This is curious. What's up with the University of Zurich and running unethical experiments? This is the second time I've seen it... last time was Bit Thief which is a hostile torrent client that...
This is curious. What's up with the University of Zurich and running unethical experiments? This is the second time I've seen it... last time was Bit Thief which is a hostile torrent client that allows you to kite torrents invisibly without re-sharing any data. If everyone used that, torrents would never seed. It's from the mid 2000s. Makes me wonder what else I'd find if I dug up all of their dissertations.
Not sure I'd classify Bit Thief as an experiment, but that did get me to look at their Distributed Computing Group. It mentions machine learning, and their summary PDF opens with this under goals:...
Not sure I'd classify Bit Thief as an experiment, but that did get me to look at their Distributed Computing Group. It mentions machine learning, and their summary PDF opens with this under goals:
We generally strive to work on exciting new research questions in upcoming new areas. We believe that the best research happens at the boundary of or between established areas. While we originally only considered computer networks and networks of embedded systems, more recently we opened up to various other types of networks. We study many questions before they
are considered by others.
Between that and how the experiment was conducted, my theory is that the current experiment was run by students in this department. I don't think anyone in the psych department was involved.
My memory is rusty since it's been over ten years, but I took an ethics in psychology class and this experiment seems to violate multiple basic standards. Namely, participants (or their guardians if they're minors) must be able to give at least some degree of informed consent. They can keep subjects in the dark about specifics, but they need to be able to consent. The researchers also must have minimal involvement, as they can influence and bias the results, thus invalidating them.
Using an unknowing, unconsenting public violates the first one. Meanwhile the researchers mention having someone look over the AI generated comments to argue that there was enough human oversight to keep it from counting as a bot. All the ways I can think of that "human oversight" coming into play would absolutely influence the results, since they'd be actively making the call on what got posted rather than acting as an observer.
I assume these standards aren't unique to the US, and I took that class in my second semester of college before changing my major from psych. Maybe it's not covered that early in all psych programs, but I just can't imagine anyone actively involved with psych in academia signing off on this experiment, if only because it would likely be rejected from publication.
Hard to understand how this would get IRB approval. Though as long as it doesn't generate a scandal, my experience with research institutions is that they are generally protective of faculty and...
Hard to understand how this would get IRB approval. Though as long as it doesn't generate a scandal, my experience with research institutions is that they are generally protective of faculty and are willing to overlook ethical violations.
In the draft of the research shared with users of the subreddit, the researchers did not include their names, which is highly unusual for a scientific paper.
I think this is the most telling point. They knew what they were doing.
This is simultaneously horrifying and completely unsurprising. The power some of these AI capabilities represent in terms of potential for misuse and malice is just staggering. And an unknown, but...
This is simultaneously horrifying and completely unsurprising.
The power some of these AI capabilities represent in terms of potential for misuse and malice is just staggering. And an unknown, but presumed significant proliferation and use of these capabilities, are already in use in the wild, giving another lever of power to aspiring tyrants and power-seekers.
It's something people expected was happening for a decade+, and Reddit didn't do much to address it. In fact, their changes to blocking made it very easy to form your own local echo chamber: That...
It's something people expected was happening for a decade+, and Reddit didn't do much to address it. In fact, their changes to blocking made it very easy to form your own local echo chamber:
That post is over 3 years old now, and I'm sure I'm sure a few malicious parties read it, or came to a similar conclusion themselves. To my knowledge, Reddit keeps the same block functionality as 3 years prior.
The sad part here is that while the average researcher is legitimately disgusted by this the average redditor upon discovering they've been interacting with a bot would be: "huh, okay." *refreshes...
The sad part here is that while the average researcher is legitimately disgusted by this the average redditor upon discovering they've been interacting with a bot would be: "huh, okay." *refreshes page*
My cynical view on this is that at this point outside of small niche subreddits the usual post quality from a well-tuned bot based on current tech is going to be higher than reddit average.
My cynical view on this is that at this point outside of small niche subreddits the usual post quality from a well-tuned bot based on current tech is going to be higher than reddit average.
Niche subs with possiblity of sales are probably at the highest risk. Things like which brands are trustworthy or has good quality or can buy it for life.
Niche subs with possiblity of sales are probably at the highest risk. Things like which brands are trustworthy or has good quality or can buy it for life.
Humans have been doing that long enough that I'm not really sure it'll dramatically change the equation on those subreddits. The most useful application of bots would be to leave a greater volume...
Humans have been doing that long enough that I'm not really sure it'll dramatically change the equation on those subreddits. The most useful application of bots would be to leave a greater volume of realistic-seeming comments praising a particular brand, but it requires work outside of writing the comments themselves to make that look realistic -- the smaller and nicher the subreddit, the more people will notice a weird uptick in activity or accounts with zero reddit history. And honestly, LLMs are probably overkill for writing the comments.
Time to post Scott Alexander's 2017 essay Sort By Controversial again. It was (nominally) fiction when it was written. Now, very much not so, and I think everyone needs to be aware of exactly what...
Time to post Scott Alexander's 2017 essay Sort By Controversial again. It was (nominally) fiction when it was written. Now, very much not so, and I think everyone needs to be aware of exactly what kind of manipulations are going on. The bot problem is much, much worse than people think.
Great read. I just had a long conversation about the thrust of this article over the weekend. I had my bachelor party in a small mountain town in the Sierras, a mountain biking Mecca where in the...
Great read. I just had a long conversation about the thrust of this article over the weekend. I had my bachelor party in a small mountain town in the Sierras, a mountain biking Mecca where in the off season only 100 permanent residents reside. We went in the off season and were the only outsiders there. We had looked online to gauge what to do and came across the men's room door of the only bar which had a massive trump 2024 sticker and a confederate flag. All of us were a bit apprehensive going in the first night, doubly so because my best man had bought everyone an assortment of colorful bucket hats. Much to our surprise the local folks there couldn't have been more welcoming. They bought us a round. They invited us to join them in pool and ping pong. They were amazing hosts and it continued for the whole weekend. in 48 hours we were on a first name basis with nearly everyone in town and felt like a had made genuine friends.
On the drive home we discussed how nervous we had been and how wrong our expectations were. It led us to calling out how we often think of conservatives as having this horrible opinion of progressives - which I have experienced when folks are surprised learn where I live or what I do in more conservative parts of the country. We all paint these ghoulish characters. We had painted those of our favorite bartender Kim or Tommy who was shirtless when we had entered the bar. They were great! And it gave us an insight into just how much divisive propaganda had gotten to us as well. We left the town not even knowing where the majority of them land politically. It was a pretty humbling experience.
Also, I have a good scissor statement that has kicked off plenty of arguments. "It's ok to pee in a hot tub. Folks that say it's not just pee and lie about it."
You monster! ;) I live in the Bay Area of California (exceedingly liberal/progressive in general), but my field (IT, along with blue collar work like welding, landscaping, etc) is reddish-purple....
"It's ok to pee in a hot tub. Folks that say it's not just pee and lie about it."
You monster! ;)
Much to our surprise the local folks there couldn't have been more welcoming. They bought us a round. They invited us to join them in pool and ping pong. They were amazing hosts and it continued for the whole weekend. in 48 hours we were on a first name basis with nearly everyone in town and felt like a had made genuine friends.
I live in the Bay Area of California (exceedingly liberal/progressive in general), but my field (IT, along with blue collar work like welding, landscaping, etc) is reddish-purple. The people I know in person are not the caricatures presented in the media, just like 'we' liberals are not the caricatures presented on Fox and its ilk.
It often feels like I'm trying to bail against the rising tides, but the only solution I've ever found it to just talk to people and be a decent human. There are always going to be folks you will never see eye to eye with, but something I am grateful for is that there really are a majority where with a little effort on both sides, you can genuinely find ways to get along. Daryl Davis is a stellar example of the power of such things.
So, so true! We live in a pretty mixed but leaning conservative area and with all of my positive friendships/interactions here, I narcissistically thought I was a bit above the fray. Turns out,...
So, so true! We live in a pretty mixed but leaning conservative area and with all of my positive friendships/interactions here, I narcissistically thought I was a bit above the fray. Turns out, nope, the algorithm got me too!
Offtopic, honest question; Are loads of people here subscribed to 404 so actually read this article and are voting based on what they read... or is everyone just voting on the topic based purely...
Offtopic, honest question; Are loads of people here subscribed to 404 so actually read this article and are voting based on what they read... or is everyone just voting on the topic based purely on the headline?
It sucks because I actually do want to read it, but even archive.today doesn't get around their paywall. :(
Muchas gracias! When I plugged the article URL into archive.today/.ph/.is/etc myself it returned a snapshot with the paywall screen still blocking the contents. But I really should have looked in...
Muchas gracias! When I plugged the article URL into archive.today/.ph/.is/etc myself it returned a snapshot with the paywall screen still blocking the contents. But I really should have looked in the snapshot history for one that managed to get past it, or was taken before they moved the article behind their paywall.
That's honestly one of the major reasons I really really dislike the idea of that feature of Three Cheers. I suspect it skews the voting on articles that have attention grabbing headlines but that...
That's honestly one of the major reasons I really really dislike the idea of that feature of Three Cheers. I suspect it skews the voting on articles that have attention grabbing headlines but that people also might not have actually read the contents of. cc: @talklittle, any thoughts about that (if you don't mind my asking)?
I'm okay removing that feature if Deimos were to request it. The fact it's hidden behind Advanced settings, off by default, and we see that posts still have generally low numbers of votes, makes...
I'm okay removing that feature if Deimos were to request it. The fact it's hidden behind Advanced settings, off by default, and we see that posts still have generally low numbers of votes, makes me think it's not presently an issue. Again I'm open if the admin were to request it removed.
Edit: Also note how on comments on Tildes (which Three Cheers doesn't auto-vote on), often the first comment gets a significantly higher vote count than the next top-level comment. Votes snowball and people have a tendency to vote on comments that others vote on. I think we see the same phenomenon with posts.
And before anyone hops in with "but the sorting behavior is different between comments and posts so it's different"—also note how people tend to vote on exemplary comments far down in a thread, by virtue of those comments being visually called out. It doesn't matter if they're top-level or not; I think it's clear users vote on things that others vote on, and we get a snowball effect.
Oh, shit, sorry! I didn't mean to imply that the feature should be removed or try to pressure you into doing that! I only wanted to bring it up in a /r/theoryofreddit kind of naval-gazing way, to...
Oh, shit, sorry! I didn't mean to imply that the feature should be removed or try to pressure you into doing that! I only wanted to bring it up in a /r/theoryofreddit kind of naval-gazing way, to discuss the possible unintend consequence of the feature, and any potential solutions for that. And regardless, while Tildes is still as small as it is, I highly doubt it's making much of a difference to the overall votes of anything. After all, how many people are actually using Three Cheers, and of those how many even have that feature enabled? Probably only a handful.
So, I'm genuinely sorry if my comment came across as an attack of any sort against you, Three Cheers, or even the feature itself. That was not my intent!
The "really really dislike the idea of that feature" kind of did make it come across that way, unfortunately :/ No harm done of course, it's good to think twice about any feature that could have...
The "really really dislike the idea of that feature" kind of did make it come across that way, unfortunately :/ No harm done of course, it's good to think twice about any feature that could have negative repercussions.
But back to the point, I don't think that feature would lead to what we're seeing, even if more people had it enabled. The more I think about it, way more likely would be people reading headlines and voting on headlines without clicking on the article. Or reading the comments section only, and voting based on that—their vote on posts representing the value of the comments section discussions, rather than representing support of the actual article. I admittedly do that myself from time to time.
I guess I was hoping that "the idea of" part would make it clear that my problem with the feature was more theoretical rather than concrete or worth taking action over. Apologies again for not...
I guess I was hoping that "the idea of" part would make it clear that my problem with the feature was more theoretical rather than concrete or worth taking action over. Apologies again for not making myself more clear.
And yeah, that's a good point. Even someone who auto-votes after clicking a topic's link is probably likely to have actually read the submission contents, so my concern is probably unfounded. And as you (and a few other people here brought up) people vote on topics for many reasons other than as a direct endorsement of the specific contents of the submission itself. E.g. Lyrl mentioned having already read about the subject elsewhere, which I have actually done before too when voting on a submission on the same subject. So I am probably just jumping at shadows a little bit when I wondered why a hard-paywalled article like this got so many votes so quickly.
For the record, I am absolutely someone who votes if "post is worth reading" OR "discussion is worth reading". From time to time, I will deliberately click through only to the discussion and not...
For the record, I am absolutely someone who votes if "post is worth reading" OR "discussion is worth reading". From time to time, I will deliberately click through only to the discussion and not even open the post.
I think top comments and examples comments getting more votes obviously suffers from sampling bias -- both have to already be comments that either many other users voted on or at least one user...
I think top comments and examples comments getting more votes obviously suffers from sampling bias -- both have to already be comments that either many other users voted on or at least one user liked enough to spend a limited-use label on. It seems natural that this would make these more likely to be high-quality comments that others would vote on, and I think it's difficult to attribute how much of the higher levels of voting on these comments is due to snowballing as opposed to their quality. I think it's probably some combination of the two, but there's no clear way to measure out what proportion of the votes come from snowballing or not.
Am I allowed to copy and paste? I can delete if it’s against the rules. I can also add in the links that the article mentions a bit later (I’m in a time crunch right now) Edit: removed copy and...
Am I allowed to copy and paste? I can delete if it’s against the rules. I can also add in the links that the article mentions a bit later (I’m in a time crunch right now)
Edit: removed copy and paste. Apologies and thank you!
I appreciate it, but you're not actually allowed to do that here. From Deimos (Tildes' admin): So you should probably delete that. I would definitely appreciate the links the article mentions...
I appreciate it, but you're not actually allowed to do that here. From Deimos (Tildes' admin):
Please don't copy-paste entire articles into a comment like this. That's the kind of thing that can get the site in trouble for copyright infringement.
So you should probably delete that. I would definitely appreciate the links the article mentions though (which should be fine to post), so I can look into them myself rather than having to rely on 404s interpretation of them... especially since I am a bit wary of 404. They started out great, but they have seemingly gotten gradually a LOT more clickbait over time, so I don't entirely trust them anymore, TBH.
Edit: Nevermind about the links. hungariantoast provided some working snapshots of the article so I can actually read the article now, and check out the links for myself.
Minor nitpick because I generally both like their articles/topics they highlight and am subscribed to the newsletter: AFAIK, it’s not a paywall, it’s an authwall you have to climb once by creating...
Minor nitpick because I generally both like their articles/topics they highlight and am subscribed to the newsletter: AFAIK, it’s not a paywall, it’s an authwall you have to climb once by creating a passwordless “account”.
Ah, thanks, you’re totally right. I of course didn’t actually check for this one specifically and my brain made me think I had seen this in my inbox already, for some reason, when I just saw it...
Ah, thanks, you’re totally right. I of course didn’t actually check for this one specifically and my brain made me think I had seen this in my inbox already, for some reason, when I just saw it someplace else. Screw laziness.
I see a little more than the headline, but I can't get around the paywall. All the common tricks fail, blocking javascript, cookie manipulation, reader mode, user agent switching, DOM editing......
I see a little more than the headline, but I can't get around the paywall. All the common tricks fail, blocking javascript, cookie manipulation, reader mode, user agent switching, DOM editing... The fact that a little of the article is available outside the paywall can mean they rely on that for indexation and it really takes an account to access the rest.
I’m able to read the first few paragraphs before they fade out and the paywall hits. I voted based on what I was able to read there, as even that little bit felt substantial enough.
I’m able to read the first few paragraphs before they fade out and the paywall hits. I voted based on what I was able to read there, as even that little bit felt substantial enough.
It's covered elsewhere - I first saw it in the Atlantic (which I subscribe to), and also heard about it on Hard Fork podcast. Less journalistically, some folks on the Lemmy thread reported some...
It's covered elsewhere - I first saw it in the Atlantic (which I subscribe to), and also heard about it on Hard Fork podcast. Less journalistically, some folks on the Lemmy thread reported some details from relevant reddit threads. I'm guessing others also encountered coverage in their normal media sources, so some votes are more informed than just the title, even if they didn't read the 404 article specifically.
Ah, that makes sense. I have even done that myself with submitted topics where I've already read about the subject elsewhere too. So I definitely should have considered that as a possibility as...
Ah, that makes sense. I have even done that myself with submitted topics where I've already read about the subject elsewhere too. So I definitely should have considered that as a possibility as well. Thanks for the insight!
This whole thing reeks. From my tinfoil hat brain- how do we know it’s not the moderators of r/changemyview that did this themselves ? It seems so suspect to me that they would be like “the PI...
This whole thing reeks.
From my tinfoil hat brain- how do we know it’s not the moderators of r/changemyview that did this themselves ? It seems so suspect to me that they would be like “the PI gave us his name but wants privacy” - they even point out the irony in this request, but decide to honor it…
They go into great deal about how exactly they didn’t break the rules, which just screams “inside job”, imo.
Anyway. The most aggregious non privacy related issues come from their claim that the AI was convincing:
The researchers claimed this was a “very modest” and “negligible” number of comments, but claimed nonetheless that their bots were highly effective at changing minds.
Only to then say, a human oversaw the whole project:
The researchers then go on to defend their research, including the fact that they broke the subreddit’s rules. While all of the bots’ comments were AI-generated, they were “reviewed and ultimately posted by a human researcher, providing substantial human oversight to the entire process.” They said this human oversight meant the researchers believed they did not break the subreddit’s rules prohibiting bots. “Given the [human oversight] considerations, we consider it inaccurate and potentially misleading to consider our accounts as ‘bots.’” The researchers then go on to say that 21 of the 34 accounts that they set up were “shadowbanned” by the Reddit platform by its automated spam filters.
The conclusion should be, “AI overseen by humans is good at crafting convincing posts” which is like the biggest no shit Sherlock ever.
I don’t believe the intent of these “researchers” at all…an anonymous paper submitted anonymously with no peer review ? Never heard of that in my life.
I mean... Why would the mods do an experiment like this and then reveal it like this? And moreover, why place direct blame on a specific university? A false accusation is just asking for legal...
I mean... Why would the mods do an experiment like this and then reveal it like this? And moreover, why place direct blame on a specific university? A false accusation is just asking for legal trouble.
More importantly though, the followup article to 404 Media seems to indicate this is all true, since the University of Zurich actually responded to 404 Media about this.
The University of Zurich, meanwhile, told 404 Media that the researchers have now decided not to publish the results of their study. A university spokesperson said its ethics committee told the researchers that the experiment would be “exceptionally challenging,” and recommended changes to the experiment but said its decisions are “not legally binding” and that the researchers are responsible for their own work.
I will note that based on my rusty memory of an ethics in psychology class from 10+ years ago, this experiment violates multiple basic ethical standards. It's vital that participants give at least some degree of informed consent, and that the researchers have minimal involvement as they can influence the results. The "human oversight" may have been limited to ensuring the comments weren't offensive and remained on-topic. Which... *still" creates a bias that can invalidate their results.
My own tin foil hat theory is that this research wasn't officially sanctioned/approved and done by some students who wanted to mess with LLMs. Chances are they weren't even in the psychology or sociology departments, but a more techy department.
There's a follow up suggesting that Reddit wants to take action, so I guess all will be revealed eventually. Still, given the years of astroturfing and bots rampaging reddit with no response, I...
There's a follow up suggesting that Reddit wants to take action, so I guess all will be revealed eventually.
Still, given the years of astroturfing and bots rampaging reddit with no response, I can't really gather much sympathy for Reddit. They made money off such acions for years.
This is curious. What's up with the University of Zurich and running unethical experiments? This is the second time I've seen it... last time was Bit Thief which is a hostile torrent client that allows you to kite torrents invisibly without re-sharing any data. If everyone used that, torrents would never seed. It's from the mid 2000s. Makes me wonder what else I'd find if I dug up all of their dissertations.
Not sure I'd classify Bit Thief as an experiment, but that did get me to look at their Distributed Computing Group. It mentions machine learning, and their summary PDF opens with this under goals:
Between that and how the experiment was conducted, my theory is that the current experiment was run by students in this department. I don't think anyone in the psych department was involved.
My memory is rusty since it's been over ten years, but I took an ethics in psychology class and this experiment seems to violate multiple basic standards. Namely, participants (or their guardians if they're minors) must be able to give at least some degree of informed consent. They can keep subjects in the dark about specifics, but they need to be able to consent. The researchers also must have minimal involvement, as they can influence and bias the results, thus invalidating them.
Using an unknowing, unconsenting public violates the first one. Meanwhile the researchers mention having someone look over the AI generated comments to argue that there was enough human oversight to keep it from counting as a bot. All the ways I can think of that "human oversight" coming into play would absolutely influence the results, since they'd be actively making the call on what got posted rather than acting as an observer.
I assume these standards aren't unique to the US, and I took that class in my second semester of college before changing my major from psych. Maybe it's not covered that early in all psych programs, but I just can't imagine anyone actively involved with psych in academia signing off on this experiment, if only because it would likely be rejected from publication.
Hard to understand how this would get IRB approval. Though as long as it doesn't generate a scandal, my experience with research institutions is that they are generally protective of faculty and are willing to overlook ethical violations.
I think this is the most telling point. They knew what they were doing.
This is simultaneously horrifying and completely unsurprising.
The power some of these AI capabilities represent in terms of potential for misuse and malice is just staggering. And an unknown, but presumed significant proliferation and use of these capabilities, are already in use in the wild, giving another lever of power to aspiring tyrants and power-seekers.
It's something people expected was happening for a decade+, and Reddit didn't do much to address it. In fact, their changes to blocking made it very easy to form your own local echo chamber:
That post is over 3 years old now, and I'm sure I'm sure a few malicious parties read it, or came to a similar conclusion themselves. To my knowledge, Reddit keeps the same block functionality as 3 years prior.
Now imagine automating all that with AI...
The sad part here is that while the average researcher is legitimately disgusted by this the average redditor upon discovering they've been interacting with a bot would be: "huh, okay." *refreshes page*
In all fairness, it's hardly news that bots, astroturff accounts, and politically motivated actors are all over reddit.
My cynical view on this is that at this point outside of small niche subreddits the usual post quality from a well-tuned bot based on current tech is going to be higher than reddit average.
Niche subs with possiblity of sales are probably at the highest risk. Things like which brands are trustworthy or has good quality or can buy it for life.
Humans have been doing that long enough that I'm not really sure it'll dramatically change the equation on those subreddits. The most useful application of bots would be to leave a greater volume of realistic-seeming comments praising a particular brand, but it requires work outside of writing the comments themselves to make that look realistic -- the smaller and nicher the subreddit, the more people will notice a weird uptick in activity or accounts with zero reddit history. And honestly, LLMs are probably overkill for writing the comments.
Of course...even robot "Asa Blackman" has a profile (username) that tells people he's...not.
Looks like I deleted my Reddit account just in time. Good riddance.
Time to post Scott Alexander's 2017 essay Sort By Controversial again. It was (nominally) fiction when it was written. Now, very much not so, and I think everyone needs to be aware of exactly what kind of manipulations are going on. The bot problem is much, much worse than people think.
Great read. I just had a long conversation about the thrust of this article over the weekend. I had my bachelor party in a small mountain town in the Sierras, a mountain biking Mecca where in the off season only 100 permanent residents reside. We went in the off season and were the only outsiders there. We had looked online to gauge what to do and came across the men's room door of the only bar which had a massive trump 2024 sticker and a confederate flag. All of us were a bit apprehensive going in the first night, doubly so because my best man had bought everyone an assortment of colorful bucket hats. Much to our surprise the local folks there couldn't have been more welcoming. They bought us a round. They invited us to join them in pool and ping pong. They were amazing hosts and it continued for the whole weekend. in 48 hours we were on a first name basis with nearly everyone in town and felt like a had made genuine friends.
On the drive home we discussed how nervous we had been and how wrong our expectations were. It led us to calling out how we often think of conservatives as having this horrible opinion of progressives - which I have experienced when folks are surprised learn where I live or what I do in more conservative parts of the country. We all paint these ghoulish characters. We had painted those of our favorite bartender Kim or Tommy who was shirtless when we had entered the bar. They were great! And it gave us an insight into just how much divisive propaganda had gotten to us as well. We left the town not even knowing where the majority of them land politically. It was a pretty humbling experience.
Also, I have a good scissor statement that has kicked off plenty of arguments. "It's ok to pee in a hot tub. Folks that say it's not just pee and lie about it."
You monster! ;)
I live in the Bay Area of California (exceedingly liberal/progressive in general), but my field (IT, along with blue collar work like welding, landscaping, etc) is reddish-purple. The people I know in person are not the caricatures presented in the media, just like 'we' liberals are not the caricatures presented on Fox and its ilk.
It often feels like I'm trying to bail against the rising tides, but the only solution I've ever found it to just talk to people and be a decent human. There are always going to be folks you will never see eye to eye with, but something I am grateful for is that there really are a majority where with a little effort on both sides, you can genuinely find ways to get along. Daryl Davis is a stellar example of the power of such things.
So, so true! We live in a pretty mixed but leaning conservative area and with all of my positive friendships/interactions here, I narcissistically thought I was a bit above the fray. Turns out, nope, the algorithm got me too!
I was thinking of this story while reading these articles. I skimmed it again just now, and... Yeah, it hits way too close to home right now.
Offtopic, honest question; Are loads of people here subscribed to 404 so actually read this article and are voting based on what they read... or is everyone just voting on the topic based purely on the headline?
It sucks because I actually do want to read it, but even archive.today doesn't get around their paywall. :(
Here are archives of the original article:
And the followup article:
Muchas gracias! When I plugged the article URL into archive.today/.ph/.is/etc myself it returned a snapshot with the paywall screen still blocking the contents. But I really should have looked in the snapshot history for one that managed to get past it, or was taken before they moved the article behind their paywall.
Is it really an archive.??? link if it didn't come from our fabulous Canadian brother?
I use Three Cheers and have it set to vote on posts I click on, cuz otherwise I never vote at all honestly. Maybe there's more like me.
That's honestly one of the major reasons I really really dislike the idea of that feature of Three Cheers. I suspect it skews the voting on articles that have attention grabbing headlines but that people also might not have actually read the contents of. cc: @talklittle, any thoughts about that (if you don't mind my asking)?
I'm okay removing that feature if Deimos were to request it. The fact it's hidden behind Advanced settings, off by default, and we see that posts still have generally low numbers of votes, makes me think it's not presently an issue. Again I'm open if the admin were to request it removed.
Edit: Also note how on comments on Tildes (which Three Cheers doesn't auto-vote on), often the first comment gets a significantly higher vote count than the next top-level comment. Votes snowball and people have a tendency to vote on comments that others vote on. I think we see the same phenomenon with posts.
And before anyone hops in with "but the sorting behavior is different between comments and posts so it's different"—also note how people tend to vote on exemplary comments far down in a thread, by virtue of those comments being visually called out. It doesn't matter if they're top-level or not; I think it's clear users vote on things that others vote on, and we get a snowball effect.
Oh, shit, sorry! I didn't mean to imply that the feature should be removed or try to pressure you into doing that! I only wanted to bring it up in a /r/theoryofreddit kind of naval-gazing way, to discuss the possible unintend consequence of the feature, and any potential solutions for that. And regardless, while Tildes is still as small as it is, I highly doubt it's making much of a difference to the overall votes of anything. After all, how many people are actually using Three Cheers, and of those how many even have that feature enabled? Probably only a handful.
So, I'm genuinely sorry if my comment came across as an attack of any sort against you, Three Cheers, or even the feature itself. That was not my intent!
The "really really dislike the idea of that feature" kind of did make it come across that way, unfortunately :/ No harm done of course, it's good to think twice about any feature that could have negative repercussions.
But back to the point, I don't think that feature would lead to what we're seeing, even if more people had it enabled. The more I think about it, way more likely would be people reading headlines and voting on headlines without clicking on the article. Or reading the comments section only, and voting based on that—their vote on posts representing the value of the comments section discussions, rather than representing support of the actual article. I admittedly do that myself from time to time.
I guess I was hoping that "the idea of" part would make it clear that my problem with the feature was more theoretical rather than concrete or worth taking action over. Apologies again for not making myself more clear.
And yeah, that's a good point. Even someone who auto-votes after clicking a topic's link is probably likely to have actually read the submission contents, so my concern is probably unfounded. And as you (and a few other people here brought up) people vote on topics for many reasons other than as a direct endorsement of the specific contents of the submission itself. E.g. Lyrl mentioned having already read about the subject elsewhere, which I have actually done before too when voting on a submission on the same subject. So I am probably just jumping at shadows a little bit when I wondered why a hard-paywalled article like this got so many votes so quickly.
For the record, I am absolutely someone who votes if "post is worth reading" OR "discussion is worth reading". From time to time, I will deliberately click through only to the discussion and not even open the post.
I think top comments and examples comments getting more votes obviously suffers from sampling bias -- both have to already be comments that either many other users voted on or at least one user liked enough to spend a limited-use label on. It seems natural that this would make these more likely to be high-quality comments that others would vote on, and I think it's difficult to attribute how much of the higher levels of voting on these comments is due to snowballing as opposed to their quality. I think it's probably some combination of the two, but there's no clear way to measure out what proportion of the votes come from snowballing or not.
Am I allowed to copy and paste? I can delete if it’s against the rules. I can also add in the links that the article mentions a bit later (I’m in a time crunch right now)
Edit: removed copy and paste. Apologies and thank you!
I appreciate it, but you're not actually allowed to do that here. From Deimos (Tildes' admin):
So you should probably delete that. I would definitely appreciate the links the article mentions though (which should be fine to post), so I can look into them myself rather than having to rely on 404s interpretation of them... especially since I am a bit wary of 404. They started out great, but they have seemingly gotten gradually a LOT more clickbait over time, so I don't entirely trust them anymore, TBH.
Edit: Nevermind about the links. hungariantoast provided some working snapshots of the article so I can actually read the article now, and check out the links for myself.
Minor nitpick because I generally both like their articles/topics they highlight and am subscribed to the newsletter: AFAIK, it’s not a paywall, it’s an authwall you have to climb once by creating a passwordless “account”.
They do this to combat LLM data scraping IIRC.
I don't think it is just an auth/reg wall. This is what I see when I click the link:
Ah, thanks, you’re totally right. I of course didn’t actually check for this one specifically and my brain made me think I had seen this in my inbox already, for some reason, when I just saw it someplace else. Screw laziness.
I see a little more than the headline, but I can't get around the paywall. All the common tricks fail, blocking javascript, cookie manipulation, reader mode, user agent switching, DOM editing... The fact that a little of the article is available outside the paywall can mean they rely on that for indexation and it really takes an account to access the rest.
See: https://tildes.net/~tech/1ns7/researchers_secretly_ran_a_massive_unauthorized_ai_persuasion_experiment_on_reddit_users#comment-fi9q
I’m able to read the first few paragraphs before they fade out and the paywall hits. I voted based on what I was able to read there, as even that little bit felt substantial enough.
It's covered elsewhere - I first saw it in the Atlantic (which I subscribe to), and also heard about it on Hard Fork podcast. Less journalistically, some folks on the Lemmy thread reported some details from relevant reddit threads. I'm guessing others also encountered coverage in their normal media sources, so some votes are more informed than just the title, even if they didn't read the 404 article specifically.
Ah, that makes sense. I have even done that myself with submitted topics where I've already read about the subject elsewhere too. So I definitely should have considered that as a possibility as well. Thanks for the insight!
I read until the paywall came up and came to the comments. I didn't vote on the story yet.
I rarely vote on posts so I don't know what inspires the behavior
This whole thing reeks.
From my tinfoil hat brain- how do we know it’s not the moderators of r/changemyview that did this themselves ? It seems so suspect to me that they would be like “the PI gave us his name but wants privacy” - they even point out the irony in this request, but decide to honor it…
They go into great deal about how exactly they didn’t break the rules, which just screams “inside job”, imo.
Anyway. The most aggregious non privacy related issues come from their claim that the AI was convincing:
Only to then say, a human oversaw the whole project:
The conclusion should be, “AI overseen by humans is good at crafting convincing posts” which is like the biggest no shit Sherlock ever.
I don’t believe the intent of these “researchers” at all…an anonymous paper submitted anonymously with no peer review ? Never heard of that in my life.
I mean... Why would the mods do an experiment like this and then reveal it like this? And moreover, why place direct blame on a specific university? A false accusation is just asking for legal trouble.
More importantly though, the followup article to 404 Media seems to indicate this is all true, since the University of Zurich actually responded to 404 Media about this.
I will note that based on my rusty memory of an ethics in psychology class from 10+ years ago, this experiment violates multiple basic ethical standards. It's vital that participants give at least some degree of informed consent, and that the researchers have minimal involvement as they can influence the results. The "human oversight" may have been limited to ensuring the comments weren't offensive and remained on-topic. Which... *still" creates a bias that can invalidate their results.
My own tin foil hat theory is that this research wasn't officially sanctioned/approved and done by some students who wanted to mess with LLMs. Chances are they weren't even in the psychology or sociology departments, but a more techy department.
There's a follow up suggesting that Reddit wants to take action, so I guess all will be revealed eventually.
Still, given the years of astroturfing and bots rampaging reddit with no response, I can't really gather much sympathy for Reddit. They made money off such acions for years.