Welcome to Breakpoint, a daily look, and an ever-changing culture through the lens of unchanging truth.

For the Colson Center, I'm John Stone Street.

In a scene from the classic PBS animated series, Arthur, Buster the Rabbit, asked in shock,

You really think someone would do that? Just go on the internet and tell lies?

Obviously, Buster was more than a little naive. In the 20 years

since that episode aired, the internet has all but proven itself to be a bottomless source

of confusion, propaganda, and misinformation. But until recently, the online lies have all

come from actual people. That's no longer the case. Just recently, a team of researchers at the

University of Zurich performed a highly questionable experiment using AI bots impersonating real people. Apparently, these bots were very effective at changing the beliefs of people on Reddit. In their paper, which was entitled, Can AI Change Your View, evidence from a large-scale online field experiment,

these researchers detailed just how they tasked AI bots to study user profiles on Reddit,

without their knowledge, in order to find their vulnerabilities.

Then the bots posed as real people in forums and tried to persuade these human users of their left-leaning beliefs.

It all worked frighteningly well.

The researchers estimated that the AI bots, some of which pretended to be rape victims, LGBTQ,

or government employees, achieved a persuasion rate that was six times that of humans.

On topics ranging from abortion to whether Christianity is good for the world,

the bots deployed arguments fine-tuned to exploit vulnerabilities, often using lies,

misinformation, or highly debatable claims. And let me say again, it actually worked. After conversing with the undercover bots, a whole lot of people changed their minds. Tech entrepreneur

Mario Nafal put it this way.

This experiment should chill anyone who values authentic human discourse, because these digital

ghosts, as he put it, cross critical ethical lines, fabricating over 1,500 comments, quote,

each precisely calibrated to exploit cognitive vulnerabilities of their human targets, end quote.

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