• LovingHippieCat@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    45
    ·
    edit-2
    2 days ago

    If anyone wants to know what subreddit, it’s r/changemyview. I remember seeing a ton of similar posts about controversial opinions and even now people are questioning Am I Overreacting and AITAH a lot. AI posts in those kind of subs are seemingly pretty frequent. I’m not surprised to see it was part of a fucking experiment.

    • Refurbished Refurbisher@lemmy.sdf.org
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      3
      ·
      1 day ago

      AIO and AITAH are so obviously just AI posting. It’s all just a massive circlejerk of AI and people who don’t know they’re talking to AI agreeing with each other.

    • eRac@lemmings.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      11
      ·
      2 days ago

      This was comments, not posts. They were using a model to approximate the demographics of a poster, then using an LLM to generate a response counter to the posted view tailored to the demographics of the poster.

      • FauxLiving@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        3
        ·
        edit-2
        1 day ago

        You’re right about this study. But, this research group isn’t the only one using LLMs to generate content on social media.

        There are 100% posts that are bot created. Do you ever notice how, on places like Am I Overreacting or Am I the Asshole that a lot of the posts just so happen to hit all of the hot button issues all at once? Nobody’s life is that cliche, but it makes excellent engagement bait and the comment chain provides a huge amount of training data as the users argue over the various topics.

        I use a local LLM, that I’ve fine tuned, to generate replies to people, who are obviously arguing in bad faith, in order to string them along and waste their time. It’s setup to lead the conversation, via red herrings and other various fallacies to the topic of good faith arguments and how people should behave in online spaces. It does this while picking out pieces of the conversation (and from the user’s profile) in order to chastise the person for their bad behavior. It would be trivial to change the prompt chains to push a political opinion rather than to just waste a person/bot’s time.

        This is being done as a side project, on under $2,000 worth of consumer hardware, by a barely competent progammer with no training in Psychology or propaganda. It’s terrifying to think of what you can do with a lot of resources and experts working full-time.