Income from all over the world were scandalized last week after learning that a team of researchers published a swarm of robots fueled by artificial intelligence, with the “Change My View” Sumddit. The large -scale experiment has been designed to explore how persuasive the IA can be.
The robots have published over 1,700 comments, adopting characters such as survivors of abuse or controversial identity as an Anti-Black Lives Matter supporter.
For Reddit, the accident was a mini-night. The Reddit brand is associated with authenticity, a place where real people come to share real opinions. If that ecosystem focused on humans is disturbed by the artificial intelligence slop or becomes a place where people cannot trust us to obtain information from real humans, it could make more than threaten the main identity of Reddit. Reddit’s background line could be at stake, since the company now sells its content to Openai for training.
The company condemned “improper and highly non -ethical experiment” and filed a complaint to the university that managed it. But that experiment was only one of those who will probably be many cases of generative artificial intelligence robots that pretend to be human on Reddit for a series of reasons, from the scientific to politically manipulative.
To protect users from manipulation of bots and “maintain human profit”, the society has quietly marked an imminent action, which could be unpopular with users who come to Reddit for another reason: anonymity.
On Monday, the CEO of Reddit Steve Huffman shared in a post that Reddit would have started working with “various third -party services” to verify the humanity of a user. This represents a significant step for a platform that historically has not required almost any personal information for users to create an account.
“To keep human Reddit and meet the evolving regulatory requirements, we will need some more information,” Huffman wrote. “In particular, we will have to know if you are a human being and in some places, if you are an adult. But we never want to know your name or who you are.”
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(Social Media companies have already started implementing identity checks after at least nine states and the United Kingdom and have approved the laws that impose age verification to protect children on their platforms.)
A Reddit spokesman refused to explain in what circumstances the company would have requested users to pass through a verification process, although they confirmed that Reddit already adopts measures to ban “bad” robots. In addition, the spokesman would not share more details on which third -party services the company would use or what type of personal identification information the users should have offered.
Many companies today rely on verification platforms as a person, league, strips, plaid and imprint identity, which usually require an ID issued by the government to verify age and humanity. Then there is the most recent and speculative technology, such as the tools of Sam Altman for humanity and its “Proof of Human” device scanning the eyes.
The opponents for ID controls say that there are risks for privacy and data security for sharing personal information with social media platforms. This is particularly true for a platform like Reddit, in which people come to publish experiences that perhaps they would never have had if their names were connected to them.
It is not difficult to imagine a world in which the authorities could sue for the identity of, for example, of a pregnant teenager who asks for experiences of abortion on R/Women in the states where it is now illegal. Watch as a goal he has delivered private conversations between a 17 -year -old Nebraska woman and her daughter, who discussed the latter’s plans to stop pregnancy. The assistance of Meta led the police to acquire a search mandate, which entailed accusations of crime for both the mother and the daughter.
This is exactly the risk that Reddit hopes to avoid touching the external companies to provide “essential and nothing else information”, for Huffman, who stressed that “we never want to know your name or who you are”.
“Anonymity is essential for Reddit,” he said.
The CEO has also observed that Reddit would continue to be “extremely protective of your personal information” and “will continue to reject excessive or unreasonable requests from public or private authorities”.
