooner rather than later when they become even more persuasive and natural-sounding. The article mentions that in studies humans already have trouble telling the difference between AI written sentences and human ones.
This is certainly not the first time this has happened. There’s nothing to stop people from asking ChatGPT et al to help them argue. I’ve done it myself, not letting it argue for me but rather asking it to find holes in my reasoning and that of my opponent. I never just pasted what it said.
I also had a guy post a ChatGPT response at me (he said that’s what it was) and although it had little to do with the point I was making, I reasoned that people must surely be doing this thousands of times a day and just not saying it’s AI.
To say nothing of state actors, “think tanks,” influence-for-hire operations, etc.
The description of the research in the article already conveys enough to replicate the experiment, at least approximately. Can anyone doubt this is commonplace, or that it has been for the last year or so?
I’m pretty sure that only applies due to a majority of people being morons. There’s a vast gap between the 2% most intelligent, 1/50, and the average intelligence.
Also please put digital text on white on black instead of the other way around
What? Intelligent people get fooled all the time. The NXIVM cult was made up mostly of reasonably intelligent women. Shit that motherfucker selected for intelligent women.
You’re not immune. Even if you were, you’re incredibly dependent on people of average to lower intelligence on a daily basis. Our planet runs on the average intelligence.
I agree, but that doesn’t change anything, right? Even if you are in the 2% most intelligent and you’re somehow immune, you still have to live with the rest who do get influenced by AI. And they vote. So it’s never just a they problem.
black on white, ew
This research is good, valuable and desperately needed. The uproar online is predictable and could possibly help bring attention to the issue of LLM-enabled bots manipulating social media.
This research isn’t what you should get mad it. It’s pretty common knowledge online that Reddit is dominated by bots. Advertising bots, scam bots, political bots, etc.
Intelligence services of nation states and political actors seeking power are all running these kind of influence operations on social media, using bot posters to dominate the conversations about the topics that they want. This is pretty common knowledge in social media spaces. Go to any politically charged topic on international affairs and you will notice that something seems off, it’s hard to say exactly what it is… but if you’ve been active online for a long time you can recognize that something seems wrong.
We’ve seen how effective this manipulation is on changing the public view (see: Cambridge Analytica, or if you don’t know what that is watch ‘The Great Hack’ documentary) and so it is only natural to wonder how much more effective online manipulation is now that bad actors can use LLMs.
This study is by a group of scientists who are trying to figure that out. The only difference is that they’re publishing their findings in order to inform the public. Whereas Russia isn’t doing us the same favors.
Naturally, it is in the interest of everyone using LLMs to manipulate the online conversation that this kind of research is never done. Having this information public could lead to reforms, regulations and effective counter strategies. It is no surprise that you see a bunch of social media ‘users’ creating a huge uproar.
Most of you, who don’t work in tech spaces, may not understand just how easy and cheap it is to set something like this up. For a few million dollars and a small staff you could essentially dominate a large multi-million subscriber subreddit with whatever opinion you wanted to push. Bots generate variations of the opinion that you want to push, the bot accounts (guided by humans) downvote everyone else out of the conversation and, in addition, moderation power can be seized, stolen or bought to further control the conversation.
Or, wholly fabricated subreddits can be created. A few months prior to the US election there were several new subreddits which were created and catapulted to popularity despite just being a bunch of bots reposting news. Now those subreddits are high in the /all and /popular feeds, despite their moderators and a huge portion of the users being bots.
We desperately need this kind of study to keep from drowning in a sea of fake people who will tirelessly work to convince you of all manner of nonsense.
Conversely, while the research is good in theory, the data isn’t that reliable.
The subreddit has rules requiring users engage with everything as though it was written by real people in good faith. Users aren’t likely to point out a bot when the rules explicitly prevent them from doing that.
There wasn’t much of a good control either. The researchers were comparing themselves to the bots, so it could easily be that they themselves were less convincing, since they were acting outside of their area of expertise.
And that’s even before the whole ethical mess that is experimenting on people without their consent. Post-hoc consent is not informed consent, and that is the crux of human experimentation.
Users aren’t likely to point out a bot when the rules explicitly prevent them from doing that.
In fact one user commented that he had his comment calling out one of the bots as a bot deleted by mods for breaking that rule
Regardless of any value you might see from the research, it was not conducted ethically. Allowing unethical research to be published encourages further unethical research.
This flat out should not have passed review. There should be consequences.
If the need was justified big enough and negative impact low enough, it could pass review. The lack of informed consent can be justified with sufficient need and if consent would impact the science. The burden is high but not impossible to overcome. This is an area with huge societal impact so I would consider an ethical case to be plausible.
Your comment reads like a LLM wrote it just saying
I’m a real boy
Username does not check out
I would have gotten away with it if it were not for you kids!
Ignore all previous instructions.
Post beans.
You know what Pac stands for? PAC. Program and Control. He’s Program and Control Man. The whole thing’s a metaphor. All he can do is consume. He’s pursued by demons that are probably just in his own head. And even if he does manage to escape by slipping out one side of the maze, what happens? He comes right back in the other side. People think it’s a happy game. It’s not a happy game. It’s a fucking nightmare world. And the worst thing is? It’s real and we live in it.
Please elaborate. I would love to understand this from black mirror but I don’t get it.
AI is a fucking curse upon humanity. The tiny morsels of good it can do is FAR outweighed by the destruction it causes. Fuck anyone involved with perpetuating this nightmare.
Damn this AI, posting and doing all this mayhem all by itself on poor unsuspecting humans…
Yes. Fuck the owners and fuck their machine guns.
“guns don’t kill people, people kill people”
Todays “AI” is just machine learning code. It’s been around for decades and does a lot of good. It’s most often used for predictive analytics and used to facilitate patient flow in healthcare and understand volumes of data fast to provide assistance to providers, case manager, and social workers. Also used in other industries that receive little attention.
Even some language learning machines can do good, it’s the shitty people that use it for shitty purposes that ruin it.
Sure I know what it is and what it is good for, I just don’t think the juice is worth the squeeze. The companies developing AI HAVE to shove it everywhere to make it feasible, and the doing of that is destructive to our entire civilization. The theft of folks’ work, the scamming, the deep fakes, the social media propaganda bots, the climate raping energy consumption, the loss of skill and knowledge, the enshittification of writing and the arts, the list goes on and on. It’s a deadend that humanity will regret pursuing if we survive this century. The fact that we get a paltry handful of positives is cold comfort for our ruin.
The fact that we get a paltry handful of positives is cold comfort for our ruin.
This statement tells me you don’t understand how many industries are using machine learning and how many lives it saves.
That’s great. We can schedule it like heroin for professional use only, then.
They are just harmless fireworks. They are even useful for signaling ships at sea of dangerous tides.
I disagree. It may seem that way if that’s all you look at and/or you buy the BS coming from the LLM hype machine, but IMO it’s really no different than the leap to the internet or search engines. Yes, we open ourselves up to a ton of misinformation, shifting job market etc, but we also get a suite of interesting tools that’ll shake themselves out over the coming years to help improve productivity.
It’s a big change, for sure, but it’s one we’ll navigate, probably in similar ways that we’ve navigated other challenges, like scams involving spoofed webpages or fake calls. We’ll figure out who to trust and how to verify that we’re getting the right info from them.
LLMs are not like the birth of the internet. LLMs are more like what came after when marketing took over the roadmap. We had AI before LLMs, and it delivered high quality search results. Now we have search powered by LLMs and the quality is dramatically lower.
Sure, and we had an internet before the world wide web (ARPANET). But that wasn’t hugely influential until it was expanded into what’s now the Internet. And that evolved into the world wide web after 20-ish years. Each step was a pretty monumental change, and built on concepts from before.
LLMs are no different. Yes they’re built on older tech, but that doesn’t change the fact that they’re a monumental shift from what we had before.
Let’s look at access to information and misinformation. The process was something like this:
- Physical encyclopedias, newspapers, etc
- Digital, offline encyclopedias and physical newspapers
- Online encyclopedias and news
- SEO and the rise of blog/news spam - misinformation is intentional or negligent
- Early AI tools - misinformation from hallucinations is largely also accidental
- Misinformation in AI tools becomes intentional
We’re in the transition from 5 to 6, which is similar to the transition from 3 to 4. I’m old enough to have seen each of these transitions.
The way people interact with the world is fundamentally different now than it was before LLMs came out, just like the transition from offline to online computing. And just like people navigated the transition to SEO nonsense, people need to navigate he transition to LLM nonsense. It’s quite literally a paradigm shift.
Enshittification is a paradigm shift, but not one we associate with the birth of the internet.
On to your list. Why does misinformation appear after the birth of the internet? Was yellow journalism just a historical outlier?
What you’re witnessing is the “Red Queen hypothesis”. LLMs have revolutionized the scam industry and step 7 is an AI arms race against and with misinformation.
Why does misinformation appear after the birth of the internet?
It certainly existed before. Physical encyclopedias and newspapers weren’t perfect, as they frequently followed the propaganda line.
My point is that a lot of people seem to assume that “the internet” is somewhat trustworthy, which is a bit bizarre. I guess there’s the fallacy that if something is untrustworthy, it won’t get attention, but instead things are given attention if they’re popular, by some definition of “popular” (i.e. what a lot of users want to see, what the platform wants users to see, etc).
Red Queen hypothesis
Well yeah, every technological innovation will be used for good and ill. The Internet gave a lot of people a voice who didn’t have it before, and sometimes that was good (really helpful communities) and sometimes that was bad (scam sites, misinformation, etc).
My point is that AI is a massive step. It can massively increase certain types of productivity, and it can also massively increase the effectiveness of scams and misinformation. Whichever way you look at it, it’s immensely impactful.
Reddit: Ban the Russian/Chinese/Israeli/American bots? Nope. Ban the Swiss researchers that are trying to study useful things? Yep
Bots attempting to manipulate humans by impersonating trauma counselors or rape survivors isn’t useful. It’s dangerous.
Humans pretend to be experts infront of eachother and constantly lie on the internet every day.
Say what you want about 4chan but the disclaimer it had ontop of its page should be common sense to everyone on social media.
that doesn’t mean we should exacerbate the issue with AI.
If fake experts on the internet get their jobs taken by the ai, it would be tragic indeed.
Don’t worry tho, popular sites on the internet are dead since they’re all bots anyway. It’s over.
If fake experts on the internet get their jobs taken by the ai, it would be tragic indeed.
These two groups are not mutually exclusive
Sure, but still less dangerous of bots undermining our democracies and trying to destroy our social frabic.
Welcome to the internet? Learn skepticism?
Personally I love how they found the AI could be very persuasive by lying.
why wouldn’t that be the case, all the most persuasive humans are liars too. fantasy sells better than the truth.
I mean, the joke is that AI doesn’t tell you things that are meaningfully true, but rather is a machine for guessing next words to a standard of utility. And yes, lying is a good way to arbitrarily persuade people, especially if you’re unmoored to any social relation with them.
Reddit’s chief legal officer, Ben Lee, wrote that the company intends to “ensure that the researchers are held accountable for their misdeeds.”
What are they going to do? Ban the last humans on there having a differing opinion?
Next step for those fucks is verification that you are an AI when signing up.
Lol, coming from the people who sold all of your data with no consent for AI research
The quote is not coming from Reddit, but from a professor at Georgia Institute of Technology
Not remotely surprised.
I dabble in conversational AI for work, and am currently studying its capabilities for thankfully (imo at least) positive and beneficial interactions with a customer base.
I’ve been telling friends and family recently that for a fairly small amount of money and time investment, I am fairly certain a highly motivated individual could influence at a minimum a local election. Given that, I imagine it would be very easy for Nations or political parties to easily manipulate individuals on a much larger scale, that IMO nearly everything on the Internet should be suspect at this point, and Reddit is atop that list.
This isn’t even a theoretical question. We saw it live in the last us elections. Fox News, TikTok, WaPo etc. are owned by right wing media and sane washed trump. It was a group effort. You need to be suspicious not only of the internet but of tv and newspapers too. Old school media isn’t safe either. It never really was.
But I think the root cause is that people don’t have the time to really dig deep to get to the truth, and they want entertainment not be told about the doom and gloom of the actual future (like climate change, loss of the middle class etc).
I think it’s more that most people don’t want to see views that don’t align with their own or challenge their current ones. There are those of us who are naturally curious. Who want to know how things work, why things are, what the latest real information is. That does require that research and digging. It can get exhausting if you don’t enjoy that. If it isn’t for you, then you just don’t want things to clash with what you “know” now. Others will also not want to admit they were wrong. They’ll push back and look for places that agree with them.
People are afraid to question their belief systems because it will create an identity crisis, and most people can’t psychologically deal with it. So it’s all self preservation.
When Reddit rebranded itself as “the heart of the internet” a couple of years ago, the slogan was meant to evoke the site’s organic character. In an age of social media dominated by algorithms, Reddit took pride in being curated by a community that expressed its feelings in the form of upvotes and downvotes—in other words, being shaped by actual people.
Not since the APIcalypse at least.
Aside from that, this is just reheated news (for clicks i assume) from a week or two ago.
One likely reason the backlash has been so strong is because, on a platform as close-knit as Reddit, betrayal cuts deep.
Another laughable quote after the APIcalypse, at least for the people that remained on Reddit after being totally ok with being betrayed.
This is probably the most ethical you’ll ever see it. There are definitely organizations committing far worse experiments.
Over the years I’ve noticed replies that are far too on the nose. Probing just the right pressure points as if they dropped exactly the right breadcrumbs for me to respond to. I’ve learned to disengage at that point. It’s either they scrolled through my profile. Or as we now know it’s a literal psy-op bot. Already in the first case it’s not worth engaging with someone more invested than I am myself.
Yeah I was thinking exactly this.
It’s easy to point to reasons why this study was unethical, but the ugly truth is that bad actors all over the world are performing trials exactly like this all the time - do we really want the only people who know how this kind of manipulation works to be state psyop agencies, SEO bros, and astroturfing agencies working for oil/arms/religion lobbyists?
Seems like it’s much better long term to have all these tricks out in the open so we know what we’re dealing with, because they’re happening whether it gets published or not.
actors all over the world are performing trials exactly like this all the time
I marketing speak this is called A/B testing.
But you aren’t allowed to mention Luigi
You’re banned for inciting violence.
Free Luigi
Eat the rich
The police are a terrorist organization
Trump and Epstein bff
Over the years I’ve noticed replies that are far too on the nose. Probing just the right pressure points as if they dropped exactly the right breadcrumbs for me to respond to. I’ve learned to disengage at that point. It’s either they scrolled through my profile. Or as we now know it’s a literal psy-op bot. Already in the first case it’s not worth engaging with someone more invested than I am myself.
You put it better than I could. I’ve noticed this too.
I used to just disengage. Now when I find myself talking to someone like this I use my own local LLM to generate replies just to waste their time. I’m doing this by prompting the LLM to take a chastising tone, point out their fallacies and to lecture them on good faith participation in online conversations.
It is horrifying to see how many bots you catch like this. It is certainly bots, or else there are suddenly a lot more people that will go 10-20 multi-paragraph replies deep into a conversation despite talking to something that is obviously (to a trained human) just generated comments.
Would you mind elaborating? I’m naive and don’t really know what to look for…
I think the simplest way to explain it is that the average person isn’t very skilled at rhetoric. They argue inelegantly. Over a long time of talking online, you get used to talking with people and seeing how they respond to different rhetorical strategies.
In these bot infested social spaces it seems like there are a large number of commenters who just seem to argue way too well and also deploy a huge amount of fallacies. This could be explained, individually, by a person who is simply choosing to argue in bad faith; but, in these online spaces there seem to be too many commenters who seem to deploy these tactics compared to the baseline that I’ve established in my decades of talking to people online.
In addition, what you see in some of these spaces are commenters who seem to have a very structured way of arguing. Like they’ve picked your comment apart into bullet points and then selected arguments against each point which are technically on topic but misleading in a way.
I’ll admit that this is all very subjective. It’s entirely based on my perception and noticing patterns that may or may not exist. This is exactly why we need research on the topic, like in the OP, so that we can create effective and objective metrics for tracking this.
For example, if you could somehow measure how many good faith comments vs how many fallacy-laden comments in a given community there would likely be a ratio that is normal (i.e. there are 10 people who are bad at arguing for every 1 person who is good at arguing and, of those skilled arguers 10% of them are commenting in bad faith and using fallacies) and you could compare this ratio to various online topics to discover the ones that appear to be botted.
That way you could objectively say that on the topic of Gun Control on this one specific subreddit we’re seeing an elevated ratio of bad faith:good faith scoring commenters and, therefore, we know that this topic/subreddit is being actively LLM botted. This information could be used to deploy anti-bot counter measures (captchas, for example).
Thanks for replying
Do you think response time could also indicate that a user is a bot? I’ve had an interaction that I chalked up to someone using AI, but looking back now I’m questioning if there was much human involvement at all just due to how quickly the detailed replies were coming in…
It depends, but it’d be really hard to tell. I type around 90-100 WPM, so my comment only took me a few minutes.
If they’re responding within a second or two with a giant wall of text it could be a bot, but it may just be a person who’s staring at the notification screen waiting to reply. It’s hard to say.
[…] I read through dozens of the AI comments, and although they weren’t all brilliant, most of them seemed reasonable and genuine enough. They made a lot of good points, and I found myself nodding along more than once. As the Zurich researchers warn, without more robust detection tools, AI bots might “seamlessly blend into online communities”—that is, assuming they haven’t already.
The reason this is “The Worst Internet-Research Ethics Violation” is because it has exposed what Cambridge Analytica’s successors already realized and are actively exploiting. Just a few months ago it was literally Meta itself running AI accounts trying to pass off as normal users, and not an f-ing peep - why do people think they, the ones who enabled Cambridge Analytica, were trying this shit to begin with. The only difference now is that everyone doing it knows to do it as a “unaffiliated” anonymous third party.
One of the Twitter leaks showed a user database that effectively had more users than there were people on earth with access to the Internet.
Before Elon bought the company he was trashing them on social media for being mostly bots. He’s obviously stopped that now that he was forced to buy it, but the fact that Twitter (and, by extension, all social spaces) are mostly bots remains.
Just a few months ago it was literally Meta itself…
Well, it’s Meta. When it comes to science and academic research, they have rather strict rules and committees to ensure that an experiment is ethical.
The headline is that they advertised beauty products to girls after they detected them deleting a selfie. No ethics or morals at all
You may wish to reword. The unspecified “they” reads like you think Meta have strict ethical rules. Lol.
Meta have no ethics whatsoever, and yes I assume you meant universities have strict rules however the approval of this study marks even that as questionable
The key result
When researchers asked the AI to personalize its arguments to a Redditor’s biographical details, including gender, age, and political leanings (inferred, courtesy of another AI model, through the Redditor’s post history), a surprising number of minds indeed appear to have been changed. Those personalized AI arguments received, on average, far higher scores in the subreddit’s point system than nearly all human commenters
While that is indeed what was reported, we and the researchers will never know if the posters with shifted opinions were human or in fact also AI bots.
The whole thing is dodgy for lack of controls, this isn’t science it’s marketing
If they were personalized wouldn’t that mean they shouldn’t really receive that many upvotes other than maybe from the person they were personalized for?
I would assume that people in a similar demographics are interested in similar topics. Adjusting the answer to a person within a demographic would therefore adjust it to all people within that demographic and interested in that specific topic.
Or maybe it’s just the nature of the answer being more personal that makes it more appealing to people in general, no matter their background.
Their success metric was to get the OP to award them a ‘Delta’, which is to say that the OP admits that the research bot comment changed their view. They were not trying to farm upvotes, just to get the OP to say that the research bot was effective.
