Researchers secretly ran an unauthorized AI persuasion experiment on Reddit

Researchers who say they are from the University of Zurich ran an unauthorized, large-scale experiment that secretly deployed AI-powered bots on the Reddit debate subreddit r/changemyview to test whether AI could change people's minds on contentious topics. The bots made more than 1,000 comments over several months, and the article says some posed as a rape victim, a Black man opposed to the Black Lives Matter movement, and a domestic violence shelter worker. Some bots tailored their replies by inferring the original poster's gender, age, ethnicity, location, and political orientation from their posting history using another LLM.