Researchers at the University of Zurich have been accused of undertaking an unauthorized four-month-long experiment on a Reddit board using artificial intelligence-generated comments to test whether AI could alter people’s opinions. 

As part of the experiment, AI-powered accounts faked a variety of personas, including a rape victim, a person opposed to specific social movements and a trauma counselor specializing in abuse, moderators of the r/changemyview subreddit said in an April 26 post.

“Our sub is a decidedly human space that rejects undisclosed AI as a core value,” the moderators said. “People do not come here to discuss their views with AI or to be experimented upon.” 

The researchers used AI to generate responses but attempted to personalize the replies based on information from the original posters’ prior Reddit history, such as political orientation, gender, age, and ethnicity, according to a draft of the paper.

Over the four-month experiment, Zurich University’s fake AI accounts posted 1,783 comments and received 137 deltas — a mark showing when another Reddit user acknowledged the account had persuaded them to change their opinion on an issue. 

  The researchers said in a post to the subreddit that all comments were manually reviewed before posting to ensure they met the community guidelines and to “minimize potential harm.”  

The university team argued that the “potential benefits of this research substantially outweigh its risks” because they have found that the large language models used in the experiment can be highly persuasive, surpassing all “previously known benchmarks of human persuasiveness.”

“Our controlled, low-risk study provided valuable insight into the real-world persuasive capabilities of LLMs — capabilities that are already easily accessible to anyone and that malicious actors could already exploit at scale for far more dangerous reasons,” the researchers said.