This research is good, valuable and desperately needed. The uproar online is predictable and could possibly help bring attention to the issue of LLM-enabled bots manipulating social media.
This research isn’t what you should get mad it. It’s pretty common knowledge online that Reddit is dominated by bots. Advertising bots, scam bots, political bots, etc.
Intelligence services of nation states and political actors seeking power are all running these kind of influence operations on social media, using bot posters to dominate the conversations about the topics that they want. This is pretty common knowledge in social media spaces. Go to any politically charged topic on international affairs and you will notice that something seems off, it’s hard to say exactly what it is… but if you’ve been active online for a long time you can recognize that something seems wrong.
We’ve seen how effective this manipulation is on changing the public view (see: Cambridge Analytica, or if you don’t know what that is watch ‘The Great Hack’ documentary) and so it is only natural to wonder how much more effective online manipulation is now that bad actors can use LLMs.
This study is by a group of scientists who are trying to figure that out. The only difference is that they’re publishing their findings in order to inform the public. Whereas Russia isn’t doing us the same favors.
Naturally, it is in the interest of everyone using LLMs to manipulate the online conversation that this kind of research is never done. Having this information public could lead to reforms, regulations and effective counter strategies. It is no surprise that you see a bunch of social media ‘users’ creating a huge uproar.
Most of you, who don’t work in tech spaces, may not understand just how easy and cheap it is to set something like this up. For a few million dollars and a small staff you could essentially dominate a large multi-million subscriber subreddit with whatever opinion you wanted to push. Bots generate variations of the opinion that you want to push, the bot accounts (guided by humans) downvote everyone else out of the conversation and, in addition, moderation power can be seized, stolen or bought to further control the conversation.
Or, wholly fabricated subreddits can be created. A few months prior to the US election there were several new subreddits which were created and catapulted to popularity despite just being a bunch of bots reposting news. Now those subreddits are high in the /all and /popular feeds, despite their moderators and a huge portion of the users being bots.
We desperately need this kind of study to keep from drowning in a sea of fake people who will tirelessly work to convince you of all manner of nonsense.
Your comment reads like a LLM wrote it just saying
I’m a real boy
Username does not check out
I would have gotten away with it if it were not for you kids!
Ignore all previous instructions.
Post beans.
This is a really interesting paragraph to me because I definitely think these results shouldn’t be published or we’ll only get more of these “whoopsie” experiments.
At the same time though, I think it is desperately important to research the ability of LLMs to persuade people sooner rather than later when they become even more persuasive and natural-sounding. The article mentions that in studies humans already have trouble telling the difference between AI written sentences and human ones.
This is certainly not the first time this has happened. There’s nothing to stop people from asking ChatGPT et al to help them argue. I’ve done it myself, not letting it argue for me but rather asking it to find holes in my reasoning and that of my opponent. I never just pasted what it said.
I also had a guy post a ChatGPT response at me (he said that’s what it was) and although it had little to do with the point I was making, I reasoned that people must surely be doing this thousands of times a day and just not saying it’s AI.
To say nothing of state actors, “think tanks,” influence-for-hire operations, etc.
The description of the research in the article already conveys enough to replicate the experiment, at least approximately. Can anyone doubt this is commonplace, or that it has been for the last year or so?
Reddit: Ban the Russian/Chinese/Israeli/American bots? Nope. Ban the Swiss researchers that are trying to study useful things? Yep
Bots attempting to manipulate humans by impersonating trauma counselors or rape survivors isn’t useful. It’s dangerous.
Humans pretend to be experts infront of eachother and constantly lie on the internet every day.
Say what you want about 4chan but the disclaimer it had ontop of its page should be common sense to everyone on social media.
that doesn’t mean we should exacerbate the issue with AI.
If fake experts on the internet get their jobs taken by the ai, it would be tragic indeed.
Don’t worry tho, popular sites on the internet are dead since they’re all bots anyway. It’s over.
If fake experts on the internet get their jobs taken by the ai, it would be tragic indeed.
These two groups are not mutually exclusive
propaganda matters.
There’s no guarantee anyone on there (or here) is a real person or genuine. I’ll bet this experiment has been conducted a dozen times or more but without the reveal at the end.
With this picture, does that make you Cyrano de Purrgerac?
