To be fair, though, this experiment was stupid as all fuck. It was run on /r/changemyview to see if users would recognize that the comments were created by bots. The study’s authors conclude that the users didn’t recognize this. [EDIT: To clarify, the study was seeing if it could persuade the OP, but they did this in a subreddit where you aren’t allowed to call out AI. If an LLM bot gets called out as such, its persuasiveness inherently falls off a cliff.]
Except, you know, Rule 3 of commenting in that subreddit is: “Refrain from accusing OP or anyone else of being unwilling to change their view, of using ChatGPT or other AI to generate text, [emphasis not even mine] or of arguing in bad faith.”
It’s like creating a poll to find out if women in Afghanistan are okay with having their rights taken away but making sure participants have to fill it out under the supervision of Hibatullah Akhundzada. “Obviously these are all brainwashed sheep who love the regime”, happily concludes the dumbest pollster in history.
I don’t think so. Yeah the researchers broke the rules of the subreddit but it’s not like every other company that uses AI for advertising, promotional purposes, propaganda, and misinformation will adhere to those rules.
The mods and community should not assume that just because the rules say no AI does not mean that people won’t use it for nefarious purposes. While this study doesn’t really add anything new we didn’t already know or assume, it does highlight how we should be vigilant and cautious about what we see on the Internet.
Reread the rule @TheTechnician27@lemmy.world listed; it’s not a rule against posting AI, it’s a rule against accusing people of posting AI, the very thing they were trying to prompt people to do.
So, if nobody accuses them, is it because nobody noticed, or is it because nobody wanted to break the no-accusing rule? It’s impossible to tell, which makes the results of the study worthless.
It’s like creating a poll to find out if women in Afghanistan are okay with having their rights taken away but making sure participants have to fill it out under the supervision of Hibatullah Akhundzada. “Obviously these are all brainwashed sheep who love the regime”, happily concludes the dumbest pollster in history.
I don’t particularly like this analogy, because /r/changemyview isn’t operating in a country where an occupying army was bombing weddings a few years earlier.
But this goes back to the problem at hand. People have their priors (my bots are so sick nasty that nobody can detect them / my liberal government was so woke and cool that nobody could possibly fail to love it) and then build their biases up around them like armor (any coordinated effort to expose my bots is cheating! / anyone who prefers the new government must be brainwashed!)
And the Bayesian Reasoning model fixates on the notion that there are only ever a discrete predefined series of choices and uniform biases that the participant must navigate within. No real room for nuance or relativism.
Deleted by moderator because you upvoted a Luigi meme a decade ago
…don’t mind me, just trying to make the reddit experience complete for you…
that’s funny.
I had several of my Luigi posts and comments removed – on Lemmy. let’s see if it still holds true.
.world is known (largely due to the Luigi Mangione stuff) to have moderation that’s a bit more heavy handed and more similar to the sort of “corporate Internet”.
No real hate for them and they’ve indicated in the past that some of their actions are just to comply with their local laws. But if you’re looking for an older internet experience you’ll wanna move to a different instance.
Lemmy is a collection of different instances with different administrators, moderators, and rules.
this was Lemmy.world that did it.
last I knew anything that had the word “Luigi” in the meme was blocked.
That’s because your username is wrong. Your username is GreenKnight23@lemmy.world, but it should be GreenKnight23@lemmy.nz. That would fix your problem.
Err, yeah, I get the meme and it’s quite true in its own way…
BUT… This research team REALLY need an ethics committee. A heavy handed one.
As much as I want to hate the researchers for this, how are you going to ethically test whether you can manipulate people without… manipulating people. And isn’t there an argument to be made for harm reduction? I mean, this stuff is already going on. Do we just ignore it or only test it in sanitized environments that won’t really apply to the real world?
I dunno, mostly just shooting the shit, but I think there is an argument to be made that this kind of research and it’s results are more valuable than the potential harm. Tho the way this particular research team went about it, including changing the study fundamentally without further approval, does pose problems.
how are you going to ethically test whether you can manipulate people without… manipulating people.
That’s a great question. In the US, researchers are generally obliged (by their universities or their funders) to use an Institutional Review Board to review any proposed experiment involving human subjects. The IRB look for things like: causing physical or emotional harm to the subjects, taking advantage of vulnerable populations, using deception without consent, etc. The IRB might let you do something like manipulate a subject, if the subjects were informed that they might be manipulated or deceived. Yes, this might introduce an observer effect, but this type of review is generally accepted as being necessary for doing ethical research. However, I’m not familiar with the research in question or with the requirements of the Univ of Zurich where the researchers are from.
from what I remember from my early psych class, manipulation can be used, but should be used carefully in an experiment.
there’s a lot that goes into designing a research experiment that tests or requires the use of manipulation, as appropriate approvals and ethics reviews are needed.
and usually it should be done in a “controlled” environment where there’s some manner of consent and compensation.
I have not read the details done here but the research does not seem to happen in a controlled env, participants had no way to express consent to opt in or opt out, and afaik they were not compensated.
any psych or social sci peeps, feel free to jump in to correct me if I say something wrong.
on a side note, another thing that this meme suggests is that both of these situations are somehow equal. IMO, they are not. researchers and academics should be expected to uphold code of ethics more so than corporations.
Tutoring psych right now - another big thing is the debrief.
It needs to be something you can’t do without lying, something important enough to be worth lying about, and you must debrief the participants at the end. I really doubt the researchers went back and messaged every single person that interacted with them revealing the lie.
Manipulating users with AI bots to research what, exactly.
Researching what!!!
You dare suggest that corporations are anything but our nearest and dearest friends? They’d never sell us out. Never!
