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‘The Worst Internet-Research Ethics Violation I Have Ever Seen’ | The most persuasive “people” on a popular subreddit turned out to be a front for a secret AI experiment. (www.theatlantic.com)

submitted 3 weeks ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 39 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 weeks ago

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

[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

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?

[–] [email protected] 8 points 3 weeks ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 weeks ago

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.