know the Reddit rules

To be fair, though, this experiment was stupid as all fuck. It was run on /r/changemyview to see if users would recognize that the comments were created by bots. The study's authors conclude that the users didn't recognize this. [EDIT: To clarify, the study was seeing if it could persuade the OP, but they did this in a subreddit where you aren't allowed to call out AI. If an LLM bot gets called out as such, its persuasiveness inherently falls off a cliff.]
Except, you know, Rule 3 of commenting in that subreddit is: "Refrain from accusing OP or anyone else of being unwilling to change their view, of using ChatGPT or other AI to generate text, [emphasis not even mine] or of arguing in bad faith."
It's like creating a poll to find out if women in Afghanistan are okay with having their rights taken away but making sure participants have to fill it out under the supervision of Hibatullah Akhundzada. "Obviously these are all brainwashed sheep who love the regime", happily concludes the dumbest pollster in history.
- Wow. That's really fucking stupid.
  
  I don't think so. Yeah the researchers broke the rules of the subreddit but it's not like every other company that uses AI for advertising, promotional purposes, propaganda, and misinformation will adhere to those rules.
  The mods and community should not assume that just because the rules say no AI does not mean that people won't use it for nefarious purposes. While this study doesn't really add anything new we didn't already know or assume, it does highlight how we should be vigilant and cautious about what we see on the Internet.
- It’s like creating a poll to find out if women in Afghanistan are okay with having their rights taken away but making sure participants have to fill it out under the supervision of Hibatullah Akhundzada. “Obviously these are all brainwashed sheep who love the regime”, happily concludes the dumbest pollster in history.
  I don't particularly like this analogy, because /r/changemyview isn't operating in a country where an occupying army was bombing weddings a few years earlier.
  But this goes back to the problem at hand. People have their priors (my bots are so sick nasty that nobody can detect them / my liberal government was so woke and cool that nobody could possibly fail to love it) and then build their biases up around them like armor (any coordinated effort to expose my bots is cheating! / anyone who prefers the new government must be brainwashed!)
  And the Bayesian Reasoning model fixates on the notion that there are only ever a discrete predefined series of choices and uniform biases that the participant must navigate within. No real room for nuance or relativism.
- Rule 3 of commenting
  Reddit has great rules…
  
  Can you explain your complaint a bit more? I'm trying to figure out just what you mean with your comment, but all I can see out of it is "reddit sucks". Which... yeah, but in this instance why?

Deleted by moderator because you upvoted a Luigi meme a decade ago
...don't mind me, just trying to make the reddit experience complete for you...
- that's funny.
  I had several of my Luigi posts and comments removed -- on Lemmy. let's see if it still holds true.
  
  .world is known (largely due to the Luigi Mangione stuff) to have moderation that's a bit more heavy handed and more similar to the sort of "corporate Internet".
  No real hate for them and they've indicated in the past that some of their actions are just to comply with their local laws. But if you're looking for an older internet experience you'll wanna move to a different instance.
  
  Well then, as lemmy's self-designated High Corvid of Progressivity, I extend to you the traditional Fediversal blessing of:
  remember kids:
  A place in heaven is reserved for those who speak truth to power
  
  Lemmy is a collection of different instances with different administrators, moderators, and rules.
  
  That's because your username is wrong. Your username is GreenKnight23@lemmy.world, but it should be GreenKnight23@lemmy.nz. That would fix your problem.

Err, yeah, I get the meme and it's quite true in its own way...
BUT... This research team REALLY need an ethics committee. A heavy handed one.
- As much as I want to hate the researchers for this, how are you going to ethically test whether you can manipulate people without... manipulating people. And isn't there an argument to be made for harm reduction? I mean, this stuff is already going on. Do we just ignore it or only test it in sanitized environments that won't really apply to the real world?
  I dunno, mostly just shooting the shit, but I think there is an argument to be made that this kind of research and it's results are more valuable than the potential harm. Tho the way this particular research team went about it, including changing the study fundamentally without further approval, does pose problems.
  
  how are you going to ethically test whether you can manipulate people without… manipulating people.
  That's a great question. In the US, researchers are generally obliged (by their universities or their funders) to use an Institutional Review Board to review any proposed experiment involving human subjects. The IRB look for things like: causing physical or emotional harm to the subjects, taking advantage of vulnerable populations, using deception without consent, etc. The IRB might let you do something like manipulate a subject, if the subjects were informed that they might be manipulated or deceived. Yes, this might introduce an observer effect, but this type of review is generally accepted as being necessary for doing ethical research. However, I'm not familiar with the research in question or with the requirements of the Univ of Zurich where the researchers are from.
  
  from what I remember from my early psych class, manipulation can be used, but should be used carefully in an experiment.
  there’s a lot that goes into designing a research experiment that tests or requires the use of manipulation, as appropriate approvals and ethics reviews are needed.
  and usually it should be done in a “controlled” environment where there’s some manner of consent and compensation.
  I have not read the details done here but the research does not seem to happen in a controlled env, participants had no way to express consent to opt in or opt out, and afaik they were not compensated.
  any psych or social sci peeps, feel free to jump in to correct me if I say something wrong.
  on a side note, another thing that this meme suggests is that both of these situations are somehow equal. IMO, they are not. researchers and academics should be expected to uphold code of ethics more so than corporations.

Manipulating users with AI bots to research what, exactly.
Researching what!!!
A/B Testing in Digital Marketing

You dare suggest that corporations are anything but our nearest and dearest friends? They'd never sell us out. Never!
- It's very possible, almost entirely a reality, that corporations can simultaneously be our enemy, and the enemy of our enemy.
  But they're never our friend.

That story is crazy and very believable. I 100% believe that AI bots are out there astroturfing opinions on reddit and elsewhere.
I'm unsure if that's better or worse than real people doing it, as has been the case for a while.
- Belief doesn't even have to factor; it's a plain-as-day truth. The sooner we collectively accept this fact, the sooner we change this shit for the better. Get on board, citizen. It's better over here.
  
  I worry that it's only better here right now because we're small and not a target. The worst we seem to get are the occasional spam bots. How are we realistically going to identify LLMs that have been trained on reddit data?
- What is likely happening is that bots are manipulating bots

$0.50 says that the "reveal" was part of the study protocol. I.e. "how people react to being knowingly vs. unknowingly manipulated".
- Seems dangerous, it's a breach of the ToS I assume so they're opening up to possible liability if Reddit got pissy. I'm actually surprised this kind of research gets IRB and other approval given you're violating ToS unless given a variance from it (I used to conduct research on social networks and had to get preapproved accounts for the purpose, and the data I was given was carefully limited.)

So they banned the people that successfully registered a bunch of AI bots and had them fly under the mods radar. I'm sure they're devastated and will never be able to get on the site again...