Reddit is looking to take more action to clarify the humanity of its users, after backlash over a recent AI experiment that was unwittingly played out on Reddit users.
Last month, 404 Media reported that a team of researchers from the University of Zurich had run a live test of AI bot profiles on Reddit, to see whether these bots could sway people’s opinions on certain divisive topics.
And they could.
As per the official report:
“Notably, all our treatments surpass human performance substantially, achieving persuasive rates between three and six times higher than the human baseline.”
So AI bots were more persuasive than humans in changing Redditors’ minds on controversial subjects, but Redditors were rightfully angry that they’d been manipulated, with no indications that they were interacting with bot profiles.
Which Reddit’s looking to rectify.
As per a community update shared by Reddit CEO Steve Huffman, the company will soon seek to add in new qualifiers to prove that users are indeed human beings.
As per Huffman:
“To keep Reddit human and to meet evolving regulatory requirements, we are going to need a little more information. Specifically, we will need to know whether you are a human, and in some locations, if you are an adult. But we never want to know your name or who you are. The way we will do this is by working with various third-party services that can provide us with the essential information and nothing else.”
That’ll likely involve third party verification through tools like Persona, which already facilitates ID verification on LinkedIn and YouTube.
Reddit will likely seek to implement similar, though as Huffman notes, they’re also keen to ensure that Redditors will be able to maintain their anonymity if they choose.
“No solution is perfect – including the status quo – but we will do our best to preserve both the humanness and anonymity of Reddit. We will share more as we go.”
So you’ll soon have to prove that you’re a real person to get some form of indicator of such on your profile and posts, as a means to weed out AI-generated users.
Which is a good solution, though a difficult one to scale, and it’ll be interesting to see how open Reddit users are to verifying their identities.
On another note, some good news for Redditors, with Huffman committing to keeping “old Reddit” operating on the web:
“old.reddit is the version of Reddit that we built back in the mid-2000s. It doesn’t scale, it’s impossible to develop on, and it’s ugly af. We will be shutting it down at the end of the month. Just kidding. I don’t know why I say stuff like this. We’ll figure out how to work around it and keep it online as long as people are using it.”
For context, you can still view the old style of Reddit on the web, which harkens back to a bygone era of the internet:
Reddit continues to support this version, and will continue to do so into the future, till all of the original internet users die out.
So if you want a hit of nostalgia, head to old Reddit.
Andrew Hutchinson
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