Redditors world wide had been scandalized final week after studying {that a} group of researchers launched a swarm of AI-powered, human-impersonating bots on the “Change My View” subreddit. The large-scale experiment was designed to discover simply how persuasive AI may be.
The bots posted over 1,700 feedback, adopting personas like abuse survivors or controversial identities like an anti-Black Lives Matter advocate.
For Reddit, the incident was a mini-nightmare. Reddit’s model is related to authenticity — a spot the place actual individuals come to share actual opinions. If that human-focused ecosystem is disturbed with AI slop or turns into a spot the place individuals can’t belief that they’re getting info from precise people, it might do greater than threaten Reddit’s core id. Reddit’s backside line might be at stake, for the reason that firm now sells its content material to OpenAI for coaching.
The firm condemned the “improper and extremely unethical experiment” and filed a criticism with the college that ran it. But that experiment was just one of what’s going to doubtless be many cases of generative AI bots pretending to be people on Reddit for quite a lot of causes, from the scientific to the politically manipulative.
To defend customers from bot manipulation and “maintain Reddit human,” the corporate has quietly signaled an upcoming motion — one that could be unpopular with customers who come to Reddit for one more motive: anonymity.
On Monday, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman shared in a submit that Reddit would begin working with “numerous third-party companies” to confirm a consumer’s humanity. This represents a big step for a platform that has traditionally required virtually no private info for customers to create an account.
“To maintain Reddit human and to fulfill evolving regulatory necessities, we’re going to want a little bit extra info,” Huffman wrote. “Specifically, we might want to know whether or not you’re a human, and in some places, if you’re an grownup. But we by no means need to know your title or who you’re.”
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(Social media firms have already began implementing ID checks after not less than 9 states and the U.Ok. and handed legal guidelines mandating age verification to guard youngsters on their platforms.)
A Reddit spokesperson declined to clarify beneath what circumstances the corporate would require customers to undergo a verification course of, although they did verify that Reddit already takes measures to ban “dangerous” bots. The spokesperson additionally wouldn’t share extra particulars about which third-party companies the corporate would use or what sort of personally figuring out info customers must provide up.
Many firms at present depend on verification platforms like Persona, Alloy, Stripe Identity, Plaid, and Footprint, which often require a government-issued ID to confirm age and humanity. Then there’s the newer and extra speculative tech, like Sam Altman’s Tools for Humanity and its eye-scanning “proof of human” machine.
Opponents to ID checks say there are information privateness and safety dangers to sharing your private info with social media platforms. That’s very true for a platform like Reddit, the place individuals come to submit experiences they perhaps by no means would have if their names had been hooked up to them.
It’s not troublesome to think about a world by which authorities would possibly subpoena Reddit for the id of, for instance, a pregnant teen asking about abortion experiences on r/girls in states the place it’s now unlawful. Just look how Meta handed over non-public conversations between a Nebraska girl and her 17-year-old daughter, which mentioned the latter’s plans to terminate a being pregnant. Meta’s help led regulation enforcement to accumulate a search warrant, which resulted in felony expenses for each the mom and daughter.
That’s precisely the chance Reddit hopes to keep away from by tapping outdoors corporations to offer “the important info and nothing else,” per Huffman, who emphasised that “we by no means need to know your title or who you’re.”
“Anonymity is crucial to Reddit,” he stated.
The CEO additionally famous that Reddit would proceed to be “extraordinarily protecting of your private info” and “will proceed to push again in opposition to extreme or unreasonable calls for from public or non-public authorities.”
