ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:
There were some very persuasive people on Reddit recently who were not actually people. They were part of an experiment. Researchers at the University of Zurich wanted to see how persuasive AI could be. Problem is the scientists did not get permission to do research on the actual humans on Reddit that the AI was interacting with. That's created a huge controversy about the ethics of the research. Reporter Tom Bartlett recently wrote about the experiment in The Atlantic. Welcome to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED.
TOM BARTLETT: Hi. Thanks for having me.
SHAPIRO: So how'd the experiment work?
BARTLETT: So what the researchers did was they created comments in response to posts on a subreddit called Change My View. And Change My View is a place where people try to, as the name suggests, change each other's views. And they asked an AI to create comments in an attempt to change the view of whoever the poster was, and then they posted those comments on that subreddit. And they posted more than a thousand comments over about four months.
SHAPIRO: And the questions ranged from whether pit bulls are more aggressive to whether living with your parents is a solution to the housing crisis. When the researchers finished this experiment, they were really eager to share their findings with the Reddit community. How did the community react?
BARTLETT: (Laughter) They didn't react well, and I think to the researchers' surprise, according to the Reddit moderators who curate that subreddit. They were outraged. They felt as if they had been unwitting subjects in a scientific experiment, which they, in fact, were. And they felt as if a subreddit that they all take very seriously had been tainted by AI content.
SHAPIRO: People on the internet often lie about their identity, so what makes this different?
BARTLETT: It's a good question. And I think some of those who have pushed back and said, well, maybe this isn't that big a deal - you know, I think part of what makes this different is we're at a moment where, you know, we're sort of flooded with AI content in a bunch of different fora, and we're trying to deal with that. And in this, one of the things that really outraged people in this subreddit was not just they offered AI opinions that were computer-generated, but that AI at various points was pretending to be, say, a Black man who was against Black Lives Matter or a city employee or a trauma counselor. And I think that sort of impersonation and, you know, people not knowing that they were, you know, dealing with someone - dealing with an AI rather than a real person, that really added to the sense of upset.
SHAPIRO: What did the researchers have to say in their defense?
BARTLETT: Well, initially, I would say they were fairly defiant. And they offered an explanation and said that this was - they wrote in a preliminary paper that they published and then took down that this was the best possible way to get honest reactions. That this, you know, getting something out, quote-unquote, "in the wild" was the best way to evaluate whether AI could be persuasive and whether it could really fool people. And so they did that initially. They have since, due to the furor, have backtracked. And just yesterday, they issued an apology and said they would like to work with the subreddit to make sure this doesn't happen again. They promised not to do this again. They said they wouldn't publish their final results. And so they've really - they certainly heard the reaction and realized that it was not favorable.
SHAPIRO: You mentioned that they will not be publishing their results, but can you tell us more about what they found?
BARTLETT: Right, so in these preliminary results, they found that the AI responses were very persuasive. And they wrote that it was - they were more persuasive than the vast majority of human comments. In this particular subreddit called Change My View, they actually keep track of how persuasive a comment is. So if something changes your mind, you mark that thing and you say, OK, that changed my mind. So these comments were very persuasive. And they also seemed to, as they wrote, blend seamlessly into the rest of the subreddit. So people didn't realize this was AI.
SHAPIRO: What are the larger implications here if AI truly is better than most humans at persuading real people to change their views?
BARTLETT: Yeah, I think that's part of what makes this really interesting. I mean, this is important research that other researchers are doing in more traditional ways, where they're asking subjects to, you know, examine whether they can tell if a particular comment is from AI and how persuasive it is. So this is an important area of research, and it's concerning if an AI can be persuasive on a particular topic and more persuasive than people. Could it be employed by bad actors to push whatever argument they're trying to push and to have thousands of bots making this case? And so, you know, what these researchers are attempting to understand is, I think, a really important phenomenon. And it's just, you know, we don't know whether this is going on in a bunch of different areas. And so we know in this case because the researchers after the fact revealed that they had done this. But if they hadn't revealed, I don't think any of us would know.
SHAPIRO: Tom Bartlett's piece for The Atlantic is headlined "The Worst Internet Research Ethics Violation I Have Ever Seen." Thank you for talking with us.
BARTLETT: Thanks, Ari. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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