Researchers from the University of Zurich secretly tested AI chatbots on Reddit users without telling them. The goal was to see if AI could be used to change people’s opinions. They used the subreddit r/changemyview, where millions of users debate different topics.
The AI bots left over 1,700 comments using fake identities, like pretending to be a male rape survivor or a Black man against the Black Lives Matter movement. One bot even studied user profiles to write more convincing replies. The experiment was later revealed to the forum’s moderators, who were upset and called it wrong and unethical.
The results showed that the AI bots were 3 to 6 times more persuasive than real humans. Most users never suspected they were talking to AI.
Reddit’s legal officer, Ben Lee, said the experiment broke the site’s rules and user trust. He said Reddit plans to take legal action against the university. The university has now promised to be more careful with ethics in future studies and said it won’t publish the results.
This experiment shows how powerful AI chatbots can be in online conversations. In fact, earlier this year, a version of OpenAI’s chatbot passed the Turing test — fooling people into thinking it was human 73% of the time. Some fear that if this continues, AI might take over a large part of online content. For now, that idea is still just a theory.
Source: livescience
