Chatbot research an ethical minefield

Newsroom

16-05-2025

How do you do research on how chatbots affect opinions on social media, without resorting to throwing artificial voices into an opinion thread on social media?
Well, certainly not the way the University of Zurich went about it, by secretly launching a series of Reddit profiles run by chatbots pretending to be variously: a rape victim, trauma councillor and a black man opposed to the Black Lives Matter movement.
It's now been threatened with legal action after failing to get informed consent for the experiment.
The research team only disclosed their experiment to the wider public after they'd finished collecting data, and their post outlining what they'd done attracted thousands of comments from users who felt their privacy had been breached.
Reddit responded by banning the university from its platform and threatening legal action. The university has now promised the study's results won't be released to the public and says they will be reviewing and strengthening their ethical review process.
This particular issue may be resolved, but the discussions around the ethical guidelines when it comes to research using artificial intelligence are ongoing.
'My initial thoughts were quite similar to a lot of people on Reddit, which was, 'They've done what?',' says Dr Andrew Lensen, a senior lecturer in artificial intelligence at Victoria University.
By not informing Reddit users they might be subject to this experiment, Lensen says the researchers bypassed one of the fundamental principles of ethics.
'Consent … in a lot of AI research especially it does come back to the idea of consent, which is that if you are going to run a study with human participants, then they need to opt in and they need to be consenting in an informed and free way,' he says.
In a Reddit post the researchers said, 'to ethically test LLMs' [large language models] persuasive power in realistic scenarios, an unaware setting was necessary,' which the ethics committee at the University of Zurich acknowledged before giving the research the green light.
But Lensen questions this reasoning, saying the argument of prior consent being 'impractical' wouldn't get past any ethics committee in New Zealand.
'The human ethics committee would be saying, 'Well how can you redesign your experiment so that you can get consent, while still meeting the essence of what you're trying to study?'' he asks.
It turns out there are other ways, and Reddit users were quick to alert the researchers to a similar study conducted by OpenAI.
'[OpenAI] took existing threads and then made Arti-Chatbot to respond and then compared the chatbot responses to the human responses … and then they had people essentially score them in a blind way, so the person scoring didn't know which was a chatbot and which was a human,' Lensen says.
There has been an influx in the number of bots lurking in the comment sections of various social media platforms.
It's hard to put an exact figure on how many there are because they're constantly changing and updating to become 'more human', making them difficult to detect.
But Lensen says that just means we, the actual real people, need to think twice about any accounts we engage with.
'It's not necessarily that the things posted by bots online are 'bad' … but as humans we also want to know what is AI-generated and what is human because we value those things differently,' he says.
Lensen says AI can be helpful when it comes to getting information and talking through ideas, but they can't fully replace a real-life person.
'We tend to want human reactions and human responses, we don't want facts and hot AI takes,' he says.
Lensen says there is a need for more research like Zurich University's, with the addition of prior consent, to understand how people interact with bots and what the effect is.
'Is it going to polarise people or is it going to bring people together? How do people feel, how do they react when you tell them afterwards whether or not it was a bot or human and why do they feel that way?
'And what does that then mean for how we want the internet or social media or even our society to operate with this influx of bots?'
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