Commenters on the popular subreddit r/changemymind found out last weekend that they've been majorly duped for months. University of Zurich researchers set out to "investigate the persuasiveness of Large Language Models (LLMs) in natural online environments" by unleashing bots pretending to be a trauma counselor, a "Black man opposed to Black Lives Matter," and a sexual assault survivor on unwitting posters. The bots left 1,783 comments and amassed over 10,000 comment karma before being exposed.
Now, Reddit's Chief Legal Officer Ben Lee says the company is considering legal action over the "improper and highly unethical experiment" that is "deeply wrong on both a moral and legal level." The researchers have been banned from Reddit. The University of Zurich told 404 Media that it is investigating the experiment's methods and will not be publishing its results.
However, you can still find parts of the research online. The paper has not been peer reviewed and should be taken with a gigantic grain of salt, but what it claims to show is interesting. Using GPT-4o, Claude 3.5 Sonnet, and Llama 3.1-405B, researchers instructed the bots to manipulate commenters by examining their posting …
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