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University of Zurich Researchers Conducted an AI Persuasion Experiment on Members of This Online Community, Without Consent

Community Signal

Release Date: 08/04/2025

University of Zurich Researchers Conducted an AI Persuasion Experiment on Members of This Online Community, Without Consent

Community Signal

In March, the volunteer moderators of the learned that researchers at the University of Zurich had been covertly conducting an experiment on their community members. By injecting AI-generated comments and posts into conversations, the researchers had wanted to measure the persuasiveness of AI. There was one big problem: They didn’t tell community members that they were being experimented on. They didn’t tell the community moderators. They didn’t tell Reddit’s corporate team. Only when they were getting ready to publish, did they disclose their actions. It then became clear...

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In March, the volunteer moderators of the Change My View subreddit learned that researchers at the University of Zurich had been covertly conducting an experiment on their community members. By injecting AI-generated comments and posts into conversations, the researchers had wanted to measure the persuasiveness of AI.

There was one big problem: They didn’t tell community members that they were being experimented on. They didn’t tell the community moderators. They didn’t tell Reddit’s corporate team. Only when they were getting ready to publish, did they disclose their actions.

It then became clear that beyond the lack of consent, they had engaged in other questionable behavior: Their AI-written contributions had spanned multiple accounts, pretending to be a rape victim, a trauma counselor focusing on abuse, a Black man opposed to Black Lives Matter, and more.

Community response was swift: Overwhelmingly, members were unhappy. The moderators insisted the research not be published. Reddit threatened legal action. Initially, the researchers were defiant but eventually, they apologized and pledged not to publish the research.

Change My View volunteer moderator Logan MacGregor joins the show to discuss what went on behind the scenes, plus:

The danger of publishing the research
Reaction to the apology
How AI is going to challenge the idea of trusting an online community

Big Quotes

Blame the manipulators, not the members and moderators (1:49): “Manipulation in online communities has existed forever. What’s happening with [AI is] the believability, the speed at which people can do it. … The fault always rests with the person who chooses to manipulate the community. It’s easy to fool people … and to do something that undermines the trust of something. It’s harder to build trust.” -Patrick O’Keefe

Why a promise not to publish was important (13:21): “From my perspective, I think the things that we wanted the most [from the researchers were] an apology and a promise not to publish. The second was really important because we were concerned that if this was published in a peer-review journal … if it was elevated to a prominent journal, that our community, which is supposed to be a protected human space, would now become just another sandbox for researchers. We felt very strongly that it should not be published. … Unfortunately, it didn’t land well.” -Logan MacGregor

When a community leader stands for their community, they often stand for all communities (14:52): “When one community person – a volunteer, a host, a person in this line of work – stands up for their community, they stand up for all communities.” -Patrick O’Keefe

Just because bad comments exist online doesn’t mean new ones won’t cause harm (20:10): “So much of what [the researchers] did to try to prevent harm was to say ‘comments like this happen all the time online, we don’t think that it’s going to cause individual trauma.’ We kind of dispute that because some of the comments are [you] pretending to be a trauma counselor and maybe that could actually cause some harm. … I don’t think they thought enough about community impact until after the community screamed ‘ouch.'” -Logan MacGregor

You can’t just blame AI for this (22:52): “One thing that’s really special about Change My View is that it’s a human space; it’s a decidedly human space. … The University of Zurich is a decidedly human space. What I think is so insidious about AI is it’s caused people to behave in ways that I don’t know we would have, without the stupid thinking machines. Because it’s a toxic influence. Unlike the bots that are invading us daily, that we’re constantly shutting down. …

“That hurts a little bit more than just dealing with bots, because this wasn’t just bots. These are people interacting with other people, and there was a human element there. The researchers are real people. I’m a real person. This happened between real people, and it wasn’t just AI.” -Logan MacGregor

How did the community respond when the experiment was disclosed? (24:47): “I would say there was this collective outrage [from the community]. … It was a unique and singular violation of the ethos of the sub, and it was especially palpable because there are a lot of researchers and research-affiliated people that are fond of the sub. It seemed like: We protect national parks, and we have national monuments – these protected spaces – and it almost felt on that level. Of all the places to do this, why Change My View?” -Logan MacGregor

Researchers can help online communities in this moment, but not if they can’t be trusted (34:13): “One of the things that I worry about when it comes to AI is it’s probably going to chip away … at this idea of having protected online spaces, because if in-person conversations are the only way that you can validate that you’re not talking to a robot, then this thing that we created called the internet, it’s going to cease to have value at all.

“That’s the fear, and I have hope that we’re going to be able to figure out a way to get past that challenge, but I’m scratching my head as to how we would do that. The true tragedy in this whole piece is that the very people that I think are best equipped to help us navigate that space are now distrusted because of this experiment. We need to heal that, and I don’t know how that’s going to happen.” -Logan MacGregor

About Logan MacGregor

Logan MacGregor is a member of the volunteer mod team on r/changemyview. Drawing from a unique blend of experience including social work, administration, program management, project management (including research-based projects), policy, strategic development, and emergency management, Logan is a credentialed Type 3 Planning Section Chief that is planning to complete the Master’s program at the Center for Homeland Defense and Security, with a thesis likely focusing on information campaigns.

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