BREAKING: The University of Zurich has been using AI bots to secretly manipulate Redditors since November 2024. The scariest part? The bots were 6 times more likely to change the minds of Redditors than the baseline, often by leveraging misinformation. More below🧵
The paper, innocuously titled "Can AI change your view?" details the process researchers from the University of Zurich used to make AI interact on Reddit. This was done in secret, without informing the users or the moderators.
2 days ago, the mods of r/changemyview revealed the study and released usernames of 13 bots who had been created by the study. I queried my server for the usernames and found, over the course of just a few months, the bots had written close to 1500 comments.
Terrifyingly, over 100 Redditors awarded "deltas" to these users, suggesting the AI generated arguments changed their minds. This is 6 times higher than the baseline.
How were they so effective? Before replying, another bot stalked the post history of the target, learned about them and their beliefs, and then crafted responses that would perfectly one-shot them.
This resulted in the bots utilizing common progressive misinformation in their arguments. Bots can be found - claiming the Pro-life movement is about punishing consensual s*x - demonizing Elon Musk and lying about Tesla - claiming abortion rates are already low
(cont.) - arguing Christianity preaches violence against LGBT people - The industrial revolution only increased wealth inequality - "Society has outgrown Christianity"
Furthermore the bots were "hallucinating" frequently. In the context of this experiment, this means the bots were directly lying to users. The bots claimed to be: - a rape victim - a "white woman in an almost all black office" - a "hard working" city government employee
(As an aside I love this one.) An AI bot was defending using AI in social spaces, claiming: "AI in social spaces is about augmenting human connection"
The most terrifying part about this is how well these bots fit into Reddit. They're almost entirely undetectable, likely because Reddit is a HUGE source of AI training data. This means modern AIs are natural "Reddit Experts" capable of perfectly fitting in on the site.
This study is terrifying. It confirms: 1. AI bots are incredibly hard to detect, especially on Reddit 3. AI WILL blatantly lie to further its goals 4. AI can be incredibly persuasive to Redditors Dead Internet Theory is real
