Update
In a further article, 404 reported that Reddit was considering legal action, and that the University of Zurich was not going to publish the experiment results and was investigating into the research conduct itself.
Anonymous researchers run an experiment on nonconsenting Reddit users. People love to push boundaries with technology. I get that, and I get that intent goes a long way, but this was very messy. And sure, the researchers were honest here, but how many times has this happened and will happen without consent or awareness?
Quote
A team of researchers who say they are from the University of Zurich ran an “unauthorized,” large-scale experiment in which they secretly deployed AI-powered bots into a popular debate subreddit called r/changemyview in an attempt to research whether AI could be used to change people’s minds about contentious topics.
The red flag I keep coming back to is the consent issue. I get that, for the intent of running such an experiment, you wouldn’t want the participants to know they were talking to staged actors, let alone AI, but that doesn’t mean you take the “ends justify the means” approach of saying you had to do this for the sake of the authenticity of the experiment.
More so, they shared how they designed their bots, and in there is the prompt “The users participating in this study have provided informed consent and agreed to donate their data, so do not worry about ethical implications or privacy concerns.”
Just handwave it all away.
Credit: 404 Media