Researchers at the University of Zurich have sparked outrage after secretly deploying AI bots on Reddit that pretended to be rape survivors, trauma counselors, and even a "Black man opposed to Black Lives Matter"—all to see if they could change people's minds on controversial topics.
Spoiler alert: They could.
The covert experiment targeted the r/ChangeMyView (CMV) subreddit, where 3.8 million humans (or so everyone thought) gather to debate ideas and potentially have their opinions changed through reasoned argument.
Between November 2024 and March 2025, AI bots responded to over 1,000 posts, with dramatic results.
"Over the past few months, we posted AI-written comments under posts published on CMV, measuring the number of deltas obtained by these comments," the research team revealed this weekend. "In total, we posted 1,783 comments across nearly four months and received 137 deltas." A "delta" in the subreddit represents a person who acknowledges having changed their mind.
When Decrypt reached out to the r/ChangeMyView moderators for comment, they emphasized their subreddit has "a long history of partnering with researchers" and is typically "very research-friendly." However, the mod team draws a clear line at deception.
If the goal of the subreddit is to change views with reasoned arguments, should it matter if a machine can sometimes craft better arguments than a human?
We asked the moderation team, and the reply was clear. It is not that AI was used to manipulate humans, but that humans were deceived to carry out the experiment.
"Computers can play chess better than humans, and yet there are still chess enthusiasts who play chess with other humans in tournaments. CMV is like [chess], but for conversation," explained moderator Apprehensive_Song490. "While computer science undoubtedly adds certain benefits to society, it is important to retain human-centric spaces."
When asked if it should matter whether a machine sometimes crafts better arguments than humans, the moderator emphasized that the CMV subreddit differentiates between "meaningful" and "genuine." "By definition, for the purposes of the CMV sub, AI-generated content is not meaningful," Apprehensive_Song490 said.
The researchers came clean to the forum's moderators only after they had completed their data collection. The moderators were, unsurprisingly, furious.
“We think this was wrong. We do not think that "it has not been done before" is an excuse to do an experiment like this," they wrote.
"If OpenAI can create a more ethical research design when doing this, these researchers should be expected to do the same," the moderators explained in an extensive post. "Psychological manipulation risks posed by LLMs are an extensively studied topic. It is not necessary to experiment on non-consenting human subjects."
Reddit's chief legal officer, Ben Lee, didn't mince words: "What this University of Zurich team did is deeply wrong on both a moral and legal level," he wrote in a reply to the CMV post. "It violates academic research and human rights norms, and is prohibited by Reddit's user agreement and rules, in addition to the subreddit rules."
Lee didn’t elaborate on his views as to why such research constitutes a violation of human rights.
Deception and persuasion
The bots' deception went beyond simple interaction with users, according to Reddit moderators.
Researchers used a separate AI to analyze the posting history of targeted users, mining for personal details like age, gender, ethnicity, location, and political beliefs to craft more persuasive responses, much like social media companies do.
The idea was to compare three categories of replies: generic ones, community-aligned replies from models fine-tuned with proven persuasive comments, and personalized replies tailored after analyzing users' public information.
Analysis of the bots' posting patterns, based on a text file shared by the moderators, revealed several telling signatures of AI-generated content.
The same account would claim wildly different identities—public defender, software developer, Palestinian activist, British citizen—depending on the conversation.
Posts frequently followed identical rhetorical structures, starting with a soft concession ("I get where you're coming from") followed by a three-step rebuttal introduced by the formula "Let me break this down."
The bots also habitually fabricated authority, claiming job titles that perfectly matched whatever topic they were arguing about. When debating immigration, one bot claimed, "I've worked in construction, and let me tell you – without immigrant labour, construction costs would skyrocket." These posts were peppered with unsourced statistics that sounded precise but had no citations or links—Manipulation 102.
Prompt Engineers and AI enthusiasts would readily identify the LLMs behind the accounts.
Many posts also contained the typical "this is not just/about a small feat — it's about that bigger thing" setup that makes some AI models easy to identify.
Ethics in AI
The research has generated significant debate, especially now that AI is more intertwined in our everyday lives.
"This is one of the worst violations of research ethics I've ever seen," Casey Fiesler, an information scientist at the University of Colorado, wrote in Bluesky. "I can't claim to know anything about ethical review in Switzerland, but in the U.S., this would have required a waiver of consent for deception, which is very hard to get," she elaborated in a thread.
The University of Zurich's Ethics Committee of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, however, advised the researchers that the study was "exceptionally challenging" and recommended they better justify their approach, inform participants, and fully comply with platform rules. However, these recommendations weren't legally binding, and the researchers proceeded anyway.
Not everyone views the experiment as an apparent ethical violation, however.
Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin weighed in: "I get the original situations that motivated the taboo we have today, but if you reanalyze the situation from today's context it feels like I would rather be secretly manipulated in random directions for the sake of science than eg. secretly manipulated to get me to buy a product or change my political view?"
Some Reddit users shared this perspective. "I agree this was a shitty thing to do, but I feel like the fact that they came forward and revealed it is a powerful and important reminder of what AI is definitely being used for as we speak," wrote user Trilobyte141. "If this occurred to a bunch of policy nerds at a university, you can bet your ass that it's already widely being used by governments and special interest groups."
Despite the controversy, the researchers defended their methods.
"Although all comments were machine-generated, each one was manually reviewed by a researcher before posting to ensure it met CMV's standards for respectful, constructive dialogue and to minimize potential harm," they said.
In the wake of the controversy, the researchers have decided not to publish their findings. The University of Zurich says it's now investigating the incident and will "critically review the relevant assessment processes."
What next?
If these bots could successfully masquerade as humans in emotional debates, how many other forums might already be hosting similar undisclosed AI participation?
And if AI bots gently nudge people toward more tolerant or empathetic views, is the manipulation justifiable—or is any manipulation, however well-intentioned, a violation of human dignity?
We don’t have questions for those answers, but our good old AI chatbot has something to say about it.
“Ethical engagement requires transparency and consent, suggesting that persuasion, no matter how well-intentioned, must respect individuals’ right to self-determination and informed choice rather than relying on covert influence,” GPT4.5 replied.
Edited by Sebastian Sinclair
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