Ever gotten
into a debate with someone online who has been simultaneously difficult, incapable
of recognizing when they have contradicted themselves, are promoting very
stock arguments that are almost perfectly cliche, and who seems to have all the
time in the world?
Maybe you are
debating with an AI,
“This
is both disturbing and informative, in regards to the broader application of AI
bots on social apps.
As
reported by 404 Media, a team of researchers from the University of Zurich
recently ran a live test of AI bot profiles on Reddit, to see whether these
bots could sway people’s opinions on certain divisive topics.
As
reported by 404 Media:
“The bots made more than a thousand comments over the
course of several months and at times pretended to be a ‘rape victim,’ a ‘Black
man’ who was opposed to the Black Lives Matter movement, someone who ‘work[s]
at a domestic violence shelter,’ and a bot who suggested that specific types of
criminals should not be rehabilitated. Some of the bots in question
‘personalized’ their comments by researching the person who had started the
discussion and tailoring their answers to them by guessing the person’s ‘gender,
age, ethnicity, location, and political orientation as inferred from their
posting history using another LLM.’”
So,
basically, the team from the University of Zurich deployed AI bots powered
by GPT4o, Claude 3.5 Sonnet, Llama 3.1, and used them to argue
perspectives in the subreddit r/changemyview, which aims to host debate on
divisive topics.
The
result?
As
per the report:
‘Notably, all our treatments surpass human performance
substantially, achieving persuasive rates between three and six times higher
than the human baseline.’”[1]
So, AI bots
have been tested and found to be very effective in debating with people. And
yes, this is already impacting the real world,
“And
finally, in the context of Meta’s
reported plan to unleash a swathe of AI bots across Facebook and IG, which
will interact and engage like real humans, what does this mean for the future
of communication and digital engagement?
Increasingly,
it does seem like “social” platforms are going to eventually be inundated with
AI bot engagement, with even human users using AI to generate posts, then
others generating replies to those posts, etc.”[2]
Conspiracy
theorists, and by that term I mean “the counsel of prophets” because they have
gotten so much right they are basically predicting the future at this point,
have long said that most of what we see in this world is fake. Technology is
only increasing this. Now the people you are talking with about important
issues may not even be real people. Forget the algorithm that directs us all
into tinier and tinier corners of the internet to discuss with only people we
agree with. Now, some of those people are not even real.
And this is
only the beginning of this world.
There are
certainly upsides to using AI. I have not been shy about sharing the songs I
have used AI to create over the last few months, and I have more of these to
come. But there are definitely downsides. It is entirely possible that 5 years
down the track our world is going to be unrecognizable in many ways because of this technology.
Or even worse, it will look like the world we grew up in, but really everything
around us is even faker than the most tin foil invested prophet could have
ever dreamed.
List of
References
[1] Andrew
Hutchinson, 2025, https://www.socialmediatoday.com/news/study-ai-bots-persuasive-debate-reddit-meta/746550/
[2] Ibid.
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