Researchers Secretly Ran a Massive, Unauthorized AI Persuasion Experiment on Reddit Users : reddit

this post was submitted on 28 Apr 2025

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Researchers Secretly Ran a Massive, Unauthorized AI Persuasion Experiment on Reddit Users (www.404media.co)

submitted 3 days ago by zdhzm2pgp@lemmy.ml to c/reddit@lemmy.ml

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[–] davel@lemmy.ml 23 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

Emphasis mine:

A team of researchers who say they are from the University of Zurich ran an “unauthorized,” large-scale experiment […]

This whole thing is sus from the get-go. Why should I believe anything these anonymous supposed “researchers” say?

[–] HiddenLayer555@lemmy.ml 17 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

If you have no qualms about pretending to be a sexual assault survivor, trauma counselor, and/or a Black man opposed to Black Lives Matter, you meet the dictionary definition of a sociopath. And I don't give a shit about "oh it's AI doing it not the people." I'm sorry, is the AI sentient? No. The humans are, and they chose to run the AI. I don't even care if those personas were entirely the AI's creation, if you didn't stop the AI as soon as you realize it was going there you're still a horrible person. Same with if you didn't even check what the AI was doing while running this """research"""

[+] PhilipTheBucket@ponder.cat 3 points 3 days ago (1 children)

[removed by mod]

[–] davel@lemmy.ml 2 points 3 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

*Langley and Eglin

Also, previously.

[–] Ganbat@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 3 days ago (1 children)

There's no star. There's a plus, but no star.

[–] davel@lemmy.ml 2 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (1 children)

Sure. Every country of nontrivial size likely has propaganda apparatuses. It’s more a matter of (1) scale, (2) purpose, (3) efficacy, and (4) to what extent they face externally vs internally. I think US psyop is proportional with the rest of its military-industrial complex, which is as large as the next nine or ten largest militaries combined. It’s laughable that Russian psyop has moved the needle much with the US electorate, never mind swung an election for Trump. The US is just a weak, vulnerable smol bean country whose military-industrial complex invented the internet.

[–] Ganbat@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 2 days ago (1 children)

It’s laughable that Russian psyop has moved the needle much with the US electorate, never mind swung an election for Trump.

Not really. Not what I was talking about, but also, not really. All it would take is a couple hundred computers and access to malleable people. Most governments could manage the first, and Twitter and Facebook tend to consolidate the second. I'd say just about any country that isn't considered third-world could move a large portion of the American populace if they wanted.

[–] davel@lemmy.ml 1 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

It’s the US government that heavily influences what content gets promoted/demoted/censored on US corporate social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, YouTube, Instagram, etc., and that is why anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist software developers created Lemmy in the first place.