The moderators of the popular subreddit r/changemyview revealed yesterday that researchers from the University of Zurich had posted comments written by AI bots in an experiment to “assess LLM’s [large language models] persuasiveness in an ethical scenario, where people ask for arguments against views they hold.” AI-written posts included posing as a victim of rape, a black man opposed to Black Lives Matter, a person who received substandard care in a foreign hospital, and a trauma counselor specialising in abuse.
None were disclosed as being by AI.
The researchers admitted this broke community rules but felt the benefits exceeded any harm done. Incredibly, the study was approved by an Institutional Review Board (IRB) with the chair of the university’s Ethics Commission reiterated that “little harm” was done and that publication would continue since it “yields important insights”. This assertion has been challenged on multiple fronts, not least that many other posters on r/changemyview are likely also AI bots, rendering any measures of persuasiveness on humans are dubious at best.
Many already know Reddit is infested with trolls pushing insincere beliefs, whether they’re bored edgelords looking for a reaction or state-aligned organisations spreading propaganda and division. AI isn’t required for these operations but it drastically reduces the financial and logistical cost involved in creating comments at volume, which is why people are specifically outraged at this experiment.
“NPC” has become a common insult in the last few years, especially among the far right, deriding others as thoughtless automatons like non-player characters in video games. Predating the rise of LLMs and ChatGPT, it speaks to a broader distrust in others’ sincerity and introspection. With undisclosed “reply guy” AI bots now rife on Bluesky and X deliberately stirring up trouble, I expect the migration to group chats and forums that pose higher barriers to bots will continue. There, human identity can be more reliably verified through consistency of dialogue or through in-person meetings. Byung-Chul Han would be delighted given he thinks modern society is plagued by an excess of openness.
The problem of whether other minds are real has always occupied philosophers. Lately I’ve been reading Maurice Merleau-Ponty to understand how his theories on phenomenology influenced and informed the development of installation art, Happenings, and larp. MMP, as I like to call him, was an anti-Cartesian. He opposed the idea that we are minds piloting meat-robot bodies, and instead argued:
I am not in space and in time, nor do I think space and time; rather, I am of space and time; my body fits itself to them and embraces them. The scope of this hold measures the scope of my existence; however, it can never in any case be total. The space and time that I inhabit are always surrounded by indeterminate horizons that contain other points of view.
How do we know that someone else is angry? An objectivist would say that when we see someone else frown and shout, we reason that because we do these things when we’re angry, the other person is probably – but not necessarily – angry. Sartre and MMP disagree: shouting and frowning are anger, and they convince us of another person’s reality by the way they make us feel shame or anger. Wittgenstein had a great line on this:
But can’t I imagine that the people around me are automata, lack consciousness, even though they behave in the same way as usual? — If I imagine it now — alone in my room — I see people with fixed looks (as in a trance) going about their business — the idea is perhaps a little uncanny. But just try to keep hold of this idea in the midst of your ordinary intercourse with others, in the street, say! Say to yourself, for example: “The children over there are mere automata; all their liveliness is mere automatism”. And you will either find these words becoming quite meaningless; or you will produce in yourself some kind of uncanny feeling, or something of the sort.
Online, bandwidth is limited. Shouting is done with all caps text, which is easier to write but also easier to fake. Even live video calls, now forgeable by AIs, are nowhere near as rich as Wittgenstein’s chats in the street. So much online discourse is a never-ending stream of brief encounters, less demanding for the insincere.
So, along with the retreat to group chats and private Discords, I wonder if there will also be a revaluing of real world encounters. I certainly hope so. If you spend all your time online, it’s very easy to see others as NPCs, and there’s no point engaging or deliberating with NPCs – less so on the street. But of course, many people don’t have easy access to streets or convivial public spaces, or they don’t pass through them as regularly. The desire for “authentic” human interaction then gets shunted into more exciting and supposedly safer environments – the mall, the theme park, the immersive experience – except they’re becoming so predictable and controlled, they also make people act like NPCs.
What’s to be done? We need new ways to foster real world sociality that aren’t just nostalgic recreations of the past – kids playing with hoops and sticks in the streets – but are attractive and open enough for strangers to come and talk to each other. And that is why I am so interested in immersive experiences and larp.
Photo by davide ragusa on Unsplash.
