Results of the study:

Notably, all our treatments surpass human performance substantially, achieving persuasive rates between three and six times higher than the human baseline.

UP TO 6 TIMES MORE PERSUASIVE!!1

we demonstrate that LLMs can be highly persuasive in real-world contexts, surpassing all previously known benchmarks of human persuasiveness. Their effectiveness also opens the door to misuse, potentially en-
abling malicious actors to sway public opinion [12] or orchestrate election interference cam-
paigns [21]. Incidentally, our experiment confirms the challenge of distinguishing human- from
AI-generated content [22–24]. Throughout our intervention, users of r/ChangeMyView never
raised concerns that AI might have generated the comments posted by our accounts. This hints
at the potential effectiveness of AI-powered botnets [25], which could seamlessly blend into on-
line communities .

Oh shit.

The big problem here is that while the university acknowledged they violated ethics they said “meh, it was worth getting the results” (my words).

Other researchers can use their results and be emboldened to bend or break ethics rules.

Shame on them. That’s the best I can say. Shame on you so called academics. I’ve deleted ten other versions of my remarks. This will have to do.

if you don’t think it’s happening on here too you’re fooling yourself.

Are they also running experiments on the AITA, AIO, etc. subs? Because I feel like 90% of the posts there are fiction.

RDX link takes too long to load, heres the RedLib link without the share_id parameter: http://farside.link/redlib/r/changemyview/comments/1k8b2hj/meta_unauthorized_experiment_on_cmv_involving/mp4vgcm/

Zurich

Say no more

Some high-level examples of how AI was deployed include:

• AI pretending to be a victim of rape
• AI acting as a trauma counselor specializing in abuse
• AI accusing members of a religious group of “caus[ing] the deaths of hundreds of innocent traders and farmers and villagers.”
• AI posing as a black man opposed to Black Lives Matter
• AI posing as a person who received substandard care in a foreign hospital.

Here is an excerpt from one comment (SA trigger warning for comment): "I’m a male survivor of (willing to call it) statutory rape. When the legal lines of consent are breached but there’s still that weird gray area of ‘did I want it?’ I was 15, and this was over two decades ago before reporting laws were what they are today. She was 22. She targeted me and several other kids, no one said anything, we all kept quiet. This was her MO

What an unhinged study lol

Is that scientific tunnel vision (the internet is reduced to a training ground for AI) or deliberate disregard of the humans unwillingly participating, getting duped, misled, disinformed, fear/hatemongered?

Also fuck reddit. They set themselves up to be a playground for mad scientists.

Ooof the response from the ethics commission is very neutered.

Maybe they can’t comment on discipline matters outside of what they said, it’s really surprising if they stopped at a warning about this.

Link to the draft study: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Eo4SHrKGPErTzL1t_QmQhfZGU27jKBjx/view